Women and the Islamic Republic

Based on extensive interviews and oral histories as well as archival sources, Women and the Islamic Republic challenges the dominant masculine theorizations of state-making in post-revolutionary Iran. Shirin Saeidi demonstrates that despite the Islamic Republic's non-democratic structures, multiple forms of citizenship have developed in post-revolutionary Iran. This finding destabilizes the binary formulation of democratization and authoritarianism which has not only dominated investigations of Iran, but also regime categorizations in political science more broadly. As non-elite Iranian women negotiate or engage with the state's gendered citizenry regime, the Islamic Republic is forced to remake, oftentimes haphazardly, its citizenry agenda. The book demonstrates how women remake their rights, responsibilities, and statuses during everyday life to condition the state-making process in Iran, showing women's everyday resistance to the state-making process.

Survey Forms for Data Collection

Data collection is done through various methods including but not limited to surveys, interviews, observations, document analysis, focus groups, and oral histories. Each of these methods employs data gathering tools in order to facilitate the collection of information or data. In this section, the survey method, particularly the survey instrument or survey form, is discussed. Specifically, this chapter will focus on the fundamental factors to consider when developing the form to ensure coming up with relevant, unbiased, and focused questions, which will yield relevant and appropriate answers. In addition, considerations to take into account for proper administration of a survey form will be covered as well as the guidelines for a better and more accurate interpretation of survey data.

Inner-city possibilities: using place and space to facilitate inter-ethnic dating and romance in 1960s–1980s Leicester

Applying a spatial lens to the oral histories of heterosexual women who had intercultural romantic relationships in Leicester from the 1960s to the 1980s provides an alternative perspective on their experiences. This article examines these women's movements into and around the inner city, eliciting discussion about the concept of ‘safe’ places and spaces and the factors that determined the transient nature of these spaces. It illustrates opportunities created for intercultural mixing, away from familial gaze and public hostility. Utilizing such spaces to develop and sustain their relationships reveals a previously unacknowledged female agency that also enabled an ‘everyday multiculturalism’ in the British city.

Remembering Desirable Futures? Civil Defence Memories and Everyday Life in Sweden and the UK

This chapter explores how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can be used to examine civil defence as remembered. In focus stand oral histories testifying to the entanglement of civil defence in everyday life. The chapter employs a historical ethnography approach, using interviews and questionnaires collected between 2006 and 2012 in Sweden and the UK. The analysis, which departs from the three themes of localities, temporalities and mediations, illustrates the value of a more ‘bottom-up’ approach and discusses how we may refine the sociotechnical imaginaries framework to incorporate at least some elements of the ‘fuzziness’ of everyday life. It shows how elements of everyday culture relate to processes of embedding, resistance and extension of civil defence in Sweden, the UK and beyond.

Jotería Listening

This essay is a mapping of Latinx queer listening practices and spaces, such as bars and restaurants, as forms of resistance to gentrification in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Using a framework called “joteria listening,” and following the route of a performance event and ritual called LA Queer Posada in 2011, the author charts a sonic trail composed of sounds, songs, and memories of places and people in Silver Lake displaced by gentrification and historical erasure. Drawing from sound studies, performance studies and joteria studies, and using oral histories, interviews, archival sources, and ethnography, this essay offers innovative ways to think of queer Latinx sound and space as it adds layers to the palimpsestic map of Silver Lake and beyond. While listening to urban hauntings, sounds of loss, celebration and resistance, it offers new ways of remembering, performing and imagining community, futurity, and a more just world.