Research and Publication
I have long been interested in a central sociological and feminist question: how do social actors—particularly women and the youth—generate change even under profound structural constraints? My research examines how collective action unsettles dominant social orders and how opportunities for transformation emerge, or are foreclosed, through structural, cultural, and infrastructural conditions. Drawing on social movement theories, historical sociology, transnational and decolonial feminist theories, youth and generational studies, and multimethod qualitative research, including archival work, narrative and discourse analysis, and digital ethnography, I study everyday practices, narratives, and imaginaries that challenge and reconfigure what is possible under authoritarian and patriarchal rule. Across my projects, I show not only the constraints shaping women’s lives but also the creative and insurgent practices through which they expand the horizons of political possibility in Iran and the broader Middle East. Parts of this work appear in peer-reviewed journals including Social Forces, Critical Sociology, Gender & Development, Journal of Asian and African Studies, and Peuples Méditerranéens.
Doctoral Research
Dissertation: Gen Z Women of Iran: Living, Imagining, and Mobilizing in the Online–Offline Nexus
Committee: Asef Bayat (Chair), Ghassan Moussawi, Matthew Soener, Linda Herrera, and Faranak Miraftab
Over the past three years, my research has focused on how Generation Z youth in Iran, particularly women, navigate authoritarian constraints while crafting new forms of everyday life and political action. The project follows practices as they move between digital and physical arenas, showing how selectively public online spaces, embodied acts, and feminist friendship networks enable young people to imagine alternative “normal” lives and to scale dispersed micro-acts into collective presence. It also analyzes how youth leverage digital infrastructures and transnational connections to build parallel yet intertwined spaces of expression, care, and mobilization. These interactions generate and circulate counter-imaginaries of youth lifestyles, what a “normal life” could be, that diverge from official narratives and become blueprints for action. My project asks how such imaginaries are reshaped under conditions of repression, how they travel across digital and physical spaces, and how they inspire youth to act upon them in both everyday practices and moments of collective uprising. Methodologically, my dissertation draws on multi-sited digital ethnography, combining online interviews, social media analysis, and digital archival work, together with oral histories and long-term engagement with Iranian society and its diaspora. This enables me to trace how performances, discourses, and symbols circulate across online and offline domains, connecting neighborhoods in Iran with transnational networks of solidarity. Through this approach, my dissertation illuminates how Gen Z, particularly women, reconfigure imaginaries of normal life and mobilize against gendered and political domination, while also contributing to broader debates on transnational feminist movements, digital activism, embodiment and affect, and social change.
In my article in Social Forces (2025), “Fractal Scaling of Feminist Politics and the Emergence of the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement in Iran,” I trace women’s resistance and feminist struggles in Iran, with particular attention to the post-1979 period, across the shifting terrains of everyday life—from small domestic gatherings and underground networks to digital spheres, transnational solidarities, and mass street mobilizations. Introducing the concept of fractal scaling, the paper shows how feminist politics grow recursively and multidirectionally, as dispersed small acts resonate, connect, and expand across spatial, temporal, and digital domains. I argue that continuity and rupture are not opposing forces but mutually constitutive dynamics that sustain activism under authoritarian constraint, and it highlights feminist friendship networks as the affective and relational infrastructure through which these dispersed acts reverberate and accumulate into broader movements. A shorter version of this paper was later invited for publication in Peuples Méditerranéens (May 2025) as “The Emergence of Woman, Life, Freedom: Feminist Friendship Networks and Fractal Forms of Resistance in Iran.”
In my piece in Critical Sociology (2025), “‘I’m the Common Pain; Dance with Me’: Fractality, Affect, and Embodiment in Circulation of Resistance” I examine how the dancing body becomes an insurgent archive, a living repository of intergenerational memory and feminist struggle. The article traces how embodied practices, especially dance, travel across online and offline spaces as repertoires of resistance, linking young women inside Iran with diasporic communities abroad and connecting the present movement to longer histories of feminist activism. In the aftermath of the violent suppression of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, dancers used their bodies as a form of protest, creating gestures and movements that carried political meaning even when formal avenues of resistance were shut down. By centering affect and embodiment, the article shows how resistance circulates not only through texts or slogans but through the very movements of the body, movements that sustain connection, memory, and emotional resonance across time and space. Theoretically, the piece develops an understanding of embodiment as both archive and relational practice, demonstrating how bodily actions generate shared memory and collective presence. It also introduces a notion of fractal embodiment, showing how embodied repertoires continually reappear and expand across different contexts of struggle.. (Photo caption: A young woman dancing in Azadi Square in Tehran during the WLF movement. Source: social media.)
