Nation on the Move
By Minoo Moallem
Design by Erik Loyer

Project Credits

I am indebted to Tara McPherson and Steve Anderson and the entire Vectors team for the opportunity that brought me into contact with the world of digital scholarship and for the collaborative work during the residency workshop and throughout the process of working on this project. This encounter, I keenly believe, has transformed my academic work, opening it to a new form of decentering and risk taking as I came upon the productive tension between legibility or illegibility of surfaces and forms beyond the limits of logocentric and communicative models of speech.

Erik Loyer was the most incredible collaborator—sensible, patient, and generous. His brilliance in the design and programming of this project helped me to learn about and appreciate the fusion of the academic, aesthetic, analytic, and technical. I am indebted to Steve Anderson for his critical insights at various stages of this project. His close reading and interaction with the project and his feedback were crucial in helping me work through the moments of vulnerability and self-doubt involved in moving into an innovative field of scholarship.

This project would have not been possible without the continuous support and encouragement of Caren Kaplan. Being a Vectors contributor herself, she inspired me to move beyond the limited imagining of this project as a book-length manuscript and bring it into dialogue with digital scholarship. I also wish to thank Inderpal Grewal, Jenny Terry, Shahin and Arash Bayatmakou, Haleh Owzar, Mehraneh, Ali, and Ahmad Moallem for their encouragement, help and support.

I would like to acknowledge the carpet weavers who shared their insights and knowledge with me, as well as the traders, collectors, connoisseurs, filmmakers, and diasporic entrepreneurs whose views helped me understand the significance of mediation in the complex world of carpets. I am also grateful to the staff of the Carpet Museum of Tehran, the Carpet Gallery of Rassam Arabzadeh, the Textile Museum (DC), the Carpet Museum Trust in Kidderminster, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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Minoo Moallem   mmoallem@berkeley.edu
AuthorMinoo Moallem is a professor of gender and women studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister. Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran, University of California Press, 2005, the co-editor (with Caren Kaplan and Norma Alarcon) of Between Woman and Nation. Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms and The State, Duke University Press, 1999. Trained as a sociologist, she writes on transnational feminist cultural studies, gender and consumer culture, immigration and diaspora studies, and Iranian cultural politics and diasporas.

Erik Loyer   erik@song.nu | http://www.erikloyer.com
Designer ProgrammerErik Loyer's interactive artworks have been exhibited online and in festivals and museums throughout the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Prix Ars Electronica; and Transmediale. Loyer is the creator of The Lair of the Marrow Monkey, one of the first websites to be added to the permanent collection of a major art museum, and Chroma, an award-winning web serial about the racial politics of virtual reality. As Creative Director for Vectors, he has designed numerous multimedia essays in collaboration with leading humanities scholars. Loyer's commercial portfolio includes Clio and One Show Gold Award-winning work for Vodafone as well as projects for BMW and Sony. He is the recipient of a Rockefeller Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship, and his works have been honored in the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media and the California Design Biennial. Loyer has a B.A. in Cinema/Television Production from the University of Southern California.