P Mahdavi
Biographic Data
| ID | 42899 |
|---|---|
| NAME | P Mahdavi |
| GIVEN NAMES | P |
| FAMILY NAME | Mahdavi |
| SIGNATURE | MAHDAVI P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pomona College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2446-4059 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 48 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Ethnographic methods: Training norms and practices and the future of American anthropology
American anthropology is engaged in significant self-reckonings that call for big changes to how anthropology is practiced. These include (1) recognizing and taking seriously the demands to decolonize the ways research is done, (2) addressing precarious employment in academic anthropology, and (3) creating a discipline better positioned to respond to urgent societal needs. A central role for ethnographic methods training is a thread that runs thr…
Ethnographic Methods Training Norms and Practices and the Future of American Anthropology
American Anthropology is engaged in significant self-reckonings that call for big changes to how anthropology is practiced. These include (1) recognizing and taking seriously the demands to decolonize the ways research is done; (2) addressing precarious employment in academic anthropology; and (3) creating a discipline better positioned to respond to urgent societal needs. A central role for ethnographic methods training is a thread that runs thr…
Teaching Ethnographic Methods: The State of the Art
Ethnography is a core methodology in anthropology and other disciplines. Yet, there is currently no scholarly consensus on how to teach ethnographic methods—or even what methods belong in the ethnographic toolkit. We report on a systematic analysis of syllabi to gauge how ethnographic methods are taught in the United States. We analyze 107 methods syllabi from a nationally elicited sample of university faculty who teach ethnography. Systematic co…
Teaching Ethnographic Methods for Cultural Anthropology: Current Practices and Needed Innovation
Historically, ethnographic methods were learned by cultural anthropology students in individual research projects. This approach creates challenges for teaching in ways that respond to the next generation’s calls to decenter anthropology’s White, heteropatriarchal voices and engage in collaborative community-based research. Analyzing syllabi from 107 ethnographic methods training courses from the United States, we find the tradition of the “lone …
Contractually Sterilized: Migrant Mothers and Carceral Politics in the Gulf Coast Cooperation (GCC) Countries
Migration to the Gulf Countries of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait has become increasingly feminized in the past two decades. Women make up the majority of migrants to the Gulf, and while they often migrate during their most fertile reproductive years while they labor in the Gulf, they are prohibited by contract from becoming pregnant—leading to a situation of what I call “contractual sterilization.” The purpose of this essay is twofold…
Transformations and Mobilizations
Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives
Stigma, pandemics, and human biology: Looking back, looking forward
The personal politics of private life in the United Arab Emirates (UAE): Sexualities, space, migration and identity politics in motion
Activism on sexuality and sexual politics in South and West Asia has been increasing in the last two decades, resulting in challenges and opportunities to negotiate sexual subjectivity, intimacy and politics. But some people articulate a desire to disentangle sexual politics from identity politics. Against this background, a two-pronged investigation of the intersections of sexuality and migration was conducted in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) w…
Contract Workers, Risk, and the War in Iraq: Sierra Leonean Labor Migrants at U.S. Military Bases
Seduction and the self: Movements through precarity, race and sexuality in Japanese host clubs
In this article, I build on the notion of precarity to argue that Japanese host clubs are sites in which a particular kind of intimacy and sense of 'belonging' are produced. The analysis highlights host clubs as necessary spaces among many in the precarious economy and as important venues for the production of subjectivity for the male hosts (both migrant and Japanese) as well as for the migrant women who frequent these establishments. In particu…
Migrating in the Era of Human Trafficking
Since the year 2000, a global 'anti-trafficking' discourse has emerged that has taken centre stage in conversations about migration and migrants' lives. In particular, 'human trafficking' as a framework for understanding migration has eclipsed the complexities and realities of challenges and opportunities experienced by migrants living and working abroad.1 The human trafficking discourse and its attendant responses seek to categorise migrants not…
Love, Motherhood and Migration: Regulating Migrant Women's Sexualities in the Persian Gulf
