Research
Mojab's areas of research and teaching include education policy studies; gender, state, diaspora and transnationality; women, war, militarization and violence; women, war and learning; women political prisoners in the Middle East; transnational women's organizations; feminism, anti-racism, colonialism and imperialism; Marxist-feminism and learning; adult education in comparative and global perspectives. [3] Her approach to the study of race, gender, class, nationality, transnationality, and ethnicity is informed by Marxist feminist dialectical, and historical materialism approach. She is critical of theoretical frameworks which treat race, gender, and class atomistically, and reduce them to the domains of discourse, text, language, or identity. She critiques monopolies of knowledge and power in education, and advocates dialogical and inclusive pedagogical practices. Mojab's research has been published on Islamic feminism, minority women in academe, diversity and academic freedom in Canadian and Iranian universities, adult education and civil society in the Middle East, feminism and nationalism, state-university relation, and women's access to higher education. [3]
Her publications include, among others, articles and book chapters which have appeared in periodicals such as International Journal of Lifelong long Education; Feminist Review; Canadian Woman Studies Journal; Journal of Middle East Women's Studies ; Journal of Ethnicities; Resources for Feminist Research; The Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education; Adult Education Quarterly: A Journal of Research and Theory; Studies in Continuing Education; Al-Raida Magazine (Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World); Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies: Alam-e-Niswan; Journal of Race, Gender, and Class; and Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal. Shahrzad writes in Persian and Kurdish and her work is translated into Arabic, French, German, Kurdish, Turkish, and Swedish.
She is the editor of Marxism and Feminism (2015); Women, War, Violence, and Learning (2010); Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds (2001, second printing 2003). She co-edited with Sara Carpenter Educating from Marx: Race, Gender and Learning (2012), with Nahla Abdo, Violence in the Name of Honour: Theoretical and Political Challenges (2004), with Himani Bannerji and Judith Whitehead, Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism (2001), and with Afsaneh Hojabri Women of Iran: A Subject bibliography and Two Decades of Iranian Women’s Studies in Exiles: A Subject Bibliography [in Persian], both published by the Iranian Women’s Studies Foundation.
She has been the guest editor of the special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East Journal, on Gender and Empire (Summer 2010) and on Dissent: The Politics and Poetics of Women’s Resistance (2012); International Journal of Lifelong Education, on Women, War and Learning; and Resources for Feminist Research, on War and Militarization.
Professor Mojab has created two research websites as an archival space for relevant resource for the research and as a tool for the dissemination of knowledge. The websites are: Marxism and Feminism: Research, Teaching, and Praxis and The Art of Resistance in the Middle East .
In recent years, Shahrzad has attempted to diversify the dissemination of her research results. Together with Shahrzad Arshadi, feminist filmmaker and photographer committed to social justice and human rights, she has produced two documentaries. Samjana: Memoirs and Resistance is based on her research about women in post-war Nepal, their role in the peace process, as well as the role of women’s NGOs in building sustainable peace. This documentary is filmed and directed by Shahrzad Arshadi. Talking Prison, Creating Art and Making Justice (2010) is a documentary based on an-art based project funded by the Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council called Words, Colour and Movement. Behind the Stained Walls (2011) is dance representation of Words, Colour and Movement project. Dancing of Change (2015) a documentary which is filmed and directed by Shahrzad Arshadi is based on Shahrzad Mojab’s decades of research and work with Kurdish women. It captures their dreams and desires for a just world, which they seek in socialism and secularism.
Her current research project is: Remembering Not to Forget is a Digital Storytelling Project telling the stories of former political prisoners-narrating state violence and telling tales of humanity, hope, and resistance. Using storytelling and digital techniques, participants will work one-on-one with artists and facilitators to tell stories, focusing on a particular time, place, space, theme, and moments of imprisonment. These stories include digital images, texts, recorded audio narrations, video clips and/or music.
In March 2022 she was amongst 151 international feminists signing Feminist Resistance Against War: A Manifesto, in solidarity with the Feminist Anti-War Resistance initiated by Russian feminists after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. [4]
Christina Marie Hoff Sommers is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000). She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist.
Transfeminism, or trans feminism, is a branch of feminism focused on transgender women and informed by transgender studies.
Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how a person's various social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage. Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, and physical appearance. These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing. However, little good-quality quantitative research has been done to support or undermine the theory of intersectionality.
Islamic feminism is a form of feminism concerned with the role of women in Islam. It aims for the full equality of all Muslims, regardless of gender, in public and private life. Islamic feminists advocate women's rights, gender equality, and social justice grounded in an Islamic framework. Although rooted in Islam, the movement's pioneers have also utilized secular, Western, or otherwise non-Muslim feminist discourses, and have recognized the role of Islamic feminism as part of an integrated global feminist movement.
Kurdish women have traditionally played important roles in Kurdish society and politics. In general, Kurdish women's rights and equality have improved dramatically in the 21st century due to progressive movements within Kurdish society. However, despite the progress, Kurdish and international women's rights organizations still report problems related to gender inequality, forced marriages, honor killings, and in Iraqi Kurdistan, female genital mutilation (FGM).
Himani Bannerji is a Canadian writer, sociologist, scholar, and philosopher from Kolkata, West Bengal, India. She teaches in the Department of Sociology, the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought, and the Graduate Programme in Women's Studies at York University in Canada. She is also known for her activist work and poetry. She received her B.A. and M.A. in English from Visva-Bharati University and Jadavpur University respectively, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.
