Profile for Sona Kazemi
Contact me
Sona Kazemi
Pronouns: She/Her
Assistant Professor
Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
Sona Kazemi Pronouns: She/Her
Assistant Professor
Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies
Specialty area(s)
Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Race and Ethnicity Studies; Socio-Legal Determinants of Health; Middle East Politics; Theocracy; Iran; Women and Revolution in the Middle East; Trauma and Torture Studies; Social Justice Education; War and Peace Studies; Critical Prison Studies; State Violence; Political Violence; Human Rights; Qualitative Methods and Advocacy; Adult Education; Disability Studies; Global Studies; Transnationalism; Migration Studies; Human Rights
Brief biography
Dr. Sona Kazemi is Assistant Professor of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. She is the author of Disabling Relations: Wounded Bodyminds and Transnational Praxis (Temple University Press, 2025), a book that advances a transnational approach to disability, madness, survival, and the infrastructures of care. She is currently completing her second monograph, Captive Revolutionaries: Madness, Disability, and Ca(re)sistance among Iranian Political Prisoners, 1981-1989, which examines the production of disability and madness through imprisonment, torture, and psychiatric violence, alongside the collective practices of care and resistance cultivated by Iranian political prisoners. Additionally, Sona is co-editing three interdisciplinary collections: Disabling States (under contract with Canadian Scholars), Towards a Transnational Solidarity Theory and Praxis: Locating Disability and Feminist Consciousness in the Global, and The Uncanny of Woman, Life, Freedom: Internal Contradictions and Transnational Reverberations. An award-winning educator, Dr. Kazemi received the 2025 Eagle Teaching Excellence Award, the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse's highest teaching honor. She has also been recognized with the Most Accessible Professor Award, multiple Committed to Accessibility Awards, and the Best Mentor Award from The Ohio State University for her commitment to inclusive and transformative education. Her scholarship has been recognized by the Society for Disability Studies with an Honorable Mention for the prestigious Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars.
Current courses at UWL
RGS 100; RGS 373; RGS 353; RGS 377
Education
Postdoctoral Fellow with the Society of Fellows: Human Rights Pasts and Futures at The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH~Jan 2021- Dec 2022
Research Justice at the Intersections Fellow with the Provost’s Office at Mills College, Oakland, California~Sep 2020 – April 2021
Postdoctoral Researcher of Global Migration, Disability Studies, and Medical Humanities at Mershon Center for International Security Studies and the Department of English at The Ohio State University~Aug 2018 - Aug 2020
PhD, Adult Education and Community Development at the Ontario Institute for studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, Sep 2014-June 2018
M.A., Critical Disability Studies at the School of Health Policy and Management, Faculty of Health, York University, Sep 2012-Oct 2013
B.A. (Hon), Psychology, York University, Sep 2008-Aug 2012
B.Sc (Pure Math) unfinished due to forced migration
Career
Teaching history
Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies
Global Human Rights
The Disability Experience in the Contemporary World
Disability, Race, Political Economy, and Gender
Global Migration and Transnational Disability Studies
Professional history
AWARDS AND HONORS
2026
- Phenomenal Woman of the Year, ALANA (Asian, Latinx, African, Native American) Women Student Organization, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, awarded for social justice work and contributions to the campus community.
- Committed to Accessibility Award, DREAM (Disability Rights Education Activism and Mentoring), University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, student-nominated.
2025
- Eagle Teaching Excellence Award, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse. Highest university-wide teaching honor; student-nominated. In 2025, 5,000 nominations were received and six faculty members were selected
- Most Accessible Professor Award, DREAM
2024
- Committed to Accessibility Award, DREAM
- Finalist, Most Accessible Professor Award, DREA
- Nominated, Eagle Teaching Excellence Award, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse.
- Nominated, Research Excellence Award, College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse.
2022
- Best Mentor for Making a Difference in the Lives of Their Students, Faculty and Staff Recognition, The Ohio State University. Nominated by the SPHINX Senior Class Honorary.
2019
- Honorable Mention, Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies, Society for Disability Studies, for “Silent Global and Oppressive Local: Fetishization of the Disabled War Veterans in Iran through the Ideological Construction of ‘Living Martyrs.’”
Research and publishing
Publications
Books
Kazemi, S. (2025). Disabling Relations: Wounded Bodyminds and Transnational Praxis. Temple University Press, Dis/Color Series.
