Passionate Uprisings

Passionate Uprisings
Author: Pardis Mahdavi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2019-10-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1503627098

There is perhaps no place in the world today where the stakes of partying and having sex are higher than in present-day Iran. Drinking and dancing can lead to arrest by the morality police and a punishment of up to 70 lashes. Consequences for sex outside of marriage can be even more severe—up to 84 lashes, or even public execution. But even under the threat of such harsh punishment, a sexual revolution is taking place. Iranian youth continually risk personal safety to meet friends, date, and, ultimately, to have sex. In the absence of any option for overt political dissent, young people have become part of a self-proclaimed revolution in which they are using their bodies to make social and political statements. Sex has become both a source of freedom and an act of political rebellion. With unprecedented access inside turn-of-the century Iran, Pardis Mahdavi offers a firsthand look at the daily lives of Iranian youth. They are given a voice as she tells the stories of their intertwined quests for sexual freedom, political reform, and a better future—but not a future without risk. The sexual revolution is also leading to increased levels of abortion, HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, and ongoing emotional troubles and mental illnesses, with worrying implications for Iranian youth and Iranian society at large. Passionate Uprisings is a fascinating, ground-breaking, and personal look into a society that is poorly understood—if it is understood at all—by the majority of Westerners today. Mahdavi's narrative provides not only an invaluable insight into the real lives of much of Iran's population, but shows how sexual politics and the youth culture could even destabilize the current regime and change the course of Iranian politics.

Passionate Uprisings

Passionate Uprisings
Author: Pardis Mahdavi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2009
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804758565

Investigates the emerging, new sexual culture of Iranian youth, in which sexuality represents freedom and engaging in sex can be considered political activism.

Passionate Uprisings

Passionate Uprisings
Author: Pardis Mahdavi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2009
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780804758574

Investigates the emerging, new sexual culture of Iranian youth, in which sexuality represents freedom and engaging in sex can be considered political activism.

A Surplus of Memory

A Surplus of Memory
Author: Yitzhak ("Antek") Zuckerman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 669
Release: 2023-09-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0520912594

In 1943, against utterly hopeless odds, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up to defy the Nazi horror machine that had set out to exterminate them. One of the leaders of the Jewish Fighting Organization, which led the uprisings, was Yitzhak Zuckerman, known by his underground pseudonym, Antek. Decades later, living in Israel, Antek dictated his memoirs. The Hebrew publication of Those Seven Years: 1939-1946 was a major event in the historiography of the Holocaust, and now Antek's memoirs are available in English. Unlike Holocaust books that focus on the annihilation of European Jews, Antek's account is of the daily struggle to maintain human dignity under the most dreadful conditions. His passionate, involved testimony, which combines detail, authenticity, and gripping immediacy, has unique historical importance. The memoirs situate the ghetto and the resistance in the social and political context that preceded them, when prewar Zionist and Socialist youth movements were gradually forged into what became the first significant armed resistance against the Nazis in all of occupied Europe. Antek also describes the activities of the resistance after the destruction of the ghetto, when 20,000 Jews hid in "Aryan" Warsaw and then participated in illegal immigration to Palestine after the war. The only extensive document by any Jewish resistance leader in Europe, Antek's book is central to understanding ghetto life and underground activities, Jewish resistance under the Nazis, and Polish-Jewish relations during and after the war. This extraordinary work is a fitting monument to the heroism of a people.

Hyphen

Hyphen
Author: Pardis Mahdavi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2021-06-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501373919

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. To hyphenate or not to hyphenate has been a central point of controversy since before the imprinting of the first Gutenberg Bible. And yet, the hyphen has persisted, bringing and bridging new words and concepts. Hyphen follows the story of the hyphen from antiquity-"Hyphen” is derived from an ancient Greek word meaning “to tie together” -to the present, but also uncovers the politics of the hyphen and the role it plays in creating identities. The journey of this humble piece of connective punctuation reveals the quiet power of an orthographic concept to speak to the travails of hyphenated individuals all over the world. Hyphen is ultimately a compelling story about the powerful ways that language and identity intertwine. Mahdavi-herself a hyphenated Iranian-American-weaves in her own experiences struggling to find a sense of self amidst feelings of betwixt and between. Through stories of the author and three other individuals, Hyphen collectively considers how to navigate, articulate, and empower new identities. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Gridlock

Gridlock
Author: Pardis Mahdavi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2011-04-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804777500

