The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments THIS PROJECT, which is the culmination of almost two decades of thinking about human rights, has many inspirations. My first debt of gratitude is to the Iranian people who gave me their time, brought me into their homes, and shared with me the details of their lives. While in Iran, I had the opportunity to learn from amazing lawyers, professors, students, and literally hundreds of people. They offered me their stories, experiences, ideas and opinions generously, warmly, and hospitably; I can never justly recognize them by mere acknowledgment. This book is for them and would have been impossible without them. While I could never exhaust the list of people to whom I owe deep appreciation, I would like to thank my closest Iranian friends and advisors throughout this journey, Golnar Ebrahimi, Roshan Jaberi, Shahnaz Massoudi, S. Mowlaverdi, Reza Ansari-Rad, and Parvaneh Assadi. This list extends to my relatives who encouraged and supported my research, including my amazing grandmother , Nayereh Assadi, whose incomparable storytelling my words barely capture. At the outset, my ideas about women’s rights in Iran were shaped by the dynamic law professors at Washington College of Law, American University , especially Joan Williams and Jamie Boyle, who first introduced me to the critical conceptual issues in legal theory. Tom Farer introduced me to the complex legal issues in international human rights law and advocacy. All encouraged further critical inquiry into the fields of human rights production. Richard J. Wilson, as the founding director of WCL’s International Human Rights Law Clinic, paved the way for my legal practice as he trained us with the intense passion for human rights that he brought into every meeting, to every case. Integrity and professional ethics are crucial in human rights practice; I deeply admire human rights lawyers Christine Brigagliano and Marc Van Der Hout for their zealous advocacy of the human rights of immigrants and refugees. They are as ethical in real life as in the courtroom. I thank them for their inspiration, guidance, and friendship, not just for having given me the opportunity to work with them. At Stanford University, I had the gift of a vibrant intellectual community , which began with a graduate cohort that has developed into a lasting intellectual community of transcontinental colleagues, especially Aradhana Sharma, Kathleen Coll, Monica DeHart, and Mei Zhan. My apprenticeship at Stanford was fortified through the guidance of Carol xviii • Acknowledgments Delaney, Sylvia Yanagisako, Paulla Ebron, and Joel Beinin. My advisor, Carol Delaney, was especially instrumental in encouraging this project in Iran when it seemed almost impossible to pull off. During 2001–02 I was a Geballe Dissertation Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. There I began to develop the raw data from my fieldwork. Under the stewardship of Thomas Bender, the SHC community was especially supportive during a troubling post-9/11 year for all. At the University of Washington, I had a supportive intellectual community with colleagues in anthropology, including Celia Lowe, Ann Anagnost, Lorna Rhodes, Janelle Taylor, Laada Bilaniuk, Danny Hoffman , Mimi Kahn, and Charles Keyes. Colleagues in the Law, Societies and Justice Program created a scholarly community with a weekly workshare group that benefited my thinking enormously and included Michael W. McCann, Steve Herbert, Angelina Godoy, Jamie Mayerfeld, Katherine Beckett, Rachel Cichowski, Gad Barzalai, and George Lovell. Other colleagues at UW, including Donald Gilbert-Santamaria, Cabeiri deBergh Robinson, and Jonathan Brown, provided intellectual, practical, and diversionary sustenance. I thank my research assistant, Cade Cannon, for finding those elusive citations. I especially thank Mona Atia for deep critical engagement with the overall project and the finite details of the argument. In 2005–6 I was a Fellow at New York University’s International Center for Advanced Studies, where I completed the first draft of this book. There I was fortunate enough to meet scholars I had long admired— especially Timothy Mitchell, Nivedita Menon, Alexei Yurchak, and Michel Callon—and met wonderful scholars such as Leshu Torchin, Valdimar Hafstein, Tavia Nyong’o, Ilana Feldman, Munir Fakher Eldin, Forrest Hylton, and Jangam Chinnaiah, who brought sustained, invaluable engagement. Along the way, I have had the opportunity to gain insights from an array of scholars, including Sally Merry, Lila Abu-Lughod, Michael Fischer , Nikki Keddie, Mary Hegland, Ahmad Dallal, and Richard Roberts, all of whom have offered advice, critique, and encouragement. Their work has influenced my own. Due to U.S. government sanctions against Iran since 1996, funding for this research has been scarce and limited. I...