This article looks at the confluence of love, labour and the law by focusing on the regulation of migrant women's sexualities in the Gulf Coast Cooperation countries of the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. Migrant women increasingly comprise the majority of migrants to the region as the demand for intimate labour in the Persian Gulf is on the rise. But migrant women who become pregnant while in the Persian Gulf are immediately imprisoned and char…
Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora
Book Review| March 01 2014 Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Rana, Junaid. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011 240 pp., $84.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper) Pardis Mahdavi Pardis Mahdavi Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2014) 11 (1): 136–137. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2385471 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Pe…
Trafficking” Parenting: Migration, Motherhood, Forced Labor and Deportability in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)
The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to look at how parenthood can often place or keep migrant women in situations of force, fraud, or coercion that characterize human trafficking; and, second, to look at how becoming a parent (or the possibility of reproducing) while in the host country structures a discourse and series of actions that can lead migrant women into trafficking-like situations of becoming undocumented and illegal, being detaine…
Gender, labour and the law: The nexus of domestic work, human trafficking and the informal economy in the United Arab Emirates
Based on ethnographic fieldwork with female migrants in the United Arab Emirates, the focus of this article is on the confluence of human trafficking discourses, gendered migration, domestic work and sex work in the UAE. I explore three main findings. First, domestic work and sex work are not mutually exclusive. Second, women choose to enter sex work in preference to domestic work because of poor working conditions in the latter. Third, global po…
Questioning the global gays(ze): Constructions of sexual identities in post-revolution Iran
This paper seeks to question the global discursivity about sexual politics in Iran while examining ways in which the discourse constructed about sexuality in Iran (by those outside Iran) contrasts with lived experiences and actual narratives of young Tehranis as they speak about their own sexual identities. The author begins by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2000 and 2007 with young people (ages 18–30) in urban Tehran and Mas…
Questioning the Discursive Construction of Trafficking and Forced Labor in the United Arab Emirates
This paper investigates interactions between issues of labor, gender, sexuality, migration, and statehood through the lens of Dubai’s unskilled foreign migrant workers. Using ethnographic research methods, including participant observation and in-depth interviews, this paper explores the conflation of discourses on trafficking, migration, and sex work through migrants’ narratives. The study is organized around three central questions: 1) What are…
Rethinking Intimate Labor through Inter-Asian Migrations: Insights from the 2011 Bellagio Conference
But We Can Always Get More!” Deportability, the State and Gendered Migration in the United Arab Emirates
This paper focuses on the politics of states and inter-state relations, and their role in creating environments of deportability and expendability that structure trafficking-like situations for female migrant workers engaged in the sphere of intimate labor 1 in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). States have played a major part in structuring the politics of deportability, a very real, present force affecting experiences of forced labor in Dubai, as …
Race, space, place: Notes on the racialisation and spatialisation of commercial sex work in Dubai, UAE
This paper focuses on the perceived racialisation and resultant spatialisation of commercial sex in Dubai. In recent years, the sex industry in Dubai has grown to include women from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, East Asia and Africa. With the increase in sex workers of different nationalities has come a form of localised racism that is embedded in structures and desires seen within specific locations. The physical spatialisation of sex work hi…
Introduction: Trade and Traffic in the Persianate World
Research Article| December 01 2010 Introduction: Trade and Traffic in the Persianate World Pardis Mahdavi; Pardis Mahdavi Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Arash Khazeni Arash Khazeni Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2010) 30 (3): 398–400. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-2010-022 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Se…
The “Trafficking” of Persians: Labor, Migration, and Traffic in Dubayy
Around the world today, we are experiencing what scholars call a “feminization of migration,” which coincides with a global panic about human trafficking and distorts the messy realities of forced labor, migration, and sex work. In the Middle East, Dubayy has become the center for the migration of many Iranian women moving into the informal economy of sex work. In this essay, I argue that the disjuncture between paradigms of Iranian women's sexua…
Hollow Bodies: Institutional Responses to Sex Trafficking in Armenia, Bosnia and India by Susan Dewey
