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2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange

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Student Presentations

Fatemeh Fani, Vasudev Vashisht, & Kanishka Puri

Saturday, October 11 - 10:00AM to 11:00AM

Join us for a slate of 3 engaging student presentations, followed by a joint Q&A! Speakers:

1. Fatemeh Fani: "Erasure" is a research project based on her personal traumatic experiences as an Iranian woman — where even a single strand of hair can mean life or death. Utilizing personal archival photos, the project revolves around the compulsory hijab and the excessive violence it inflicts on women in Iran. Fani uses art as an act of protest and resistance, as well as a vehicle for advocacy and hope. By posing the question, "How can a simple object—a scarf—lose its primary function and become a means of violence, murder, rape, and oppression?" the audience is invited to confront the painful realities surrounding the compulsory hijab and its profound impact on Iranian women.

2. Vasudev Vashisht: This presentation centers on remixing photography as a social and environmental tool — through collaboration with communities and more-than-human forms. Vashisht approaches photography not as a static representation, but as a living, situated practice that entangles material processes, environmental research, and participatory methods. As an MFA student in Photography at Parsons, he has been developing multiple bodies of work that challenge extractive histories and reimagine ecological futures. Vashisht's practice engages found materials, organic matter, and alternative photographic techniques to forge new relationships between human and more-than-human entities. He works against the problematic illusions of human separateness and nature as a resource by considering photography as a material ecology.

3. Kanishka Puri: The internal impetus to mutate her personal archive led Puri to imagine a world that is yet to be. As she says: "Here, all of us, the slime mold, the algae, the fungus that infiltrated our environment, my mother, her mother, and I, are as unruly as we can be." With this work, Puri explores feminist futurist aesthetics, along with other organisms. This collaboration confronts the invisible nature of women's labor and performativity.