Recognition and Reviews
Champlin, K. (2026, Spring). Review of Disabling Relations: Wounded Bodyminds and Transnational Praxis. (S. Kazemi, Author). Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, 19(2s).
Second Monograph in Progress
Kazemi, S. Captive Revolutionaries: Madness, Disability, and Ca(re)sistance among Iranian Political Prisoners, 1981-1989. Solicited by Duke University Press and Palgrave Macmillan.
Edited Volumes in Progress
Gorman, R. da S., Tam, L., & Kazemi, S. (Eds.). Disabling States. Under advance contract with Canadian Scholars.
Gold, E., Karah, H., & Kazemi, S. (Eds.). Towards a Transnational Solidarity Theory and Praxis: Locating Disability and Feminist Consciousness in the Global. Solicited by Amherst College Press.
Alav-rad, R., Zarabadi, L., & Kazemi, S. (Eds.). The Uncanny of Woman, Life, Freedom: Internals Contradictions and Transnational Reverberations. Solicited by Palgrave Macmillan.
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
Li, L., Kazemi, S., Zheng, W., & Lin, Y. C. T. (2025). Resisting multiple empires, cultivating transnational solidarity: A conversation among feminist-of-color scholar-activists. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 1-26.
Kazemi, S., Gold, E., & Karah, H. (2024). Mobile immobility: Disability in contexts of state violence and political incarceration. Disability and the Global South. (Equal authorship.)
Kazemi, S. (2024). Fetishization of the disabled war veterans in Iran through the ideological construction of "living martyrs." Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal, 18(4).
Kazemi, S., & Sarikaya, B. (2019). Politicizing disability-production mechanisms: Applying the transnational disability model to a case of incarceration, torture, and hunger strike/death fast of a Kurdish political prisoner in Turkey. Zanj: The Journal of Critical Global South Studies, 2(1).
Kazemi, S. (2019). Whose disability (studies)? Defetishizing disablement of Iranian survivors of the Iran-Iraq War by (re)telling resilient narratives of survival. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 8(4).
Kazemi, S. (2019). Disabling power of capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism: Looking at war injury through historical materialism, disability studies, and geopolitics. Disability Studies Quarterly, 39(3).
Kazemi, S. (2017). Toward a conceptualization of transnational disability theory and praxis: Engaging the dialectics of geopolitics, Third World, and imperialism. Critical Disability Discourse Journal, 8.
Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters
Gold, E., & Kazemi, S. (2026). Psychiatry as a nationalist project: Maddening political psychiatry through case studies of mental health education efforts in Iran and Canada. In A. Davis, L. Spring, & M. Castrodale (Eds.), Mad Studies and Education: Critical Pedagogy and Mad Praxis in the Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan.
Kazemi, S., Gold, E., Karah, H., & Hande, M. J. (2025). Transnational disability praxis: Archiving survival, resistance, and resilience amidst ongoing emergencies. In J. Barclay & S. Hunt-Kennedy (Eds.), Cripping the Archives. University of Illinois Press.
Kazemi, S. (2024). Dislocated selves, incarcerated rights. In A. Shuman & W. Hesford (Eds.), Human Rights on the Move. Ohio State University Press.
Kazemi, S., & Karah, H. (2023). Making sense of the disability autonomy and collectivity binary: A review of informal disability justice pedagogy across cultures. In M. A. Raja & N. T. C. Lu (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice. Routledge.
Kazemi, S., & Karah, H. (2023). Madness as response-ability against state terror: A case study from the Iranian Revolution. In N. Erevelles & M. Marrow (Eds.), Handbook of Critical Disability Studies. Springer.
Kazemi, S., & Shadmani, S. (forthcoming). Fetishized bodies and administered lives within disability aesthetics and politics in Iran. In D. Bolt (Ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Disability Studies. Oxford University Press.
Kazemi, S., & Gold, E. (in press). Piecing together the life of an Iranian woman political prisoner: Defetishizing the production of madness and disability through state violence. In S. Scalenghe & B. Tsacoyianis (Eds.), Disability History in the Modern Middle East. Bloomsbury.
Kazemi, S., & Karah, H. (forthcoming). Cultural imperialism and life of the mind: A review of cerebral bias in humanities pedagogy and beyond. In R. da Silveira Gorman & B. Le François (Eds.), Palgrave Encyclopedia of Critical Perspectives in Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan.
News
Kudos
published
published
published
interviewed
published
presented
