Life and Thought
Mahsa Asadollahnejad is an Iranian researcher in the fields of political sociology, political thought, and critical thought. She holds a PhD in Political Sociology from Tarbiat Modares University, and her research addresses the relationship between imagination, social critique, politics, and the contemporary history of Iran.
Mahsa Asadollahnejad, born in 1990, is an Iranian researcher in the fields of political sociology, political thought, critical thought, and the contemporary history of Iran. She received her PhD in Political Sociology from Tarbiat Modares University.
The title of her master's thesis was "Imagination and the Possibility of Critiquing Objective Reality: A Case Study of Henry Corbin and the Political and Social Implications of the Mundus Imaginalis." In this research, she examined the relationship between the active imagination in the tradition of Islamic philosophy, particularly the concept of the Mundus Imaginalis (ʿālam al-mithāl), and social and political escapism, attempting to demonstrate the consequences of this type of imagination for the formation of an esotericist socio-political world.
In her doctoral dissertation, she addressed the history of the formation of the Islamic Republic government between 1979 and 1989. Continuing her research trajectory, she has once again returned to the problem of imagination, but this time with a more critical question: how the active imagination, instead of an esotericist politics, can provide the possibility for a kind of critical politics.
