By Jenée Wilde, Senior Instructor Department of English
Parichehr Kazemi is a political science PhD candidate at the University of Oregon. She received a 2019 Graduate Student Research Award from CSWS and was the Center’s 2022 Jane Grant Dissertation fellow. Kazemi researches women’s resistance efforts, social media, and social movements across the Middle East, focusing on the ways that women use social media images as a means of protest in Iran. As a CSWS Advisory Board member last year, she drafted the Center’s statement declaring solidarity with demonstrators in Iran who protested the tragic death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iranian morality police. I caught up with her over the summer to learn more about her research and the impacts of CSWS grant funding on her work.
Jenée Wilde: What were you working on when you got your first CSWS research grant in 2019, and how did it become a seed for what you’re doing now?
Parichehr Kazemi: I started grad school in 2018, and I initially was really interested in working on Latin America. Latin American studies was a central focus of my undergraduate education and I wanted to build on that interest. At the same time, the women’s movement in Iran was really taking off—specifically around this online-offline movement that had a huge turning point in 2018 with women staking out very public challenges to the mandatory hijab and other discriminatory laws. There was a lot happening in Iran under the women’s movement and women’s resistance that engaged my interest, so I completely switched course.
All our research is very personal, but because it’s very personal, we are deeply embedded in it and it becomes harder to take a step back and say, what’s the analytical lens here? That’s what was happening to me when those protest movements sprang up in Iran. I kept telling my advisor, Erin Beck, this is unprecedented and amazing stuff. And she kept saying, how do you know if this is unprecedented? How do you know that it presents a strong challenge to the regime? You need to do some comparative work.
The first CSWS research grant allowed me to do that. I historicized the movement, looking at women’s resistance efforts within the past two decades under the Islamic Republic to understand what the regime response was then, and then compared that to the current regime response to protest movements. In political science, my home department, we have a second-year paper that is the equivalent of a master’s thesis. The grant supported my work on this second-year paper, which was an image analysis of My Stealthy Freedom (one of the key women’s movements of the last decade) and contextualized and compared it to previous mobilizations.
JW: Can you say more about the women’s movements in Iran?
PK: The Islamic revolution took place in 1979 and became a huge turning point in women’s rights, essentially giving men free rein over women’s sexual and reproductive rights while limiting women’s opportunities and choices in the public sphere. The extremely suppressive post-revolutionary period coupled with a near decade-long war with Iraq didn’t give women a lot of opportunities to mobilize against such measures. But then in the 1990s, some openings appeared in the social and political spheres, due to a turning point in the regime’s politics and the end of the war, that women took advantage of to push more publicly for their rights. They pushed for reversals of many of the laws that the Islamic regime initiated and pushed back against some of the most visible markers of regime power that dictated how women could dress, how they could be in public, who they could associate with, and so on. By the early 2000s, for example, there was a coalition of women in Parliament that started mobilizing around discriminatory gender laws. A few years after that, another coalition of women built on this public mobilization effort by aiming to get one million people to sign a petition showing interest in reversing these laws.
These were the big women’s movements happening in the nineties and early 2000s. Women had to strategically organize in a way that would fly under the radar of the Islamic regime to tackle these very discriminatory policies and, for its part, regime forces didn’t suppress these movements (or were slower to suppress them) compared to those that came a few years later.
Then in 2014, a new online trend starts that seems harmless at first. You start seeing women taking pictures and videos of themselves doing illegal things—things that women are banned from doing in public like riding bikes, singing, dancing, being with members of the opposite sex or, most famously, being unveiled. These pictures get shared on a couple of key social media pages and become known as “My Stealthy Freedom.” They evolve into a kind of movement resisting the regime’s policies and provide women with a pathway to sustaining activism given that it’s much harder to control and suppress online activities.
For my dissertation, I historicize that turning point to understand what kinds of variables would have to come together for this particular movement to come about. What I argue is that post-2009 (following the Green Movement, a popular uprising against a rigged election that was heavily suppressed), the regime became much more dictatorial, authoritarian, and repressive, forcing women to innovate new ways of tackling discriminatory legislation. So, methods of persisting and protesting went in different directions. At the same time, camera phones were pervasive and one of the only social media platforms that wasn’t banned in Iran was Instagram, a very visual platform. All of these elements come together to produce My Stealthy Freedom, which takes shape around women’s day-to-day lived oppression and experiences. Men become a big part of it, too. In some cases, men even donned the veil and posted pictures in support of women’s right to choose their own dress.
