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.

Resisting Extortion

Criminal extortion is an understudied, but widespread and severe problem in Latin America. In states that cannot or choose not to uphold the rule of law, victims are often seen as helpless in the face of powerful criminals. However, even under such difficult circumstances, victims resist criminal extortion in surprisingly different ways. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in violent localities in Colombia, El Salvador and Mexico, Moncada weaves together interviews, focus groups, and participatory drawing exercises to explain why victims pursue distinct strategies to resist criminal extortion. The analysis traces and compares processes that lead to individual acts of everyday resistance; sporadic killings by ad hoc groups of victims and police; institutionalized and sustained collective vigilantism; and coordination between victims and states to co-produce order in ways that both strengthen and undermine the rule of law. This book offers valuable new insights into the broader politics of crime and the state.

Reading Tradition in Food: An Interdisciplinary Study of Bengali Food Writing

Food Studies has been a prominent part of Interdisciplinary Studies in the West from the 1980s and it is catching up in India as well. A close study of recipes and other forms of food writing can offer insights into the everyday culinary negotiations and the constitution of a cultural ‘tradition’ of taste. These insights of gastropolitics may help us better understand the functioning of subliminal hegemonic technologies and everyday resistance to the same. In our era of postcolonial globalization, where domination and subjugation happen through micro-politics of power, our readings of food writing may open new doors of reading and theorizing heritage and history.

Forms and Ethics of Baloch Midwifery

In Pakistan, the rise of unnecessary uterotonic injections to induce childbirth, sometimes also resulting in hysterectomies, has women returning to dhīnabogs (Baloch midwives) to heal the iatrogenic effects of biomedical interventions; and reinforcing local assumptions about the benefits of Balochi dhawā/medicine, dhīnabogiri or midwifery, and homebirths. Drawing on ethnographic research in Balochistan the chapter traces how dhīnabogs’ work, ethical stances, and critical outlook concerning the iatrogenic effects of biomedical interventions are non-oppositional forms of everyday resistance. The protective role of dhīnabogiri is embedded in the intimate aspects of childbirth that profoundly structure the ethical relationship between the labouring woman and her dhīnabog. This relationship is defined not only by dhīnabogs’ concern for the well-being of mother and child, but also by their character and ethics, which are inscribed in the vernacular and social authorized praxis of dhīnabogs , kawwās (expert midwives) and balluk (granny midwives).

Aid micropolitics: Everyday southern resistance to racialized and geographical assumptions of expertise

Aid partnerships between global north and global south institutions are critiqued for maintaining colonial knowledge politics and restricting the participation of southern development experts. This paper draws on lifework interviews with senior civil servants within the Antigua and Barbuda government to explore how southern development experts subvert the development hierarchies that permeate partnership micropolitics. The paper first reveals how southern development experts draw on their experiences and normative discourses of ‘local knowledge’ to dismantle assumptions that whiteness and ‘westerness’ symbolise expertise in partnerships. Second, southern development experts engage in small-scale acts of everyday resistance to assert their expertise and decentre the authority and knowledge of foreign consultants. Everyday resistance allows this paper to reveal southern experts’ personal agency and subtle forms of resistance, which Foucauldian analyses of power and ‘spectacular’ theories of resistance are unequipped to recognise. I suggest that the racialised and geographic hierarchies, which structure power and privilege in the micro-level encounters between donors and beneficiaries are not as entrenched as we may think.

Documenting the Everyday Hidden Resistance of Ride-Hailing Platform Drivers to Algorithmic Management in Lagos, Nigeria

Ride-hailing platforms such as Uber, an integral component in the global platform economy, are not only facilitating fluidity and so-called autonomy of labor; they are also creating an unfair working environment for workers. This phenomenon indicates the strength of a highly temporal and mobile capital, pitted against workers not just in Lagos but around the world. This article adopts James Scott’s notion of everyday resistance in exposing some of the hidden practices of platform drivers in Lagos. It finds that sabotaging and falsely complying through manipulating algorithms and gaming spaces for rewards are facilitated by social media and communication networks, are deliberate, hidden practices to subvert algorithmic control. While Lagos is a unique case in the global South, examples from global North cities highlight some peculiarity. A robust qualitative methodology was conducted comprising semistructured interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observations from forty Uber and Bolt trips. Other primary data sources include driver forums, attending driver training sessions and listening to transport radio programs. This article identifies temporal and spatial dynamics in recognizing everyday hidden practices as not always hidden, but dispersed and inconsistent because of the mutual learning capabilities between platform drivers and algorithmic managers. The hidden transcripts of platform drivers delve into public realms and back following, enabling platform drivers to develop new hidden practices, typifying a continuous power struggle in Lagos.