Ghazal Jafari

Education

Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), Doctor of Design (DDes)
Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), Master in Design Studies (MDes in urbanism, landscape, & ecology) 
University of Toronto, Master of Urban Design (MUD)
Shahid Beheshti University (Tehran), Bachelor of Architecture (BArch)

Biography

Dr. Ghazal Jafari is a territorial scholar, award-winning designer, and environmental historian originally trained as an architect and ecological urbanist. Her areas of research and work include environmental and climate justice, infrastructural ecologies, conflict zones and borderlands, Indigenous landscapes and environmental praxis in West Asia, intersections of feminist liberation and ecology, as well as immigration spatial narratives. Her work is informed by her embodied knowledge as a displaced woman of Persian and Azeri descent. Through a gendered, feminist lens, her current book project investigates the geospatial formation of the Iran-Iraq borderlands as a conflict region and extraction periphery (a shadow landscape of contemporary global imperialism) in the past 150 years. Her book also traces techniques of resistance and resilience rooted in Indigenous organizations and environmental literacies. Methodologically, her work is invested in creative stories and counternarratives in multimedia format. She is a co-founding director of No Design on Stolen Land, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to opening the knowledge of complex ecological challenges and raising awareness about geopolitical conflicts at the intersection of environmental justice, spatial inequality, climate adaptation, and community self-determination. Previously, Ghazal was an Aga Khan doctoral fellow and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs research fellow at Harvard University. She has received multiple design competition awards and recognitions, including the One Prize Award: Water as the Sixth Borough (2011), and Azure Magazine’s Annual Award (2012), among others.
 
Ghazal’s recent publications include “Silent Siege: In the Shadow Landscapes of International Sanctions” in Constructing Invisibility: Infrastructure, Militarization, and the Extreme Environment (ORO, 2025, forthcoming); “Woman, Water, Freedom: Climate Justice, Women’s Liberation, and Territorial Sovereignty in Iran-Iraq Borderlands” Journal of Architectural Education 78: Infidelities (2024); “Expulsion by Design,” in Margin and Text: Amplifying Diverse Voices in Architecture (Princeton Architecture Press, 2025); A BOTANY OF VIOLENCE: Across 529 Years of Resistance & Resurgence (Goff books, 2021), “No Design on Stolen Land: Dismantling Design’s Dehumanizing White Supremacy” Architectural Design 90 (2020), and New Geographies 09: Posthuman (GSD & Actar, 2016-18), Grounding UPS: An Infrastructural Ethnography of a Logistics Corporation (doctoral dissertation, Harvard GSD), among others.
 
In the capacities of curator, author, and editor, Ghazal has been involved in exhibitions, installations, and open-source publications. These include Towards a Flora of the Future exhibition and symposium at UVA Architecture School (2022), The Quino Treaty at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), Landscape as Resistance: Pretexts, Subtexts, Contexts in Struggles for Environmental Justice (open-source primer, 2016-2021), Confronting Columbus (open letter & online educational archive, 2020), and The Missing 400: On the Erasure of Women from the Urban Environment (self-published book and multimedia project, 2016), among others.