The images of human trafficking are all too often reduced to media tales of helpless young women taken by heavily accented, dark-skinned captors—but the reality is a far cry from this stereotype. In the Middle East, Dubai has been accused of being a hotbed of trafficking. Pardis Mahdavi, however, draws a more complicated and more personal picture of this city filled with migrants. Not all migrant workers are trapped, tricked, and abused. Like anyone else, they make choices to better their lives, though the risk of ending up in bad situations is high. Legislators hoping to combat human trafficking focus heavily on women and sex work, but there is real potential for abuse of both male and female migrants in a variety of areas of employment—whether on the street, in a field, at a restaurant, or at someone's house. Gridlock explores how migrants' actual experiences in Dubai contrast with the typical discussions—and global moral panic—about human trafficking. Mahdavi powerfully contrasts migrants' own stories with interviews with U.S. policy makers, revealing the gaping disconnect between policies on human trafficking and the realities of forced labor and migration in the Persian Gulf. To work toward solving this global problem, we need to be honest about what trafficking is—and is not—and to finally get past the stereotypes about trafficked persons so we can really understand the challenges migrant workers are living through every day.

New World Coming

New World Coming
Author: Alastair Lee Bitsóí
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-11-02
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1948814544

"Different voices in New World Coming tell powerful stories of loss and difficulty plus messages of hope and promise for all as we seek a healing future for the earth and each other." —REGINA LOPEZ-WHITESKUNK (Ute Mountain Ute), contributor to Edge of Morning: Native Voices Speak for the Bears Ears New World Coming documents the distinct moment through personal narratives and intergenerational imaginings of a just, healthy, and equitable future. Writers reflect on what movements for justice and liberation can learn from the response to COVID–19, uprisings for Black lives, and climate crisis, through essays and poems that inspire and generate the change we need to survive and thrive. ALASTAIR LEE BITSÓÍ (Diné) is a public health and environmental writer from the Navajo Nation. He is an award–winning news reporter for the Navajo Times, and served as communications director for the Indigenous–led land conservation nonprofit, Utah Diné Bikéyah, which continues advocacy for protection and restoration of Bears Ears National Monument. His newly launched consulting business, Near the Water Communications and Media Group, provides public health messaging services for organizations. He holds a master's degree in public health from New York University College of Global Public Health, and is an alumnus of Gonzaga University. BROOKE LARSEN is a writer and community organizer. She has an MA in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah and was the recipient of the High Country News Bell Prize for emerging writers. Brooke has spent the past decade organizing with the climate justice movement. She co–founded Uplift, a youth–led organization for climate justice in the Southwest, and was a youth delegate to the UN Climate Change Conference in 2016 with SustainUS. Brooke resides and grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, ancestral land of the Goshute, Shoshone, and Ute people.

Days of Revolution

Days of Revolution
Author: Mary Elaine Hegland
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2013-10-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804788855

Outside of Shiraz in the Fars Province of southwestern Iran lies "Aliabad." Mary Hegland arrived in this then-small agricultural village of several thousand people in the summer of 1978, unaware of the momentous changes that would sweep this town and this country in the months ahead. She became the only American researcher to witness the Islamic Revolution firsthand over her eighteen-month stay. Days of Revolution offers an insider's view of how regular people were drawn into, experienced, and influenced the 1979 Revolution and its aftermath. Conventional wisdom assumes Shi'a religious ideology fueled the revolutionary movement. But Hegland counters that the Revolution spread through much more pragmatic concerns: growing inequality, lack of development and employment opportunities, government corruption. Local expectations of leaders and the political process—expectations developed from their experience with traditional kinship-based factions—guided local villagers' attitudes and decision-making, and they often adopted the religious justifications for Revolution only after joining the uprising. Sharing stories of conflict and revolution alongside in-depth interviews, the book sheds new light on this critical historical moment. Returning to Aliabad decades later, Days of Revolution closes with a view of the village and revolution thirty years on. Over the course of several visits between 2003 and 2008, Mary Hegland investigates the lasting effects of the Revolution on the local political factions and in individual lives. As Iran remains front-page news, this intimate look at the country's recent history and its people has never been more timely or critical for understanding the critical interplay of local and global politics in Iran.

Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising

Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising
Author: Robert Gooding-Williams
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2013-10-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1135207224

Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising keeps the public debate alive by exploring the connections between the Rodney King incidents and the ordinary workings of cultural, political, and economic power in contemporary America. Its recurrent theme is the continuing, complicated significance of race in American society. Contributors: Houston A. Baker, Jr.; Judith Butler; Sumi K. Cho; Kimberle Crenshaw; Mike Davis; Thomas L. Dumm; Walter C. Farrell, Jr.; Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Ruth Wilson Gilmore; Robert Gooding-Williams; James H. Johnson, Jr.; Elaine H. Kim; Melvin L. Oliver; Michael Omi; Gary Peller; Cedric J. Robinson; Jerry Watts; Cornel West; Patricia Williams; Rhonda M. Williams; Howard Winant.