Dr. Ghazal Jafari is a territorial scholar, weaver, and educator, professionally trained as an architect and urban designer. Originally of Persian and Azeri descent and currently living in voluntary exile in the United States, Dr. Jafari left Iran due to political and socioenvironmental violence. Her research focuses on spatial and environmental justice, landscape infrastructure, plant knowledge, feminist liberation, immigrants’ narrative, and non-Western spatial discourses. Her teaching engages urban ecologies, contingency planning for climate change and geopolitical conflict, and politics of representation. She is a founding director of OPEN SYSTEMS / Landscape Infrastructure Lab, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to opening knowledge of complex ecological challenges and raising awareness about geopolitical conflicts at the intersection of spatial inequality, climate justice, and community self-determination. Her coming book is about clashing histories of the transnational systems of dispossession and struggles for survival along the Iran-Iraq borderlands. As part of her book, Ghazal has been mapping the interdependencies between the ecological richness and endurance of riverine landscapes, matriarchal organizations, and resurgent feminist ecologies to reveal the subversive trajectories and prospects of transgenerational emancipatory struggles in waters and plants, past, present, and future. Her recent projects and publications include TOWARDS A FLORA OF THE FUTURE (2022), A BOTANY OF VIOLENCE: Across 529 Years of Resistance & Resurgence (2022), NOT YOUR AMAZON TO EXPLOIT (2019-2021), “NO DESIGN ON STOLEN LAND: Dismantling Design’s Dehumanizing White Supremacy,” Architectural Design 90 (2020), CONFRONTING COLUMBUS (2019-20), THE MISSING 400: On the Erasure of Women from the Urban Environment (2016-18), and NEW GEOGRAPHIES 09: Posthuman (2016-18). She is an Assistant Professor of Urban & Environmental Planning at University of Virginia.