The Kamer Foundation, sometimes referred to as Ka-Mer is a Turkish women's group that finds shelter for and offers legal aid to women who have been threatened by their relatives.
Angela McRobbie is a British cultural theorist, feminist and commentator whose work combines the study of popular culture, contemporary media practices and feminism through conceptions of a third-person reflexive gaze. She is a professor of communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
In feminist theory, kyriarchy is a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission. The word was coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in 1992 to describe her theory of interconnected, interacting, and self-extending systems of domination and submission, in which a single individual might be oppressed in some relationships and privileged in others. It is an intersectional extension of the idea of patriarchy beyond gender. Kyriarchy encompasses sexism, racism, ableism, ageism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Catholicism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, xenophobia, economic injustice, the prison-industrial complex, colonialism, militarism, ethnocentrism, speciesism, and other forms of dominating hierarchies in which the subordination of one person or group to another is internalized and institutionalized.
Toward a Feminist Theory of the State is a 1989 book about feminist political theory by the legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon.
The status of women in Iraq at the beginning of the 21st century is affected by many factors: wars, sectarian religious debates concerning Islamic law and Iraq's Constitution, cultural traditions, and modern secularism. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women are widowed as a result of a series of wars and internal conflicts. Women's rights organizations struggle against harassment and intimidation, while they work to promote improvements to women's status in the law, in education, the workplace, and many other spheres of Iraqi life, and to curtail abusive traditional practices such as honor killings and forced marriages.
Lise Vogel is a feminist sociologist and art historian from the United States. An influential Marxist-feminist theoretician, she is recognised for being one of the main founders of the Social Reproduction Theory. She also participated in the civil rights and the women's liberation movements in organisations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi and Bread & Roses in Boston. In her earlier career as an art historian, she was one of the first to try to develop a feminist perspective on Art History.
Lídia Puigvert is a Colombian lecturer of sociology at the University of Barcelona. She is a feminist author known for her theoretical contributions to dialog feminism and the overcoming of gender violence. She has been published many times and co-authored Women and Social Transformation with Judith Butler and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. Due to her relevant contributions in gender studies, she was appointed as a consultant for European research projects such as IMPACT-EV, INCLUD-ED, and WORKALÓ. She was a principal investigator in several projects and coordinated Life paths that move away or move closer to human trafficking with the purpose of sexual exploitation. In 2008, she was a member of the Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women at the European Women's Lobby Observatory. As a lecturer, she has been invited to present conferences and seminars at different universities around the world, such as Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard.
Sunera Thobani is a Tanzanian-Canadian feminist sociologist, academic, and activist. Her research interests include critical race theory, postcolonial feminism, anti-imperialism, Islamophobia, Indigeneity, and the War on Terror. She is currently an associate professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. Thobani is also a founding member of Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equality/Equity (R.A.C.E.), the former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), and the director for the Centre for Race, Autobiography, Gender, and Age (RAGA).
Sherene Razack is a Distinguished Professor and the Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies in the Department of Gender Studies, University of California at Los Angeles. As a feminist critical race scholar, her research and teaching focus on racial violence. She is best known for her contributions to feminist and critical race studies about discrimination against Muslim and Indigenous women in Canada, systemic racism in the Canadian justice system, and colonial violence against Indigenous peoples worldwide. She is the founder of the virtual research and teaching network Racial Violence Hub (RVHub). Formerly a Distinguished Professor of Critical Race and Gender Studies in the Department of Social Justice, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (1991-2016), she relocated to the United States from Canada in 2016.
Susan B. Boyd is a Canadian feminist legal scholar, the inaugural Chair in Feminist Legal Studies, and founder of the Centre for Feminist Legal Studies, and Professor Emerita at UBC. She conducts research in the fields of feminist legal theory, law and gender, law and sexuality, parenthood law, child custody law and law and social justice. In 2012, Professor Boyd was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, in recognition of her international reputation as a leading socio-legal scholar.
Carceral feminism is a critical term for types of feminism that advocate for enhancing and increasing prison sentences that deal with feminist and gender issues. It is the belief that harsher and longer prison sentences will help work towards solving these issues. The phrase "carceral feminism" was coined by Elizabeth Bernstein, a feminist sociologist, in her 2007 article, "The Sexual Politics of the 'New Abolitionism'". Examining the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States, Bernstein introduced the term to describe a type of feminist activism which casts all forms of sexual labor as sex trafficking. She sees this as a retrograde step, suggesting it erodes the rights of women in the sex industry, and takes the focus off other important feminist issues, and expands the neoliberal agenda.
Catherine Eschle is a British political scientist, scholar, feminist and researcher who is best known for her research which centres around the concepts of feminism, resistance, intersectionality, social movements, gender-politics, democracy, and International Relations. Since 2001 Eschle has been published in journals such as: Westview press, Security Dialogues International Studies Quarterly, and the European Journal of Politics and Gender, and Political Studies.
Nükhet Sirman is a Turkish social anthropologist. She earned a doctorate degree from Britain's University College London in 1988, and since 1989, she is a professor of anthropology at the Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. She has done academic analysis of the feminist movement in Turkey and introduced the concept of "familial citizenship" in the academic realm.