As the movement grows, it branches into different campaigns that evolve alongside the environment and state backlash. You get “White Wednesdays,” for example, which encourages women to don white veils every Wednesday in support of removing compulsory hijab laws. You also get “My Camera Is My Weapon,” which encourages women to record their experiences with harassment from morality police and religious zealots when “breaking the law.” As a way to reverse the patriarchal gaze, they record these instances and then share them on social media to make their harassers visible instead of them (given that women are typically at the center of the state’s surveillance efforts).
A lot of things were happening as this movement was taking off, but one element really stood out to me: images. They were becoming this very political thing, but no one was talking about them. The Black Lives Matter movement was also happening around the same time—another movement relying on social media pictures and videos to document abuse—but this visual element kept fading into the background in a lot of the analyses I was reading. This was really interesting to me and set the groundwork for my dissertation.
JW: That brings us up to your second phase with CSWS as our Jane Grant Fellow. Tell me what you’ve been doing, and what the fellowship has allowed you to do that you may not have been able to do otherwise.
PK: It’s amazing how everything unfolded and aligned so perfectly with me having received the Jane Grant award this year. The award freed me up from having to teach while working on my research, which I’m really grateful for, but it also coincided with what happened in Iran this last year, allowing me to focus more on that given its connections to my research.
Right around the start of the academic year last September, protests erupted across Iran following the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, for being improperly veiled. Women were at the center of these protests and women’s grievances (due to decades-long discrimination, violence, and harassment) were at its forefront, hence the movement’s slogan of “Women, Life, Freedom.”
While a lot of my Iranian colleagues in other departments were completely burned out and exhausted and didn’t understand how they could keep up with events, let alone process and grieve them, I was able to follow what was happening closely since I didn’t have that burden on me to teach. The movement also directly tied to my research on My Stealthy Freedom and women’s resistance efforts over the last several decades, so I felt like I was in a good position to speak on the movement and contextualize it, which is exactly what I did. I was able to write several public interest pieces1, which was really good for my career. These eventually led to speaking engagements in the US, Spain, and Lebanon—including at the United Nations’ 67th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women.
At the same time, I had just moved to Mexico City from Oregon—thanks to the grant, I didn’t have to be physically in Eugene to teach—and I speak Spanish. So, once I got here, I ended up being the Spanish-speaking source on all things involving Iran. I did a lot of media appearances just explaining what was happening in Iran to Spanish speakers. Also, because of all these different elements that came together, I got very involved in building an activist coalition in Mexico City, where it was really needed.
When you’re on the dissertation journey, people say just focus on the dissertation. But all of a sudden, there was no way that I could just isolate myself and do research. This is why I’m so grateful for the Jane Grant award—it set me up for everything that came after and, most importantly, gave me the luxury of time that most academics don’t have. I worked on my dissertation, wrote and spoke publicly about my research, got more involved in a topic I’m obviously very passionate about, and did it all from one of my favorite cities in the world. My research, career, and personal life benefited tremendously from the award.
JW: Why did you decide to move to Mexico City?
PK: Can you believe I had never even been to Mexico City until I moved here? I did my undergrad in Spain, and I really missed being in a Spanish-speaking country. I’m also a city girl at heart so it was a no-brainer once I got the award that I would leave Eugene for the academic year. But I have a big dog that I couldn’t bear putting through the journey of going back to Spain, which was my initial thought, so Mexico started to look very appealing.
I’ve always been enamored by Mexico and Mexican culture. I grew up in Oklahoma, which has a large Mexican population, and appreciated a lot of those influences in terms of community, language, music, and, of course, food! So, given that it checked off several items on my list, I thought, why not use this opportunity to move to Mexico City? I did, and I can’t believe how everything worked out so perfectly. The same week that I moved, I literally became the Spanish-speaking news person on the topic of Iran.
JW: So part of the way that the fellowship has helped your career is you’ve become a subject-matter expert in the news?
PK: Exactly. It was bizarre because I didn’t even know anybody.
JW: How did they find you?
PK: Maybe a week after I arrived, there was a global day of protest for the Iranian diaspora in support of the movement back home. I wasn’t sure whether a protest would be held in Mexico City, so I sought out Iranians and ended up getting connected to the community fairly quickly. At the protest, they were looking for people to interview, and once they figured out what I do for work and that I spoke Spanish, they said, we need to talk to you more.
JW: What other opportunities have opened up for you?
PK: One of the other big organizations that has supported my work is the American Political Science Association’s Middle East program (APSA-MENA). I worked with them to build on my interest in activism and bring that into academia. At the Arabic Council for the Social Sciences biannual conference in Beirut, which APSA-MENA supported, I organized and hosted a two-day workshop on activism and academia—what happened in the last year in Iran, what we were missing in academia, what solidarity efforts in the academy would look like, and how to create them. I also connected this issue to some of the backlash that we’ve seen in academia over the last couple of years with people being active on issues that they really care about, basically giving participants a space to feel comfortable discussing and connecting these two interests without the fear of being vilified.