My earlier research examined women’s everyday lives and forms of resistance in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran through historical sociology, decolonial feminist theory, and postcolonial critique. I analyzed how women actively negotiated social, spatial, and moral constraints, particularly within expanding urban landscapes. My collaboration with the Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran project at Harvard University further deepened my understanding of women’s lives during this period. A part of this research titled “A Decolonial Inquiry into Women’s Agency in Urban Landscape in 19th Century Iran” appears in Gender & Development (2024), where I show how women’s practices in the Qajar era (1860s–1890) challenge Eurocentric historiography and reveal longer genealogies of resistance that resonate into the present. I ask why women’s everyday negotiations over expanding urban spaces remain absent from dominant historical accounts. From a decolonial feminist perspective, I argue that reconstructing women’s histories requires not only critiquing dominant representations but also recovering and reinterpreting local texts as alternative feminist knowledge formations.
A group of woman performers dressed in both women’s and men’s attire, late 19th century, Iran. Source: Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran
Building on this historical foundation, I turned to Iran before the 1979 Revolution. In my article “Ali Shariati and Crafting a Collective Islamic Revolutionary Identity for Women: A Socio-Historical Perspective“ in the Journal of Asian and African Studies (2023), I examined how religious women—often excluded from Marxist and nationalist discourses—were enabled to enter political life through Ali Shariati’s notion of revolutionary Islamic womanhood. By foregrounding Fatemeh, the daughter of the Prophet, as a model of resistance, Shariati created a discourse that filled a vacuum in the political landscape and offered religious women a legitimate revolutionary subjectivity. My analysis shows how this framework not only gave religious women new ways to participate in social movements but also reshaped gendered imaginaries in revolutionary Iran.
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
Moqadam, Mahbubeh. “Transnational Vernacular Feminist Activism: Mattering and Materializing Socioemotional Solidarity,” Sings: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, In press
Moqadam, Mahbubeh. “Fractal Scaling of Feminist Politics and the Emergence of Woman Life Freedom Movement in Iran,” Social Forces https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf050
Moqadam, Mahbubeh. “I’m the common pain; Dance with me”: Fractality, Affect, and Embodiment in Circulation of Resistance,” Critical Sociology https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205251359979
Moqadam, Mahbubeh. “A Decolonial Inquiry into Women’s Agency in Urban Landscape in 19th Century Iran”. Invited contribution to the special issue on Women in Public Spaces, Journal of Gender & Development https://doi.org/10.1080/13552074.2024.2357504
Moqadam, Mahbubeh. “Ali Shariati and Crafting a Collective Islamic Revolutionary Identity for Women: A Socio-Historical Perspective” Journal of Asian & African Studies
https://doi.org/10.1177/00219096231207891.
Courtney Carr, Deniz Berfin Aydin, Lydia Biggs, Renee Brown, Natalie Gallagher, Mahbubeh Moqadam, and Mahvish Nazar “Pandemic within a Pandemic (within a Pandemic): Unraveling a Pedagogy of Possibilities.” The RAACES Review:Racialized Academics and Advocates Centering Equity and Solidarity, Volume 2, Issue 1, pages 34-44. https://tinyurl.com/y6wr9pjv
Book Chapters in Progress
Moqadam, Mahbubeh. “Feminist Social Movements in Iran” Invited contribution to The Routledge Handbook of the Present Past: New Perspectives in Cultural and Historical Research to be published in 2027
Karimzad, Farzad, Mahbubeh Moqadam, “Nationalism and Diaspora: Textualities, Imaginaries, and Materialities,” Invited contribution to The Bloomsbury Handbook of Language and Nationalism to be published in 2027
Public Sociology (Selected)
“The use of dance as a form of protest, resistance in Iran” Research feature, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
UIUC News Bureau, https://tinyurl.com/hn3ppep6
UIUC Graduate College, https://tinyurl.com/4wew25dv
“The Emergence of Woman, Life, Freedom: Feminist Friendship Networks and Fractal Forms of Resistance in Iran” Peuples Méditerranéens https://tinyurl.com/3wh7bnyv
Ulusötesi feminist deneyimlerden süzülenler: “Ortak farklılıklarımız ortak paydalarımızdır” [What we distill from transnational feminist experiences: Our common differences are our shared grounds”]. Interview with Kaos GL Magazine: News portal for LGBTQI+, Turkeyhttps://tinyurl.com/2tzjbsnc
“Woman, Life, Freedom” Interview on 2022 Social Movement in Iran,Global and Transnational Sociology Newsletter, American Sociological Association (ASA) https://tinyurl.com/3tfn65n
“Khaharan-e Faramosh Shodeh [Forgotten Sisters]” (A Conversation with A Feminist Activist in Ankara: Women’s Movements in Iran and Turkey, Bidarzani: A Feminist Website, Iran https://bidarzani.com/30178/
“Goft o go ba Yeki az Fa‘alan-e Hoghough-e Zan-e Chap-gera dar Turkiye” (A Conversation with a Leftist Feminst Activist in Turkey: It Seems Pursuing Eastern Issues is Dangerous While Western Issues Are Harmless!)Bidarzani: A Feminist Website, Iran, https://bidarzani.com/30229/