Transgressive Sex: Subversion and Control in Erotic Encounters edited by Hastings Donnan and Fiona Magowan
Questioning the Discursive Construction of Trafficking and Forced Labor in the United Arab Emirates
This paper investigates interactions between issues of labor, gender, sexuality, migration, and statehood through the lens of Dubai’s unskilled foreign migrant workers. Using ethnographic research methods, including participant observation and in-depth interviews, this paper explores the conflation of discourses on trafficking, migration, and sex work through migrants’ narratives. The study is organized around three central questions: 1) What are…
Gender, labour and the law: The nexus of domestic work, human trafficking and the informal economy in the United Arab Emirates
Based on ethnographic fieldwork with female migrants in the United Arab Emirates, the focus of this article is on the confluence of human trafficking discourses, gendered migration, domestic work and sex work in the UAE. I explore three main findings. First, domestic work and sex work are not mutually exclusive. Second, women choose to enter sex work in preference to domestic work because of poor working conditions in the latter. Third, global po…
Teaching Ethnographic Methods for Cultural Anthropology: Current Practices and Needed Innovation
Historically, ethnographic methods were learned by cultural anthropology students in individual research projects. This approach creates challenges for teaching in ways that respond to the next generation’s calls to decenter anthropology’s White, heteropatriarchal voices and engage in collaborative community-based research. Analyzing syllabi from 107 ethnographic methods training courses from the United States, we find the tradition of the “lone …
Ethnographic methods: Training norms and practices and the future of American anthropology
American anthropology is engaged in significant self-reckonings that call for big changes to how anthropology is practiced. These include (1) recognizing and taking seriously the demands to decolonize the ways research is done, (2) addressing precarious employment in academic anthropology, and (3) creating a discipline better positioned to respond to urgent societal needs. A central role for ethnographic methods training is a thread that runs thr…
Questioning the global gays(ze): Constructions of sexual identities in post-revolution Iran
This paper seeks to question the global discursivity about sexual politics in Iran while examining ways in which the discourse constructed about sexuality in Iran (by those outside Iran) contrasts with lived experiences and actual narratives of young Tehranis as they speak about their own sexual identities. The author begins by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2000 and 2007 with young people (ages 18–30) in urban Tehran and Mas…
The “Trafficking” of Persians: Labor, Migration, and Traffic in Dubayy
Around the world today, we are experiencing what scholars call a “feminization of migration,” which coincides with a global panic about human trafficking and distorts the messy realities of forced labor, migration, and sex work. In the Middle East, Dubayy has become the center for the migration of many Iranian women moving into the informal economy of sex work. In this essay, I argue that the disjuncture between paradigms of Iranian women's sexua…
Love, Motherhood and Migration: Regulating Migrant Women's Sexualities in the Persian Gulf
This article looks at the confluence of love, labour and the law by focusing on the regulation of migrant women's sexualities in the Gulf Coast Cooperation countries of the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. Migrant women increasingly comprise the majority of migrants to the region as the demand for intimate labour in the Persian Gulf is on the rise. But migrant women who become pregnant while in the Persian Gulf are immediately imprisoned and char…
Contract Workers, Risk, and the War in Iraq: Sierra Leonean Labor Migrants at U.S. Military Bases
Migrating in the Era of Human Trafficking
Since the year 2000, a global 'anti-trafficking' discourse has emerged that has taken centre stage in conversations about migration and migrants' lives. In particular, 'human trafficking' as a framework for understanding migration has eclipsed the complexities and realities of challenges and opportunities experienced by migrants living and working abroad.1 The human trafficking discourse and its attendant responses seek to categorise migrants not…
But We Can Always Get More!” Deportability, the State and Gendered Migration in the United Arab Emirates
This paper focuses on the politics of states and inter-state relations, and their role in creating environments of deportability and expendability that structure trafficking-like situations for female migrant workers engaged in the sphere of intimate labor 1 in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). States have played a major part in structuring the politics of deportability, a very real, present force affecting experiences of forced labor in Dubai, as …
Introduction: Trade and Traffic in the Persianate World
