This paper develops a notion of citizenship which accounts for interruptions of, and compliances with, routines in governance. It applies the concept beyond a legal status and electoral practice to decipher how everyday encounters with the state can lead to creative institutional reconfigurations. Focusing on the wives and daughters of martyrs from the Iran-Iraq war (1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988), this paper poses ideologically committed contestation and collaborations with national structures of power as acts of citizenship. With particular attention to temporality and constructive uses of memory, this discussion introduces a governing technique created and utilized by women to remake the state as they assert a self-determined citizenry status.
Feminist theorizations of care have been central to feminist research practices. Nevertheless, this article argues that feminist theorizations of care have not addressed how a feminist committed to breaking down hierarchies between research participants and herself can carefully study ambiguous activism. By illuminating the similarities, overlaps, and differences between feminist and Islamic theorizations and practices of care and justice, this article forges an ethic of Islamic feminist research practice that supports the author’s investigation of a precarious movement—Iran’s Hezbollah. The article places feminist thought in conversation with the study of gender and religion, which is an urgent interdisciplinary task.
In this article, we theoretically conceptualise the renegotiation of participatory action and activism through the formation of intellectual space that is self-reflective and upheld by what we metaphorically describe as mirrors between parallel worlds. Rethinking what activism is and how an individual relates to their social group is dependent on different levels of self-reflection, self-criticism and competing scales of insertion of other people’s struggles into one’s own political vision in an effort to intellectually rectify the local tensions that emerge in a post-revolutionary context where people are disconnected from global-level activism. A significant aspect of this analysis is our interlocutors’ imaginative capacity to draw from other people’s experiences through cultural and visual artefacts and integrate them into their own life history with the intention to address national or group-specific dilemmas. While some have drawn attention to the importance of noting how spaces for activism are remade in the post-revolutionary context due to such sentiments as disappointment, we instead examine the formation of conceptual spaces of activism within the context of isolation in contemporary Iran. Empirically, we bring together a political analysis of the novel Bevatan by Reza AmirKhani, and interviews conducted with English literature students in Shiraz.
Chapter 3 looks at the Islamic Republic of Iran and argues that while religion, laws, and customs impact the ability of researchers to conduct field research to a certain extent, the state’s authoritarian intervention plays a far greater role in limiting researchers’ freedom of inquiry. The chapter offers advice on how to deal with the limitations on research imposed by the authoritarian state. The chapter is based on the experiences of an Iranian American scholar, and an Italian professor based in Dublin. Examining this topic from the perspective of two female researchers with different backgrounds sheds light on the importance of religion and gender to fieldwork in Iran.
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