Event Details

Professor Roy Suddaby discussing his latest research on Institutions, Slow Violence and the Strategic Construction of Historical Events

In September of 2019, after learning that she might be imprisoned by the Islamic Republic for sneaking into a football stadium to watch a match, a 29 year old Iranian woman set herself on fire and died. Sahar Khodayari’s death received global media coverage and sparked widespread condemnation against Iranian government. Later that month FIFA, the international governing body of association football, ordered Iran to grant women unrestricted access to stadiums in numbers proportional to the demand for tickets. In October of 2019 four thousand women attended a match against Cambodia in Azadi Stadium.

Sahar Khodayari’s act of self-immolation illustrates a well-established strategy by which social activists draw attention to the power and pernicious harm exerted by social institutions. Because institutions change slowly, the violence they exert is often so deeply woven into the culture that it becomes so cognitively legitimate, so taken-for granted by both the community, and the victim, that the violence and the victim are made invisible. And because institutions exert their power so broadly, embedding into everyday social practices, customs, processes and social structures, it is often extremely difficult to attribute causality to the perpetrator, even when the victim and the violence are revealed.

In this paper I apply the convergent insights of social movement theory, rhetorical history, and institutional theory, to theorize the strategic responses of marginalized actors to institutional violence. I offer a typology of deliberately constructed historical events that vary in terms of their degree of deliberation and their temporal positioning. I hypothesize institutional factors that determine whether a deliberately constructed event will assume the status of a historical event or, alternatively, vanish from collective memory.