JOURNAL OF IRANIAN SOCIAL STUDIES
Year:2022 | Volume:16 | Issue:4|Papers Count:6

From the perspective of the security-oriented cultural discourse, culture has strategic importance for governance, because it is linked to security and development of society. From this point of view, cultural engineering is essential for creating a unified nation. A nation that is capable of reviving the Islamic civilization. Basically, this discourse sees the population as a raw material for nation-building and it will be a cause for concern if they are not. According to this discourse, the cultural policy is the most effective apparatus for turning people into subjugated individuals. In this research, genealogical methods have been used to understand the conditions that led to the formation of the discourse. The findings suggest that the failure of government in creating subjugated subjects leads to the dominance of a conservative approach to the cultural policy. Structurally, the ability of the government to create desirable subjects depends on the government's capacity to provide welfare to citizens. But in the post-war era, the economic reforms based on structural adjustment and the government's obligation to withdrawal of social policy led to widespread social exclusion. As a result, the subjectizing capacity of the state weakened drastically. Under these circumstances, social reality is seen as a threat to the eyes of the policy-making elite, resulting in intensifying the government's tendency to securitize and policing cultural policy to stand up to the threat.

Structural and value changes in the society had strong impacts on internal relations of the family including the relations with the elderly within the family. Considering the ever-increasing growth of the elderly population, paying attention to their quality of life (including exclusion) is one of the basic factors in their social health. This paper aims at describing and interpreting the elderly experiences of exclusion in family relationships. As far as research method is concerned, as a qualitative research the paper has adopted descriptive phenomenology method. Successively, targeted sampling method with maximum variation strategy has been used for selecting 12 elderly men and women of 60 years and older in Karaj city. They are interviewed according to semi-structured in-depth interview technique; and the interviews were analyzed by Colaizzi strategy.As a result, exclusion was understood as four emerging themes including "feeling of being remove", "loneliness and lack of social embededness", "living with age stigma" and "suffering and fear of being burdened". The research results emphasized on the the comprehensive essence of the experience of exclusion of the elderly in family relationships. It shows that aging and reproduction of exclusion are related, and indicates that the exclusion of the elderly is a totality with a set of overlapping elements and dialectical and fluid relationships, in which exclusion in one dimension, causes exclusion in other dimensions as well.

Arbaeen pilgrimage walk is one great phenomenon that has become popular in the Shia world in recent years and has led to a vast transformation in religious policies in Iranian society. We are witnessing a very rapid trend in the growth of people's participation in this ritual during last decade. On the one hand, the government has turned its legitimacy into one of the key points of showing successes, and on the other hand, critics have turned it into an arena for criticism of political economy in Iran. Therefore, there is a deep challenge between different narratives in the analysis and evaluation of this phenomenon in the scientific and public media of the country.In this article, an attempt has been made to find out the main patterns of representation of this event, taking into account the lived experiences and participation in various conferences and meetings about this ritual, as well as reading almost all the scientific articles published in Farsi and referring to the available book sources. For this purpose, the concepts of utopia, ideology and heterotopia have been used to be able to analyze the relationship between existing discourses and the power and order.The results of this research are based on the fact that two main and dominant discourses can be recognized: the discourse that can be considered  as the believers in the Islamic revolution and the government, tried to search for their own utopias and ideals in this event and Finally, with a kind of implicit simulation between that utopia and the claims of governmental discourse in Iran, use it as an ideology to legitimize this political order and show that this great ritual is exactly along the discourse of the Islamic Revolution. On the other hand, the critics, with an upside-down view, try to show all the political manipulations of the facts in the example of this ritual and criticize the fundamental inefficiencies of the political order through this ritual. For this reason, it has been used as a heterotopia to criticize the existing situation. However, other sub-discourses can be raised next to these two main discourses. But they have not had a special media representation.

Although Iran has achieved stillbirth target of Every Newborn Action Plan (≤12 stillbirths per 1000 total births by 2030) at national level, there are still notable contextual inequalities (spatial and socioeconomic) in stillbirth. The purpose of this study is to explain the inequality in stillbirth, using the intersectionality approach that McGibbon proposes in the field of the right to access health care. We used the Iranian Maternal and Neonatal Network (IMAN) for the period of 2013-2020. The indicators extracted from this study showed that mothers who experience several disadvantages at the same time (like non-Iranian mothers who gave birth in the fifth geographic region of Iran (the east), or uninsured mothers over 45 years), experience stillbirth more frequently compared to their counterparts. We came to this conclusion that the intersection of three areas of social determinants of health (maternal education level, type of hospital, type of insurance), the isms (nationality and maternal age) and geographic or spatial contexts (urban-rural residency, the geographical area of birthplace) can create synergy with each other and cause some groups of mothers who belong to the most vulnerable strata of the society to be oppressed more. The main policy suggestion of this research is to reduce stillbirth by considering the intersection of inequalities instead of individual axes of inequality. 

The present study intends to explore the lived experience of saleswomen working in new shopping centers and thereby achieve its semantic implications. Malls and shopping centers have expanded in megacities such as Tehran in recent years. This shows forms of consumer culture in society, as well as informal work and the feminization of the workforce and its challenges. This research has used qualitative grounded theory method. The Purposive sampling Methods with maximum variety was used to gather the samples. Additionally semi-structured interviews were used to gather the data. 30 saleswomen working in shopping centers participated in the research sampling.The results of the research show that causal factors such as economic autonomy, easy access to the sales job, femininity of the work environment, an opportunity to be seen and redefining the female identity, have played a role in explaining the lived experience of working women. Meanwhile, ignoring work rules, work bodies including؛ Exhibitive body (imposing clothing and makeup codes and saleswomen as a model), disciplinary body, faking kindness, and customer-oriented rationality act as intrusive strategies and conditions. According to the present study, the lived experience of saleswomen in shopping malls has resulted in accepting inferiority, and alienation. The Core category also implies "selling as exploitation".

This paper tries to give an account of religiosity as well as secularism among 17-18-year-old boys in the city of Soume'sara, Guilan Provinde, Iran from a qualitative perspective. This study intends to find out how people interpret religion and through what mechanisms the religiosity or secularism are formed and established among them. The conceptual framework of this study is derived from the theoretical approaches of Robert Bellah and Meredith McGuire in the field of religion. Research data has been collected using in-depth and semi-structured interview techniques among fifteen young people - mostly students- and by convenient sampling.The findings of the research show that many students have a personal interpretation of spirituality and their religiosity is not formal. Also, secularization among them is evident in practical life as well as cognitive levels.