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Investigates the emerging, new sexual culture of Iranian youth, in which sexuality represents freedom and engaging in sex can be considered political activism.
An activist and human-trafficking expert became her own case study when she feared her daughter was kidnapped by her ex-husband--she utilized illicit trade networks to smuggle herself across the globe to save her, igniting a feminist movement. Pardis Mahdavi has always been caught between worlds, whether between the expectations of her Iranian-American family stuck in the 1970s versus the reality of living in Iran during the sexual revolution in the early 2000s; the demands of her traditional, controlling husband and the responsibility that came with her research into the globe's most vulnerable women; or the pipe dream of justice from a legal system that abandoned her in contrast to the eff...
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 fe...
A panic surrounds human trafficking and terrorism. The socially constructed 'war on terror’ and ‘war on trafficking’ are linked through discourses that not only combine the two, but help promote an anti-Muslim sentiment. Using ethnographic data and stories, From Trafficking to Terror presents the need to challenge the trafficking and terror paradigm, and rethink approaches to the large scale challenges these discourses have created. This book is ideal for courses on gender, labor, migration, human rights and globalization.
The lines between what constitutes migration and what constitutes human trafficking are messy at best. State policies rarely acknowledge the lived experiences of migrants, and too often the laws and policies meant to protect individuals ultimately increase the challenges faced by migrants and their kin. In some cases, the laws themselves lead to illegality or statelessness, particularly for migrant mothers and their children. Crossing the Gulf tells the stories of the intimate lives of migrants in the Gulf cities of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City. Pardis Mahdavi reveals the interconnections between migration and emotion, between family and state policy, and shows how migrants can be both mobilized and immobilized by their family relationships and the bonds of love they share across borders. The result is an absorbing and literally moving ethnography that illuminates the mutually reinforcing and constitutive forces that impact the lives of migrants and their loved ones—and how profoundly migrants are underserved by policies that more often lead to their illegality, statelessness, deportation, detention, and abuse than to their aid.
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 hy...
The untold story of generations of Middle Eastern freedom fighters—horsewomen who safeguarded an ancient breed of Caspian horse—and their efforts to defend their homelands from the Taliban and others seeking to destroy them. "A breathtaking book that revisits nearly one hundred years of Iranian history, highlighting the power and beauty of women who refuse to be subdued.” ―Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of A Woven World Book of Queens reaches back centuries to the Persian Empire and a woman disguised as a man, facing an invading army, protected only by light armor and the stallion she sat astride. Mahdavi draws a thread from past to present: from her fearless Iranian grandmother, wh...
Migrant Encounters examines what happens when migrants across Asia encounter the restrictions and opportunities presented by state actors and policies. Contributions draw on original ethnographic work foregrounding migrants' intimate lives to argue that such encounters unpredictably transform migrants and the states between which they move.
Prospect Top 50 Thinker of 2021 British Academy Book Prize Finalist PROSE Award Finalist “Provocative, elegantly written.” —Fara Dabhoiwala, New York Review of Books “Demonstrates how a broad rethinking of political issues becomes possible when Western ideals and practices are examined from the vantage point of Asia and Africa.” —Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of Books In case after case around the globe—from Israel to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The model emerged in America, where genocide and internment on reservations crea...
Gridlock explores how migrant workers' actual experiences in Dubai contrast with the typical discussions—and global moral panic—about human trafficking.