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ABOUT ME

I am an urban scholar of globalization. My scholarship is situated at the intersection of sociology, geography, planning, and feminist studies, using case study and ethnographic methodologies. My research concerns social and institutional aspects of urban development and planning that address basic human needs including housing and urban infrastructure and services that support it. I am particularly interested in the global and local development processes and contingencies involved in the formation of the city and citizens’ struggles for dignified livelihood — namely, how groups disadvantaged by class, gender, race, and ethnicity mobilize for resources such as shelter, basic infrastructure, and services and how institutional arrangements facilitate and frustrate provision and access to such vital urban resources.


A native of Iran, I started my undergraduate studies at Tehran University, and continued my graduate studies at Trondheim University, Norway, for my Master’s, and at University of California, Berkeley, for my PhD. Over the years my research and teaching has spanned several regions including the Middle East, Latin America, Southern Africa, and North America. In the 1990s, I studied the struggle for shelter and dignified livelihood through the experience of low-income communities, particularly female-headed households in Latin America. Since the late-1990s I studied the struggle for justice and equity through the experience of racialized township residents in post-apartheid South Africa. My most recent multi-sited ethnographic work, empirically based in the US, Mexico and Togo, extends my earlier research by revealing the intimate connections in revitalization of rustbelt towns in the US and the free work of women and transnational families in displaced workers’ communities of origin.

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