Negar is a French/Iranian geographer trained in France and the UK. After a first Masters degree, Negar worked for several years as an environmental and social executive for a multilateral development project in South-East Asia. In 2012, she graduated with a first class degree in Environment and Development (MA Geography) at King’s College London. She then carried on her academic training with a DPhil in Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, Saint Antony’s College, which she obtained in 2018. Before coming to Bristol, Negar was a lecturer in the Social Science of International Development at King’s College London. 

Negar is a feminist political geographer interested in unravelling the ways in which intersectional forms of exclusion and marginalisation are produced, reproduced and contested in stressed environments. Her research  brings the insights of feminist political ecology, labour geography and the sensibilities of an ethnographer to issues of resource extraction, work, migration, gender and Muslimness in the Global South, the post-Soviet Muslim South and France. Negar undertakes empirically grounded research on issues with marginalized communities - women, men and children informal and precarious laborers in an extractive coal landscape marked by the emergence of Chinese investments in post-Soviet Tajikistan, and more recently children second generation migrants in France.

Her work fosters conversations between different strands of feminist geographical research: post/decolonial geography, political geography and ecology, labour geography, children and youth geographies, feminist geopolitics and geographies of Muslim identities.

Negar is also a documentary filmmaker interested in exploring the use of visual, embodied and art-based methodologies in the study of issues around marginalization and exclusion. She has co-directed two films: a short video-documentary Komor: Journey through the Tajik underground’ (co-direction: Hattie Brookes-Ward) on extractive exclusion in Kante;  and an award winning animated ethnographic portrait on one stigmatised female coal miner, ‘Nadirah: Coal woman’ (with the animation artist and director Kate Jessop).

Research interests include

• Feminist political ecology
• Postcolonial and Decolonial theory
• Feminist Geopolitics
• Resource Extraction (mining), violence and resistance
• Migration and identity
• Critical perspectives on labour and work
• Development/ post-development/ decolonising development
• Gender, Masculinities, Muslimness
• Children & youth
• Tajikistan & Central Asia, Afghan and Iranian diasporas, Soviet and Post-Soviet studies
• Postcolonial France
• Visual, embodied and art-based methodologies: film, dance, animation, participatory and decolonial methods
• Ethnography
• Critical pedagogy