meet the author: chowra makaremi

Chowra Makaremi made a name for herself with the essay Woman! Life! Freedom!, for which she received the France Culture-Arte essay prize in 2023. Born in Iran, now settled in France, Chowra Makaremi places the sensitive at the heart of her anthropological approach. Better: she makes her own memories and emotions a material in its own right, in a rare coherence between object and research method. A few months ago, she signed a new essay nourished by observations in the United States, Argentina or even Iran. Subtitled The politics of attachment in the face of the politics of cruelty, Affective Resistances shows how emotions and bonds can become forms of resistance and sheds light on contemporary uprisings in the light of their sensitive material and their feminist heritage. Author's gaze Particularly touched by this remarkably written essay, Sandra de Vivies (La Femme of the lake) poses her author's gaze on Affective Resistances. She will notably question Chowra Makaremi on this position on the edge of the intimate and the political, of academic science and art. A position that joins, in a certain way, that of writers resorting to fiction to elucidate reality. Their unpublished interview will be followed by a literary carte blanche given to Chowra Makaremi: an unpublished contribution. About Affective Resistances “A magnificent reflection, nourished by feminist philosophy, on what our terrors and our attachments do to politics.” - Les Inrockuptibles “Affective Resistances, a personal and moving essay, a very great book of those that we tell ourselves while reading it that it marks us forever.” - France Culture About the author Chowra Makaremi is an anthropologist at the CNRS. She has directed several works, including Between reception and rejection. What cities do to migrants (with Véronique Bontemps and Sarah Mazouz, le passager clandestin, 2018). In 2019, she directed the film Hitch. An Iranian story (Alter Ego, 78'). She is the author of Aziz's Notebook. At the heart of the Iranian revolution (Gallimard, 2011) and Woman! Life! Freedom! Echoes of a revolutionary uprising in Iran (La Découverte, 2023), which won the France Culture-Arte essay prize 2023. Subtitled The politics of attachment in the face of the politics of cruelty, her latest book Affective Resistances was published in 2025. About the moderator Sandra de Vivies is a Franco-Belgian writer. She published La Femme of the lake (Cambourakis, 2025), which won several awards. Before that she published a first collection of photosensitive stories, Vivaces (La place, 2021), texts and photographs at Éditions Wildproject as well as in other collective books and magazines. The entanglement of the intimate and the political and the whole history of bodies, imaginaries, arts and sciences run through her work. She works in the field of writings of a repopulated reality which, formally, borrow as much from prose as from poetry.