Shahrzad Mojab

Theorizing the politics of 'Islamic feminism'

This article examines developments in ‘Islamic feminism’, and offers a critique of feminist theories, which construct it as an authentic and indigenous emancipatory alternative to secular feminisms. Focusing on Iranian theocracy, I argue that the Islamization of gender relations has created an oppressive patriarchy that cannot be replaced through legal reforms. While many women in Iran resist this religious and patriarchal regime, and an increasing number of Iranian intellectuals and activists, including Islamists, call for the separation of state and religion, feminists of a cultural relativist and postmodernist persuasion do not acknowledge the failure of the Islamic project. I argue that western feminist theory, in spite of its advances, is in a state of crisis since (a) it is challenged by the continuation of patriarchal domination in the West in the wake of legal equality between genders, (b) suspicious of the universality of patriarchy, it overlooks oppressive gender relations in non-western societies and (c) rejecting Eurocentrism and racism, it endorses the fragmentation of women of the world into religious, national, ethnic, racial and cultural entities with particularist agendas.

Women and Consciousness in the "Learning Organization": Emancipation or Exploitation?.

This studys goal is to uncover the contradictions inherent in the philosophy and practice of the learning organization. Through a Marxist-feminist analysis of recent shifts in adult education and workplace structure, this study attempts to uncover the function of the learning organization in the capitalist political economy, the location of workers in relation to the learning organization, and the role of learning rhetoric in maintaining the status quo. This study argues that the learning organization model can be seen both as a mechanism for the extraction of surplus value from workers and as a method of social control. The learning organization model is often associated with progressive, even emancipatory, claims of inclusion and collaboration in the work-place. However, this study argues that the educational legacies of feminism, trade unionism, antiracism, and revolutionary struggle are better places to seek the learning interests of the workers that make up the learning organization.

Of property and propriety : the role of gender and class in imperialism and nationalism

Unique in its approach, this collection of essays examines property relations, moral regulations pertaining to gender, and nationalism in India, Kurdistan, Ireland, and Finland. Structured around six case studies, the contributors combine an analysis of gender with a dialectical examination of class and patriarchy to reveal how these relations have become constructed in recent nationalist movements. Offering an alternative to post-colonial and post-structuralist formulations of gender and nationalism, the volume highlights the connections and convergences in matters of property, propriety, and gender among ideologically similar nationalist movements, and shows how ideological similarities and differences need to be understood prior to analysing the gender symbolism and patriarchal relations of nationalist histories.

Learning by dispossession: democracy promotion and civic engagement in Iraq and the United States

This paper brings together two ongoing research projects on current citizenship learning programs in Iraq and the United States, both of which draw from the theoretical ground of Marxist-feminist perspective. A particular strength of this paper is its comparison between two American citizenship education programs in the context of neoliberalism, war and imperialism. Many claim that citizenship learning is always an ideological project promoting a particular set of beliefs or values. However, this research reveals that citizenship education programs are also ideological in their methods—a process Mojab has termed ‘learning by dispossession’—that serve to abstract learners from material conditions in order to promote a particular vision of liberal democracy that legitimates the very material conditions learners struggle to overcome.

Women, Violence and Informal Learning

This chapter is based on a comparative study recently conducted among immigrant women of two distinct communities in the Greater Toronto Area: the Spanishspeaking community and the Kurds. The purpose of the study was to contribute to our understanding of the impact of violence on immigrant women’s learning. What is the relationship between patriarchal, political, social and economical power structures of violence and the experience of immigrant women’s learning in the diaspora? How do women who have experienced violence either in domestic or war situations best learn about their rights, the law and strategies for resistance? What features are similar or different between these types of learning? We argue that the experience of violence does impact learning. It should not, however, be seen as a delimiter or as an impediment to learning, but rather as an accepted fact that should be taken into account in any learning effort. Each author worked closely with one of two communities. Our division of labour was based on general familiarity as well as particular knowledge of either the Spanish or Kurdish languages. Estimates on the size of the Spanish-speaking population in Toronto vary depending upon definitions and measurement methods used; an accepted number is 145,000. The Kurds constitute a much smaller number and are more recent arrivals to Canada. According to the 1996 Statistics Canada survey, there are 4,225 Kurds living in Canada. An in-depth, non-structured, conversational interview was used in order to document the life histories of these women as these were told, perceived and created by them. The Spanish-speaking women also participated in a workshop wherein they focused on learning about the law. Fourteen women from each community participated in the research. These women represented a cross section of socio-economic and educational backgrounds within their communities. Nevertheless, they shared many similarities as “immigrant” women in Canada; in particular, their labour force participation manifested the racialized and genderized nature of the Canadian job market (Mojab, 2000). The distinctiveness of the two communities has provided us with rich data by which to understand the impact of trauma caused by violence against immigrant women. In

