Lecturer: Parvin Ardalan

The Annual Front Line Defenders Lecture was established in 2013 to provoke discussion and debate about the range of issues affecting human rights defenders as they work tirelessly to bring about changes and build robust civil societies. Held in partnership with universities in Dublin, Belfast and Galway, the lecture is broadly accessible to a general audience with an interest in philosophy, law, human rights or politics.

You can register for the Dublin or Galway lectures below:

Register for the Dublin Lecture - 30 March 2023

Register for the Galway Lecture - 31 March 2023

About Parvin Ardalan

Parvin Ardalan is a feminist activist, journalist, and writer with a background in the grassroots feminist movement in Iran. She is currently a board member of Swedish PEN and a member of the network Feminists for Jina. She currently works at the Documentation and Freedom of Expression Unit at Malmö City Archives.

Her interest in gender, social movements, and migration led her to launch a process in a joint effort with civil society and numerous cultural institutions to create Women Making HERstory – a project committed to the unveiling, visualising, and rewriting the life and work of women with migration backgrounds in Sweden. Her next process was launching Migration Memory Encounters, where the knowledge, experiences, and memories of migrants in various cultural fields have been rediscovered through live performances and installations in Sweden.

She was a co-founder of the Women’s Cultural Center and The One Million Signature Campaign in Iran – a grassroots movement aimed at repealing discriminatory laws against women in Iran. She was awarded the Olof Palme Prize In 2007 and has lived in exile since 2009. She was the first guest writer of Malmö City (2010-2012) in Sweden under the ICORN (The International Cities of Refuge Network) programme.

About the Lecture

Jin Jian Azadi / Woman Life Freedom: A social vision for human dignity and human rights

The government’s murder of Jina Amini in September 2022 rocketed Iranian society into a revolutionary moment where woman has emerged as a symbol of resistance at the intersection of all forms of discrimination. In this paradigm shift, the past and current protest movements are linked together through the celebrated slogan of “Jin Jian Azadi”. A new horizon of change has now opened in front of us.

In her lecture, Parvin Ardalan will describe the current revolutionary moment in Iran. How and why did the government’s murder of Jina take us to this particular point? She will try to unpack the radical potential and meaning of Jin, Jian, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom). She will insist on the entangled relation of the three elements of this slogan and as such will argue that this slogan by linking the everyday and material necessities of life to the abstract notion of ‘rights’ opens a new horizon of feminist politics for Iran, in specific and the human rights discourse in general. In other words, in its insistence on life, this slogan ties material necessities to everyday needs. As such this slogan provides a concrete meaning to the generic and abstract notion of ‘human dignity’. Jin, Jian, Azadi aims at life in its totality and for this it is a radical and transformative slogan.

The Annual Lecture Partners include: UCD Centre for Ethics in Public Life (CEPL), UCD School of Politics and International Relations (SPIRe), UCD Centre for Human Rights, Trinity College Dublin, University of Galway & The Irish Centre For Human Rights, Queens University Belfast & the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice.

About Front Line Defenders

Front Line Defenders (FLD) is an international human rights organisation founded in Dublin in 2001, with the specific aim of protecting human rights defenders at risk (HRDs). FLD works to improve the security and protection of human rights defenders and organisations around the world at risk for their peaceful and legitimate human rights work. As identified by human rights defenders themselves, FLD responds to protection and security needs by providing support through grants, capacity building, visibility, networking, and advocacy, at the international, regional and local levels. Front Line Defenders has been awarded the 2018 United Nations Human Rights Prize.