Common Ground#788

WOMXN, LIFE, FREEDOM, Pt. II: A Practice-based Conversation on Online Security and Privacy with Sarah Aoun

Featuring Aoun and Morehshin Allahyari, with Farnoosh Fathi

Thursday, April 13, 2023

1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

Privacy and security researcher Sarah Aoun joins artist Morehshin Allahyari for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Farnoosh Fathi.

In this talk

WOMXN, LIFE, FREEDOM is an online event series for co-learning, co-growing, solidarity, and kinship with our Iranian siblings. We come together as artists, thinkers, and organizers,mainly in the diaspora, to share, amplify, and weave together a refusal of long-lasting cultural and political gender/sexual oppression in Iran. The ongoing “Woman, Life, Freedom” or Jina revolution was sparked by the killing of 22-year-old Kurdish Jina (Mahsa) Amini in the hands of the regime’s police on September 16, 2022. Ever since, Iran has experienced a nationwide uprising, primarily led by women and marginalized ethnic groups demanding an end to the current Islamic regime and the establishment of a society free of oppression, discrimination, and dictatorship. As our days unfold between hope in the power of the Iranian people’s resistance, and despair from unthinkable violence by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, how might we continue to participate and show solidarity, using “Woman, Life, Freedom is a daily practice” as our mantra? The series explores this question by providing a platform for growth and support through practice-based conversations.

In Pt. II of the series, A Practice-based Conversation on Online Security and Privacy with Sarah Aoun, Aoun and Morehshin Allahyari will discuss the basics around digital security, and what it means to be safe online and navigate the internet while safeguarding your information. We will understand how to protect online accounts, how to keep your devices locked down, and what internet security and circumvention means in the context of censorship and internet shutdowns.

ترجمه فارسی این برنامه پس از برگزاری در سایت قرار خواهد گرفت.

Sarah Aoun

Sarah Aoun is a privacy and security researcher. For the past decade, her work has primarily focused on providing privacy and security for vulnerable populations around the world. Most recently, she was the CTO and Vice President of Security at the Open Technology Fund, an organization that funds projects focused on countering censorship and surveillance. Sarah has worked as an operational security and counter surveillance trainer, and has served as a cybersecurity consultant for dozens of US and international NGOs. She is currently a New America Fellow, and was a Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow (2017-2018), an Internet Freedom Fellow (2016-2017), and was a technical advisor for the Internet Freedom Festival, the Human Rights Foundation, Global Journalist Security, and Reset.

Morehshin Allahyari

Morehshin Allahyari (Persian: موره شین اللهیاری‎), is a NY based Iranian-Kurdish artist using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to re-figure myth and history. Through archival practices and storytelling, her work weaves together complex counternarratives in opposition to the lasting influence of Western technological colonialism in the context of SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa). Her work has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops at venues throughout the world, including the MoMa, Centre Pompidou, and Venice Biennale di Architecture, and many others. She is the recipient of The United States Artist Fellowship (2021) and The Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019), among other recognitions.

More on Morehshin Allahyari

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Farnoosh Fathi reading.

Farnoosh Fathi

Farnoosh Fathi is the author of Great Guns (Canarium, 2013), editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (NYRB Poets, 2018) and founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). Poems from her forthcoming collection Granny Cloud were recently adapted for Dolores Goes to Poetry City, a new play by Darcie Dennigan, and staged by the Wilbury Theatre. She lives in New York.

In the Rail: Farnoosh Fathi