Research Article| December 01 2010 Introduction: Trade and Traffic in the Persianate World Pardis Mahdavi; Pardis Mahdavi Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Arash Khazeni Arash Khazeni Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2010) 30 (3): 398–400. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-2010-022 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Se…
But What If Someone Sees Me
Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, women have experienced increasingly marginalized status in the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). Despite the fact that rates of HIV and sexually transmitted infection (STI) are rising in Iran, especially among heterosexual women, changing conceptions of risk among urban Iranian women are not well understood. Due to the IRI’s strict ban on premarital sex, the distribution of educational information related to th…
Passionate uprisings: Young people, sexuality and politics in post‐revolutionary Iran
This paper examines the sexual and social practices of young people in contemporary Iran. Young people in urban areas live under the rubric of a fundamentalist, Islamist regime which restricts social freedoms such as premarital heterosexual contact, homosexual encounters, dancing, alcohol consumption and large group gatherings. Drawing on close focus research and individual and group inteviews, this paper seeks to analyse young people's responses…
Deconstructing sexuality in the Middle East
But What If Someone Sees Me
Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, women have experienced increasingly marginalized status in the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). Despite the fact that rates of HIV and sexually transmitted infection (STI) are rising in Iran, especially among heterosexual women, changing conceptions of risk among urban Iranian women are not well understood. Due to the IRI’s strict ban on premarital sex, the distribution of educational information related to th…
Wannabes, Goths and Christians: The Boundaries of Sex, Style and Status by Amy C. Wilkins
Race, space, place: Notes on the racialisation and spatialisation of commercial sex work in Dubai, UAE
This paper focuses on the perceived racialisation and resultant spatialisation of commercial sex in Dubai. In recent years, the sex industry in Dubai has grown to include women from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, East Asia and Africa. With the increase in sex workers of different nationalities has come a form of localised racism that is embedded in structures and desires seen within specific locations. The physical spatialisation of sex work hi…
Introduction: Trade and Traffic in the Persianate World
Research Article| December 01 2010 Introduction: Trade and Traffic in the Persianate World Pardis Mahdavi; Pardis Mahdavi Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Arash Khazeni Arash Khazeni Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2010) 30 (3): 398–400. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-2010-022 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Se…
The “Trafficking” of Persians: Labor, Migration, and Traffic in Dubayy
Around the world today, we are experiencing what scholars call a “feminization of migration,” which coincides with a global panic about human trafficking and distorts the messy realities of forced labor, migration, and sex work. In the Middle East, Dubayy has become the center for the migration of many Iranian women moving into the informal economy of sex work. In this essay, I argue that the disjuncture between paradigms of Iranian women's sexua…
Hollow Bodies: Institutional Responses to Sex Trafficking in Armenia, Bosnia and India by Susan Dewey
Transgressive Sex: Subversion and Control in Erotic Encounters edited by Hastings Donnan and Fiona Magowan
Questioning the Discursive Construction of Trafficking and Forced Labor in the United Arab Emirates
This paper investigates interactions between issues of labor, gender, sexuality, migration, and statehood through the lens of Dubai’s unskilled foreign migrant workers. Using ethnographic research methods, including participant observation and in-depth interviews, this paper explores the conflation of discourses on trafficking, migration, and sex work through migrants’ narratives. The study is organized around three central questions: 1) What are…
Rethinking Intimate Labor through Inter-Asian Migrations: Insights from the 2011 Bellagio Conference
But We Can Always Get More!” Deportability, the State and Gendered Migration in the United Arab Emirates
This paper focuses on the politics of states and inter-state relations, and their role in creating environments of deportability and expendability that structure trafficking-like situations for female migrant workers engaged in the sphere of intimate labor 1 in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). States have played a major part in structuring the politics of deportability, a very real, present force affecting experiences of forced labor in Dubai, as …
Questioning the global gays(ze): Constructions of sexual identities in post-revolution Iran
