About
Noqte
Noqte, in its broadest sense, is a place where we — Neshat and Pedram — hope to bring together the different things we care about and do.
It grew out of our experience as teachers, our interest in history and art, our need for understanding and beauty, and our continuing curiosity about human beings and society. It is an attempt to bring these different paths together in one place: somewhere we ourselves can continue to grow while creating things that may also be meaningful to others.
What is Noqte — and why did we create it?
Noqte is, for us, the sum of several things: years of teaching, a fascination with history and art, a desire to understand how people and societies work, and a need to remain close to things we find meaningful and beautiful.
We wanted a place where these different parts of our lives would not have to remain separate. A place where teaching could meet research, where ideas could meet art and making, where cultural work could lead to conversation, and where the things we do for a living could also be things we genuinely care about.
Noqte is a for-profit initiative. One of its important purposes is very simple: to make money. We want it to generate an income that allows us to live, continue working, and feel satisfied with the work through which we earn that income.
But for us, how that money is made matters more than the fact of making it. We want our income to come from work that helps us understand the world better; work in which we can find meaning; work that keeps us in contact with beauty; and work that we actually enjoy doing.
The rest of our aims are, if we are being precise, also connected to our own needs — only at different levels.
There is a need to understand: to know more about how human beings and the world work. There is a need for connection: to be in conversation with people who have similar concerns — people who think, doubt, ask questions, and search for meaning. There is a need for belonging: to have a community that can, in some sense, feel like home. And there is a need for beauty: to encounter and make things that feel right, thoughtful, and well-proportioned.
Noqte is also an attempt to share these experiences. We try to design what we do in ways that, while meeting some of our own needs, can create real and valuable experiences for others as well — through spending time together with ideas, works, stories, and questions.
A place for conversation
One of the things we hope may gradually emerge around Noqte is a group of people who are able — and willing — to talk to one another.
By conversation, we do not mean simply announcing positions in one another’s presence.
Conversation requires at least two sides. It requires an effort to understand what another person means, and the possibility of developing a shared language and a set of concepts through which disagreement itself can become meaningful. We may disagree about those concepts too; what matters is that there is still an attempt to understand.
For that kind of conversation to exist, there also needs to be some degree of affection, trust, and belonging.
We hope Noqte can gradually become a small community of people for whom thinking and conversation are not occasional activities, but part of everyday life.
What we do
Learning
Education and learning are among the central parts of Noqte.
But by learning we do not mean only the transmission of information. We are interested in learning as an engagement with understanding, meaning, and questions.
For now, our courses and workshops focus particularly on subjects such as identity, history, literature, art, thought, society, and civilization.
Cultural Events
We hope to create different reasons for the community around Noqte to come together: exhibitions, music, film screenings, discussions and debates — and sometimes simply games, food, and spending time together.
We also hope these gatherings can create opportunities for individuals and groups who might otherwise remain separate to meet one another and become more familiar.
Content Production
Part of what we do is produce written, visual, and audiovisual content.
Sometimes that may be a film, a piece of graphic design, an essay, a video for a YouTube channel, or material for a podcast. Much of this work may be produced in collaboration with — or commissioned by — other individuals and organisations.
Publishing
We also hope, over time, to publish things ourselves: books, magazines, essays, podcasts, videos, and other cultural and educational material.
Part of this work will grow directly out of Noqte’s courses, events, and community.
Who are we?
Because a large part of Noqte’s work revolves around culture and education, and because community-building is one of its central aims, we think we have a responsibility to be explicit about who we are and about the elements that have shaped the way we see the world. In the social sciences, and increasingly in educational practice, this is often discussed through the idea of positionality.
The starting point is simple: complete neutrality — speaking or teaching from no position at all — is not possible in social research or education. Our histories, experiences, identities, values, interests, and circumstances affect what we notice, the questions we ask, the things we find important, and the judgments we make.
