Farzaneh Hall, Room 212
Phone: (405) 325-5308
Email: hashemi@ou.edu
Website: www.manatahashemi.com
Manata Hashemi is the Farzaneh Family Associate Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
A sociologist and urban ethnographer by training, she uses qualitative methods to center the everyday lives and emancipatory projects of marginalized Middle Eastern groups living in economic insecurity. Her research takes a bottom-up look into how stigmatized identities are created, contested, and reproduced in people’s efforts to claim cultural membership.
Dr. Hashemi is the author of Coming of Age in Iran: Poverty and the Struggle for Dignity in Iran, which draws on ethnography conducted over twelve years to explore how some economically vulnerable youth in Iran publicly conform to social norms to gain social and economic benefits that simultaneously challenge and amplify systems of inequality within their communities. She is also the co-editor of Children in Crisis: Ethnographic Studies in International Contexts, an interdisciplinary volume that examines how children living in crisis situations in both the global North and South respond to their circumstances. Her work has appeared in numerous journals such as the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Qualitative Sociology, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies and featured in national outlets like The Conversation. She has provided expertise to various organizations including the United Nations Children’s Fund.
Dr. Hashemi received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, her M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, and her B.A. in Near Eastern Studies from Cornell University. She previously served as a research director for Qatar Foundation and was a post-doctoral fellow at Georgetown University in Qatar.
