“The personal is theoretical.”
– Sara Ahmed
I am a sociologist and a feminist ethnographer who uses the ethnographic moment as an entry into global processes, linking the local and the personal to the global, and discerning the global in the vernacular and the personal. My research and scholarly interests lie at the intersection of gender and globalization, feminist geography, gender politics, and ethnographies of the state. My research to date has engaged with two main broad themes: i) Gendered Geographies of Urban Segregation; ii) Gendered Bodies and Global Politics.
Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (University of California Press, 2020)
Winner of the 2020 Latifeh Yarshater Book Award from the Association for Iranian Studies
While much has been written about the impact of the 1979 Islamic revolution on life in Iran, discussions about the everyday life of Iranian women have been glaringly missing. Women in Place offers a gripping inquiry into gender segregation policies and women’s rights in contemporary Iran. Nazanin Shahrokni takes us onto gender-segregated buses, inside a women-only park, and outside the closed doors of stadiums where women are banned from attending men’s soccer matches. The Islamic character of the state, she demonstrates, has had to coexist, fuse, and compete with technocratic imperatives, pragmatic considerations regarding the viability of the state, international influences, and global trends. Through a retelling of the past four decades of state policy regulating gender boundaries, Women in Place challenges notions of the Iranian state as overly unitary, ideological, and isolated from social forces and pushes us to contemplate the changing place of women in a social order shaped by capitalism, state-sanctioned Islamism, and debates about women’s rights. Shahrokni throws into sharp relief the ways in which the state strives to constantly regulate and contain women’s bodies and movements within the boundaries of the “proper” but simultaneously invests in and claims credit for their expanded access to public spaces.
Other Publications
ARTICLES
“Gender and Public Space” co-authored with Gqola, P. D. et al. Gender and Development, 2024, 32(1-2): 1-25.
“Depleted Households: Domesticating Economic Sanctions,” The Humanity Journal, 2023, 14(2).
[Honorable Mention, Arlene Kaplan Daniels Paper Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems, 2024]
“Bodies in Revolt, Challenging the State in Iran,” Current History, 2023, 122(848): 323-328.
“Ecologies of Belonging and Exclusion: An Intersectional Analysis of Urban Citizenship in Kuwait City,” co-authored with Spyros Sofos, LSE Middle East Centre Kuwait Programme Paper Series, 2023.
“In Her Name: (Re)Imagining Feminist Solidarities in the Aftermath of the Iran Protests,” Feminist Studies, 2022, 48(3).
“Mobilizing Pity: The Dialectics of Narrative Production and Erasure in the Case of Iran’s #BlueGirl,” Co-authored with Spyros Sofos, Globalizations, 13 January 2021.
“Patriarchal Accommodations: Women’s Mobility and the Policies of Gender Difference from Urban Tehran to Migrant Mexico,” Co-authored with Abigail Andrews, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 2014, 43(2): 148-175.
“The Mothers’ Paradise: Women-Only Parks and the Dynamics of State Power in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 2014, 10(3): 87-108. [Winner of Best Graduate Paper Prize, Association for Middle East Women’s Studies, 2013]
“The Politics of Polling: Polling and the Constitution of Counter-Publics during “Reform” in Iran” Current Sociology, 2012, 60(2): 202-221.
Book Chapters
“Football Comes to the Silver Screen: The Contentious Politics of Football Spectatorship in Iran” in The Beautiful Game on a Muslim Pitch: How Football and Religion are Shaping Identity and Society, edited by Aaron W. Hughes and Leif Stenberg (Edinburgh University Press, 2025).
“Facing the State: Mapping the Transformation of the Iranian Women’s Movements Over Four Decades” in The Handbook of Global Feminisms and Gender Studies: Convergences, Divergences, and Pluralities, edited by Analia Torres et al. (Routledge, 2024).
“The Politics of Gender and the State in Postrevolutionary Iran” in The Handbook of Sociology in the Middle East, edited by Fatma Muge Gocek and Gamze Evcimen (I.B. Tauris, 2022).
“(At) Home in Crisis” in Global Feminist Autoethnographies During COVID-19: Displacements and Disruptions, edited by Melanie Heath et al. (Routledge, 2022).
“Manufacturing Consent: From Moral Subjects to (Un)Healthy Citizens” in Governance and Gender in Muslim Contexts, edited by Deniz Kandiyoti et al. (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
“Protecting Men and the State: The Politics of Gender Segregation at Iranian Universities,” in Women, Islam, and Education in Iran, edited by Rezaei-Rashti et al. (Routledge, 2019)
“Le Paradis des mères à Téhéran : de prohibition à productivité,” in Etat-nation et fabrique du genre, des corps et des sexualités: Iran, Turquie et Afghanistan, edited by Azadeh Kian and Lucia Direnberger (Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2019).
Dr Nazanin Shahrokni 