The Sea That Binds and Divides: Our Mediterranean

The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Mediterranean Studies Forum present a lecture with award-winning multimedia journalist Iason Athanasiadis.  Through a combination of stories from and experiences in 2020 Istanbul in the midst of a lockdown to combat the global pandemic to looking at the impacts of centuries of history on the rich cultures and diasporic communities of the Mediterranean, we will be shown exactly how this sea has bound and divided continents, peoples, ideas, and religions for hundreds of years, and how it will continue to do so for hundreds more.

Iason Athanasiadis is a Mediterranean-focused multimedia journalist based between Athens, Istanbul, and Tunis. He uses all media to recount the story of how once-cosmopolitan, now-neglected port cities can recover from the effects of colonialism and nationalist narratives while adapting to the era of climate change, mass migration, and the misapplication of distorted modernities.

Having studied Arabic and Modern Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford, Persian and Contemporary Iranian Studies in Tehran, and been a Nieman fellow at Harvard, Iason covered region-defining events in the Greater Middle East region like the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2005 Iranian elections, the Greek economic crisis, and the Arab uprisings from 2001 onwards. From 2011 until 2018 he photographed and made short films for United Nations political and humanitarian missions in Afghanistan, Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and Tunisia.

The Anna Lindh Foundation awarded Iason its Mediterranean Journalism Award for his coverage of the Arab Spring in 2011, and in 2017 its 10th-anniversary alumni award for his commitment to using all media to tell stories of intercultural dialogue.

Iason is currently completing a longform essay for the Balkan Investigate Research Network on impunity in the Greek police.