Media

Of Crisis and the Search for Political Grammar in Iran (with Arash Davari)
Jadaliyya 11.11.2025

This dossier explores a crisis.
Israel’s twelve-day war on Iran in June 2025, carried out with the backing and participation of the United States, unfolded with startling intensity: aerial bombardments, drones, car bombs, and cyberattacks struck Iranian cities as regional actors and global powers recalibrated their positions in real time. Beyond its immediate destruction and geopolitical maneuvering, the war laid bare fault lines across different spheres of politics. For decades now, scholarship and commentary about Iran have been caught in familiar binaries—namely, reform versus revolution, state versus society, and nationalism versus imperialism. The June war exposed the fragility of inherited categories and the inadequacy of established frameworks. It produced a discursive shockwave, revealing the limits of these binaries more starkly than ever before. In the same breath, it posed urgent questions about how to think—and act—politically. Read more…

Bodies in Revolt, Challenging the State in Iran
Current History 122 (848): 323-328, December 2023

The protests that erupted across Iran in 2022 after the death of a woman arrested for noncompliance with a headscarf requirement were not only about religious dress codes. They were a culmination of years of growing discontent over broader questions involving the place of women in the Islamic Republic and other grievances about the reach of an overbearing state and perceived social and political injustices. The erosion of civil society has made it difficult to sustain the protests’ momentum, as the state moves to co-opt businesses and the public into enforcing its decrees, but the uprising is part of a longer-term, nonlinear process of dissent-driven change in Iran. Read more…

Political Contestation around the “Football in Cinema” Project in Iran
POMEPS Studies 48: Politics of Sports in the Middle East, June 2023

In this article, I explore the ways in which political contestations are mapped onto, and further politicize, everyday sports and entertainment spaces. To do so, I focus on the case of the “football in cinema” project to highlight the multipolarity of the complex terrain of conflict and negotiation among female football fans, cinema owners and managers, movie producers, and various state officials and organizations. The article follows how the disputes over women’s football spectatorship and their access to football stadiums has spilled over into other spaces, such as cinemas, cafés, and restaurants, where football has been livestreamed…Read more…

Feminist Solidarities: The Iran Protests
LSE Research for the World, 15.11.2022

The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Jîna Amini at the hands of the morality police sparked nationwide protests in Iran. The protests have created a space for sisterhood, crossing class and ethnic boundaries in Iran. They also highlight the urgency of forging feminist solidarities across national borders…Watch here…

Students in Tehran Protest Gender Segregation in University Dining Hall (with Spyros Sofos)
Truthout, 28.10.2022

On October 23, female and male students defied the state-mandated segregation regulations in the university dining halls by attempting to enter, sit and eat together at a dining hall, only to be evicted by the university administration. The next day, the Basiji students sought to uphold the boundary their classmates had “breached,” by attempting to barricade the area with tables and prevent other students from entering and normalizing “desegregation.” As the students overran the Basiji barricades and flooded the dining hall…Read more…

Women, Life, Freedom
History Today Magazine, 11.11.2022

Iranian women have always been present in national uprisings, but this time they are leading them…Read more…

Kuwait City and Its Fragments (with Spyros Sofos)
LSE Middle East Centre Blog Series, 05.04.2022

Originally a small fishing and pearl diving settlement, Kuwait City became a key point in the East India Company sea routes to India and the east coast of Africa in the 18^th century. The affluence brought about by the discovery of oil in the 20^th century set in motion a dramatic transformation of…Read more…

Nazanin Shahrokni, Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (New Texts Out Now)
Jadaliyya 15.01.2021

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Nazanin Shahrokni (NS): Women in Place constitutes the intertwinement of the personal, the political, and the professional for me. I begin the book by describing a scene from 1995, which I experienced personally: the opening ceremony of the Students’ Sports Olympiad, which took place in Isfahan, Iran, one of the first times when male and female students were allowed in the very same stadium together, albeit in separate sections. This was a formative experience for me, because living these events brought home an apparent “paradox” that permeates my book. Back then, in the 1990s when timid steps towards an opening with regards to the “place” of women in Iran were taking place, interestingly, the very same female officials who had invested in opening up doors for us, young women, were also the ones who were monitoring and restricting this new experience of “freedom.”…Read more…