Feminist counter-geopolitics: knowledges, practices, and spaces of activism in Iranian diasporas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the face of growing state authoritarianism, particularly targeting feminist and women’s rights activists in Iran and forcing many to leave the country, the question of whether and how feminist activism outside the country’s national border negotiates and contests political structures of gendered violence and displacement is of growing importance. This dissertation explores how knowledges, practices, and spaces of activism in Iranian diasporas across selected European and Canadian cities create alternatives to state political structures. The present research was conducted between December 2021 and June 2023 and employed different qualitative research methods, including semi-structured interviews with 39 activists, academics, artists, policymakers, and diaspora community members whose work intersects with feminism, women’s rights, and gender-based violence. I draw upon the concept of feminist counter-geopolitics, discussing what knowledges, practices, and spaces constitute them. By focusing on feminist activist experiences as the focal point of analysis, the dissertation questions the lack of attention to activism in diaspora in critical, feminist, and urban geopolitics. I examine how activist knowledge of gender and sexual-based violence changes as they cross national borders and illustrate the challenges and opportunities of translating knowledge in a transnational context. Despite significant obstacles in materializing these knowledges such as economic hardships, political kinships among activists provide important sources of material and emotional support for activists. Furthermore, I show how, despite the dominant logic of Iranian nationalism, transnational solidarities among activists in diasporas resist such exclusionary discourses in the context of the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising. I discuss how such knowledges, practices, and spaces illustrate intimate geopolitics that challenge the state-centric understanding of geopolitics, pointing toward emancipatory aspects of feminist counter-geopolitics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".