We therefore believe that those who provide educational and cultural spaces have a responsibility to make the important elements of their own position as clear as they reasonably can. Where do we come from? What have we experienced? What do we value? And how have these things shaped the way we understand the world and the work we do?
Some of our answers can also be found in our writing about Noqte’s philosophy of education. But for greater clarity, we try here to introduce ourselves as openly as possible.
Neshat Shirazi
Neshat was born in Tehran in 1992 into an urban middle-class Bahá’í family, with roots in Ardestan on her father’s side and Kashan on her mother’s.
That cultural and religious background, together with growing up in a large and complex city such as Tehran, has played an important role in shaping how she thinks about people, society, and the possibilities of individual growth.
Her lived experience of educational discrimination against Bahá’ís in Iran has also been an important starting point in her intellectual and professional life. She studied architecture at the Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education (BIHE) and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in architecture at the Bergen School of Architecture (BAS).
Neshat has worked across architectural design, graphic design, photography, and visual production. She has been involved with visual and applied arts since adolescence, and this continuing relationship between art and architecture has shaped her sensitivity to beauty, meaning, and the relationship between form and content.
At BIHE, she taught architectural representation and worked as a teaching assistant in world architectural history under art historian Sussan Babaie, Professor in the Arts of Iran and Islam at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Together with her interest in the humanities and social sciences, these experiences have contributed to a multidisciplinary and human-centred way of thinking about space, culture, and education.
In political, social, and philosophical questions, Neshat’s approach is grounded above all in fairness, careful observation, and the precise definition of concepts.
The same approach has informed much of her educational and cultural work, including facilitating youth groups and moderating spaces for discussion and debate.
Pedram Vafadari
Pedram was born in Babolsar in 1984 into a Bahá’í family with Zoroastrian Yazdi–Isfahani roots on his father’s side, and a background of Shi‘i Islam, Khorasani Mousavi Sayyid ancestry, and Turkic heritage on his mother’s.
He does not see himself as confined by any one of these identities. But he believes that the diversity — and at times the tension — between the traditions and values he grew up around has played a decisive role in shaping how he thinks about human beings, society, and culture.
Pedram first studied civil engineering and later architecture at the Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education (BIHE). He subsequently taught there for more than a decade, in courses including art history, sustainability in architecture, rural studies, and perspective drawing.
He later began graduate studies in curriculum development at BIHE and subsequently completed an MPhil in Higher Education at the University of Oslo. During this period, he encountered institutional theory — an encounter that became one of the foundations of the way he now thinks about institutions, culture, and social structures.
His experience has moved across architecture and renovation, design, translation, research, teaching, content production, and a range of cultural and artistic projects. He believes that his engagement with history, literature, philosophy, and the social sciences — together with a long process of personal reflection and psychological growth — has helped him develop a more complex, compassionate, and realistic understanding of human beings and societies.
Intellectually, Pedram describes himself as liberal in the precise sense of the term: committed to individual freedom, human agency, and the value of reason in understanding both the world and ourselves. Ethically, his outlook is broadly utilitarian. At the same time, his emphasis on sustainability and transcendence often brings his practical thinking close to deontological — particularly Kantian — ethics.
He believes in the deep interdependence of the individual and society, and understands knowledge not as a collection of separate disciplines, but as a single, interconnected network.
The two of us
We have been working together for more than ten years.
We feel together.
We think together.
We talk together.
We make things together.
And, in the most literal sense, we live together.
In 2021, we moved from Tehran to Oslo. Today, our life and work move between Oslo and Bergen.
Noqte is, in many ways, a continuation of that shared life: a place where the different things we have learned, cared about, questioned, enjoyed, and built — separately and together — can meet.
Ultimately
Noqte is, for us, a place where all the things we enjoy doing can come together. It is an attempt to build a space in which understanding, pleasure, conversation, and growth can happen alongside one another.
A place where we can keep our own need for meaning and beauty alive, while at the same time making something from which other people can also take a share — even if that share is sometimes only a moment of understanding, or a moment of beauty.