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My dissertation project is titled Manufacturing Resilience: Labor Organizations and Labor Market Institutions in the Making of Modern Iran (1960-2020). Scholars expect sanctions, unemployment, and authoritarianism to weaken workers and labor movements. But in Iran, employees and professionals stage widespread protests. These labor protests have put significant pressure on authorities to concede social rights, protect government spending, and maintain economic output.
My dissertation addresses this puzzle of labor contention and power in the Islamic Republic. Based on over two years of fieldwork conducted in- and outside Iran, the project combines qualitative and quantitative methods to show how workers have shaped the Iranian state across six decades of development, social upheaval, and international pressure. By exploring how labor organizations and labor market institutions structure markets and politics in the global South, the dissertation contributes to scholarly literatures on development, social movements, and authoritarianism.
My PhD project has received generous financial support from a number of organizations, including the Social Science Research Council, The Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute, UCLA Department of Sociology, UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, The Bourse and Bazaar Foundation, and the Oxford University Middle East Centre.
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I am also interested in how states in the developing world navigate climate change, drought, and the energy transition. As Bourse and Bazaar Fellow, I wrote a short piece analyzing water politics in Iran.