This paper seeks to question the global discursivity about sexual politics in Iran while examining ways in which the discourse constructed about sexuality in Iran (by those outside Iran) contrasts with lived experiences and actual narratives of young Tehranis as they speak about their own sexual identities. The author begins by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2000 and 2007 with young people (ages 18–30) in urban Tehran and Mas…
Trafficking” Parenting: Migration, Motherhood, Forced Labor and Deportability in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)
The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to look at how parenthood can often place or keep migrant women in situations of force, fraud, or coercion that characterize human trafficking; and, second, to look at how becoming a parent (or the possibility of reproducing) while in the host country structures a discourse and series of actions that can lead migrant women into trafficking-like situations of becoming undocumented and illegal, being detaine…
Gender, labour and the law: The nexus of domestic work, human trafficking and the informal economy in the United Arab Emirates
Based on ethnographic fieldwork with female migrants in the United Arab Emirates, the focus of this article is on the confluence of human trafficking discourses, gendered migration, domestic work and sex work in the UAE. I explore three main findings. First, domestic work and sex work are not mutually exclusive. Second, women choose to enter sex work in preference to domestic work because of poor working conditions in the latter. Third, global po…
Love, Motherhood and Migration: Regulating Migrant Women's Sexualities in the Persian Gulf
This article looks at the confluence of love, labour and the law by focusing on the regulation of migrant women's sexualities in the Gulf Coast Cooperation countries of the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. Migrant women increasingly comprise the majority of migrants to the region as the demand for intimate labour in the Persian Gulf is on the rise. But migrant women who become pregnant while in the Persian Gulf are immediately imprisoned and char…
Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora
Book Review| March 01 2014 Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Rana, Junaid. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011 240 pp., $84.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper) Pardis Mahdavi Pardis Mahdavi Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2014) 11 (1): 136–137. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2385471 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Pe…
Migrating in the Era of Human Trafficking
Since the year 2000, a global 'anti-trafficking' discourse has emerged that has taken centre stage in conversations about migration and migrants' lives. In particular, 'human trafficking' as a framework for understanding migration has eclipsed the complexities and realities of challenges and opportunities experienced by migrants living and working abroad.1 The human trafficking discourse and its attendant responses seek to categorise migrants not…
Seduction and the self: Movements through precarity, race and sexuality in Japanese host clubs
In this article, I build on the notion of precarity to argue that Japanese host clubs are sites in which a particular kind of intimacy and sense of 'belonging' are produced. The analysis highlights host clubs as necessary spaces among many in the precarious economy and as important venues for the production of subjectivity for the male hosts (both migrant and Japanese) as well as for the migrant women who frequent these establishments. In particu…
The personal politics of private life in the United Arab Emirates (UAE): Sexualities, space, migration and identity politics in motion
Activism on sexuality and sexual politics in South and West Asia has been increasing in the last two decades, resulting in challenges and opportunities to negotiate sexual subjectivity, intimacy and politics. But some people articulate a desire to disentangle sexual politics from identity politics. Against this background, a two-pronged investigation of the intersections of sexuality and migration was conducted in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) w…
Contract Workers, Risk, and the War in Iraq: Sierra Leonean Labor Migrants at U.S. Military Bases
Transformations and Mobilizations
Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives
Stigma, pandemics, and human biology: Looking back, looking forward
Contractually Sterilized: Migrant Mothers and Carceral Politics in the Gulf Coast Cooperation (GCC) Countries
Migration to the Gulf Countries of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait has become increasingly feminized in the past two decades. Women make up the majority of migrants to the Gulf, and while they often migrate during their most fertile reproductive years while they labor in the Gulf, they are prohibited by contract from becoming pregnant—leading to a situation of what I call “contractual sterilization.” The purpose of this essay is twofold…
Sociology (24 works) · Gender Studies (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · Ethnography (14 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Geography (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Human sexuality (11 works) · Sex work and related issues (11 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (10 works)