Introduction: A Specter Haunts Adult Education: Crafting a Marxist-Feminist Framework for Adult Education and Learning

Over one hundred years ago, Marx and Engels argued that Europe was haunted by the possibility of an alternative way of organizing social life.1 Today, the field of adult education finds itself in a complex position vis-a-vis recent transformations in the global economy, the practice of democracy, and the purposes of adult education. We face the onslaught of the demands of the knowledge economy and the rhetorical promises of the policies of lifelong learning. To this challenge we have responded with calls to our historical vocation, the transformation of social conditions, and the cultivation of community. It is clear that today this same ghost is haunting us as well. However, our ability to navigate this difficult terrain is complicated by a growing sense that we are facing the limits of the explanatory power of traditional theoretical paradigms. At the same time, we are increasingly frustrated by the co-optation of the social purposes of adult education by the agendas of capital through constructs such as human-capital theory, the knowledge economy, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Our capacity to resist this co-optation depends on our ability to generate transformative praxis, a unity of theory and action based in truly critical and useful forms of knowledge. Thus, the theories we use to guide our inquiries are of the utmost importance.

Adult Education and the “Matter” of Consciousness in Marxist-Feminism

In teaching adult education courses, a major challenge for us is to make students articulate the sources of their knowledge about themselves or the world. We ask them to think through these questions: “How do you know what you know?” “Where does your knowledge come from?” There are some immediate and predictable answers such as personal experience, accumulated academic, or work-related knowledge, or social learning through culture, tradition, media, personal, or group interaction. We encourage them to go deeper in their explanation and interpretation of social relations and their role and location in them. This, we have come to realize, is not an easy process, in part because, in our understanding, the way to answer these questions is to articulate the relationship between self and the social world as well as between consciousness and the material world. Often students are neither able to name this relationship nor are fully capable of articulating their location in these social relations. Thus, as teachers, we have found it necessary to delve deeper into the problematic of dissociated self and society. In this chapter, we undertake an exploration of the relation between consciousness and the material world from the perspective of Marxist-Feminism.

Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism: A Decade Later

This essay, written in reflection of earlier work, introduces the themes needed to analyze forms of gender and class oppression as these have been mediated through, and by, hegemonic projects of imperialism and nationalism. It argues that the gender critique of imperialism and nationalism should be informed by a critical epistemology that integrates class, capital, and other social relations with ideologies and practices of power. A feminist historical materialism is used that avoids the either-or binary of material, social relations versus culture and language is used, bringing into view the particularities of social relations and illuminating the ways that gender becomes crucial for hegemonic projects. These hegemonic social projects inform languages and cultures of people that are integrated as shaping elements of common sense, consensus, contestations, and the politics of gender. The pitfalls of national consciousness are also brought into view using feminist and class lenses, so that differences between liberal, communist, and even fascist forms of nationalism are revealed. These analytical tools, developed a decade ago, are still relevant to contemporary case studies of imperialism and nationalism of Israel and Palestine and the religious and cultural nationalism in parts of the Middle East that has arisen in resistance to contemporary American imperialism.

The State, university, and the construction of civil society in the Middle East

Abstract Education in the Middle East is a site of ongoing conflicts between the state and non-state forces. The state, in most countries of the region, has owned and run the educational system, and used it primarily as a means of state-building and nation-building. Non-state actors have generally been excluded from the creation of higher educational institutions; and when such initiatives are allowed, the institutions are politically and academically controlled by the state. The universities have, however, led a very complex life. They have been hotbeds of struggle for democracy, independence and socialism. Since these conflicts are continuing, the universities, the students and faculty, will be actively involved in changing the status quo. A condition for the rise of civil society in the region is the civilising of the state, and the universities will pose a serious challenge to the status quo. The future trend, as far as the students are concerned, is to a large extent a struggle for democratisation of social and political life in each country, and the autonomy of the university from the power of the state and the market.

Epilogue: Living Revolution, Learning Revolution, Teaching Revolution

After many iterations, the title of this book became, based on a suggestion from our series editor Tony Green, Educating from Marx: Race, Gender, and Learning. It is a simple and astute title through which Tony inadvertently returned us to the roots of this project. In the fall of 2006 a reading group began in the adult education and community development program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. We came together for various reasons, the first of which was to read original texts by theorists of influence in the field of adult education. Marx, and those who followed after him, came to the forefront of this discussion given our interest in the critical/radical tradition of the field. Over time, the group coalesced around a central problematic: how to formulate a theoretical framework, drawing on anti-racism, postcolonial studies, feminism, and dialectical historical materialism, through which we could better understand the particular historical moment in which we live. We have asked ourselves a deceptively simple, but not simplistic, question that has guided our work: if we look through this framework, what do we see? At the conclusion of this exploration, we have to turn to another of these “easier said than done” propositions: how do we teach it?