My dissertation project is titled “The Backbone of the Islamic Republic: Workers and the Politics of Labor in Iran.” Based on over two years of fieldwork in- and outside Iran, the dissertation traces the development of state-labor relations in post-revolutionary Iran to understand how US-led economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic have become associated with high levels of labor protest in the country.
It combines qualitative and quantitative methods to contribute to our understanding of how revolution, war-making, and class politics shape authoritarian regimes; and how hydrocarbon rents impact work and workers.
My PhD project has received generous financial support from a number of organisations, including the Social Science Research Council, the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute, the UCLA Department of Sociology, the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, the Bourse and Bazaar Foundation, and the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford University.
Beyond labor, I am also interested in how states in the Middle East navigate climate change, drought, and the energy transition. As Bourse and Bazaar Fellow, I wrote a short piece analysing distributional conflict around water in Iran.