People will disagree with me on this, but I think anyone who is an academic, whatever research you’re doing, you’re an activist. Obviously, there’s different gradations of what that activism looks like. But I think it’s silly for us to try to disconnect that part of us that is passionate about a topic, hence why we chose to study it, and say we don’t actually care about this in the real world. Our research has real-world implications, or that’s the hope anyway, right? So why not embrace this social and political world that we study in other ways, too?
JW: Given these trends you’ve been noticing with digital activism in relation to Iran that started with My Stealthy Freedom, have you been seeing similar kinds of digital activism in other parts of the world? Is this something that’s got a lot of momentum? And if so, why do you think that is the case?
PK: Part of my dissertation compares images in Iran—the ways that women use them in this very specific way—to the ways that movements in other parts of the world use social media or have used images in protest, like the Saudi women’s “Right2Drive” movement where women recorded themselves driving as a way to protest the female driving ban. I’m hoping in the future to extend my project to Black Lives Matter, because I also think that the visual element has been really important to that particular movement, or even to contrast it to other movements like #MeToo, where tweets and text-based content played a much bigger role than visuals. I want to explore why digital activism takes the form that it does and whether that’s based on the specific grievance, the context, or other factors.
Digital activism is only growing, which makes sense given that digital engagement is now a big part of our lives. For example, TikTok has become a very political platform despite presenting itself as a fun video-sharing site. Dr. Anita Weiss, who teaches in the International Studies department and who is also on my committee, told me about how young girls in Pakistan record TikTok videos with clear Feminist and political messages. But then when cornered by the authorities about this content, they use TikTok as a cover to say no, we’re just recording silly teenage videos. It’s interesting how these platforms get adopted in the ways that they do, how protest emerges through them in relation to the restrictions placed on freedom of expression, and, in some cases, how people still don’t take them all that seriously.
With my dissertation, I hope to show that using social media in these ways isn’t just social. Visual content has significant political weight, but we miss this aspect of it when we limit ourselves to just thinking about selfies and influencer videos as extensions of a self-absorbed culture. Protest can take shape through the taking and sharing of images. This content can also lay the groundwork for future street mobilizations like in Iran.
JW: How is your work contributing to a need that you might see in research on women and gender? Where is your work filling a gap that you see?
PK: Part of my research contributes to our understanding of the visual element in women’s mobilization. Digital images and videos are how Iranian women challenge patriarchy, but visuals are present in other movements, too, like the US women’s movement’s use of pussy hats to protest the election of Donald Trump or the Chilean women’s street performances of the song “A Rapist in your Path.” The visual component is present in a lot of feminist protest and is something I’m really interested in and contributing to with my research.
Another part pushes back against how women in the Middle East have traditionally been understood in the academy as meek and passive. I show how, despite the broader structures of oppression that they live under, women in the region enact resistance in very creative ways. They skillfully maneuver the barriers that they face and even, at times, incorporate those barriers into their protest (like in “My Camera Is My Weapon”). We can learn a lot from them.
Relatedly, I hope to add nuance to women’s experiences with oppression as it relates to authoritarianism. This is something that is really lacking in political science, even in studies focused on gender and sexuality. The field still seems to speak as if all women experience oppression in similar ways regardless of political context. It’s wonderful that intersectionality has greatly expanded our breath of knowledge, but I hope we can continue building on this theoretical lens through considerations for regime type. This is especially important now, given that the nature of these regimes is what makes research on women difficult. Rather than acquiesce, we should draw even more attention to this intersection.
JW: Sounds like you’ve been able to accomplish a lot during your fellowship year. How far along are you in your dissertation now?
PK: I plan to finish writing in the coming academic year, but my timeline is pretty job-market-dependent. If I find a job in the next year or so, then I will finish. If I don’t, I will push it into 2025. Either way, I was able to get a ton of writing done thanks to the Jane Grant award this past year and feel like I’m in a good place with my dissertation.
—Jenée Wilde is a senior instructor of English and research dissemination specialist for the Center.
Endnotes
1 “How Female Iranian Activists Use Powerful Images to Protest Oppressive Policies,” The Conversation, December 21, 2022; “From Digital Visual Activism to Mass Public Protest: The Role of Social Media Images and Videos in the 2022 Iranian Movement,” Mobilizing Ideas, October 27, 2022.