Scholar Spotlight: Ehsan Lor Afshar
“I study the things people care about most, and how those things shape our lives, choices, and feelings.”
Ehsan Lor Afshar
Assistant Teaching Professor
Department of Anthropology
My work explores how changes in what we value—especially when something important loses its worth—can make people feel out of place or disconnected from their home and community.
My research integrates a value theory of displacement into the emerging anthropology of sanctions, offering a perspective on displacement not just as physical movement, but as a lived experience of alienation and detachment from place.
Focusing on the dramatic collapse of Iran’s currency, I examine how economic devaluation unsettles people’s sense of belonging, disrupts everyday routines, and narrows their imagined futures.
My work offers an innovative ethnography of value that centers on devaluation, an often-overlooked dimension in anthropological theory. While much research focuses on how value is constituted, circulated, and determined, I explore how it erodes in times of crisis, using storytelling as a core ethnographic method to bring these transformations to light.
Why I Do What I Do
As an Iranian, I’ve experienced firsthand the far-reaching impacts of sanctions, from difficulties paying graduate school application fees to the closure of my US bank account and delays in my fieldwork due to licensing restrictions. These experiences made me feel excluded from academic norms, and anthropology gave me the tools to examine and theorize such lived realities critically, both my own and those of others whose voices are often absent from discussions about sanctions and displacement.
Currently Working On
I contributed a chapter titled “Nothing is Normal Here: Living under Sanctions in Iran” for the forthcoming edited volume Besieged: Everyday Encounters with Economic Sanctions, the first anthropological collection to examine sanctions critically.
In it, I analyze the sanction-driven value crisis in Iran through three interlocking dynamics: devaluation, revaluation, and exclusion, that have left many Iranians feeling that their lives are anything but normal.
By Amy Beth Miller