Sahar Maranlou is a lecturer at School of Law, University of Essex, UK. She is a socio- legal academic, specialising in access to justice, legal empowerment, gender, Islamic Law and Iranian legal system. Her monograph ‘Access to Justice in Iran: Women, Perceptions, and Reality (Cambridge University Press, 2015) looks at access to justice, gender, public perceptions and legal empowerment in Iran.

Talk title: Hijab Law Reform. The aim of this talk is to present a short investigation of hijab law by focusing on the state policy and public perceptions pertaining to mandatory hijab and its justification/opposition on social media. It examines the recent online against compulsory hijab calling for a change in the law and provides an analysis of twitter hashtag #mahsa_amini to discuss perceptions of gender equality and law reform on social media.

Naghmeh Sohrabi is the Charles (Corky) Goodman professor of Middle East History and the Director for Research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. She is working on a book about the revolutionary generation in Iran tentatively titled The Intimate Lives of a Revolution: Iran 1979. She has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Academy in Berlin and her work on the 1979 revolution has been published in History Compass, International Journal for Middle East Studies, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. She is a co-host and editor for Counter/Argument: A Middle East Podcast.

Talk title: The Potency and the Oddity of "Revolution" in Iran

Pardis Asadi Zeidabadi completed PhD in Sociology at Newcastle University. Her PhD focused on exploring the Perspectives of Iranian Feminists and Women Activists on their Political Identity and Priorities. She is a researcher and Visiting Lecturer at City, University of London.

Talk title: Iranian women's movement and democratisation".

Close to five months have passed since the death of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini in police custody sparked nation-wide protests in Iran. The women-led uprising has taken many twists and turns since. Although streets have been quieter in the past few weeks, the movement’s reverberations continue strong. This panel assesses the Woman, Life, Freedom movement five months after it started, by asking questions about the nature of the hijab law and its perceptions, the ties between women’s rights movements and democratisation, and the conception of revolution in the minds of protestors and its ramification in the real world. 

Moderator: Maryam Alemzadeh, St.Antony’s College

This workshop is jointly sponsored by the Middle East Centre, St.Antony’s College and Oxford School of Global and Area Studies