Iranian Journal of Sociology
Year:2019 | Volume:19 | Issue:4 |Papers Count:6

Discrimination and ethnic inequality against the Kurds have been the subject of concerns and public debate both inside and outside of Iran for decades, but the ethnic experiences of the Kurds within the social fields of Iran including universities have rarely been the subject of empirical studies. So, we applied the exploratory approach to the study of the ethnic lived experience of Kurdish students in the Iranian universities, focusing on the experiences of discrimination and inequality in four universities including Tabriz, Tehran, Allamah, and Kurdistan. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 Kurdish students. Interviews data were analyzed by thematic analysis, which resulted in 11 main themes and 11 sub-themes. The findings showed that university's experiences for Kurdish students include significant aspects of discrimination, inequality and ethnic exclusion in both formal and informal spheres of university.

The purpose of the research is to explain the process of forming a “ reflective traditional personality” concerning the three anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and anti-arrogance discourses. This research was done through applying the analytical method. The social representative of the “ reflective traditional personality” is a new middle class. The new middle class is a social group that has been gradually formed in Iranian society since the early nineteenth century, to introduce new social changes inspired by Western societies. The results showed that, contrary to expectations, this group has not become a social carrier of such changes. They adopted different social and political patterns of behavior and a special sociocultural personality, referred to here as a “ reflexive traditional personality” . Anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and anti-arrogance processes are related to three processes of discourse making, the ideologization of political thought in Iran and the establishment of the capitalist. These discourses have significantly influenced the emergence of this personality. The results also showed that the social structures in Middle Eastern societies including Iran have changed differently and led to “ reflexive traditional societies” .

This research aims to analyze Iranshahri discourse as a modern identity discourse of Iranians in terms of contemporary economy and politics. Since the modern formation of this discourse has appeared in Javad Tabatabaei’ s works, the articulation of this discourse and the reason for its hegemony are examined according to his writings. Then, we examined the formation of the concept of emptiness in Iranshahri discourse using Laclau's methodology. The theoretical concept of this research suggested that Iranshahri discourse aims to interpret the emptiness created by neoliberalism through his particular political philosophy. Thus, we recognized the following parameters in Tabatabaei's political philosophy: the emptiness of otherness, eliminating people and building nations, alienated people, and imposing consensus in his political philosophy analysis. The above concepts showed that Iranshahri discourse and his political philosophy attempt to construct Iranian identity and justify the status quo by drawing the masses’ attention to something other than neoliberalism crises.

This study intends to focus on the queue, as one of the semiotic resources in the young girls' educational experiences, to represent the semantic system formed in the intersubjectivity space of the social actors. In this regard, the narratives of thirteen young Mashhadi girls from the queue have been analyzed based on the social semiotic approach of Van Leeuwen. The results of this study showed that the queue as an arena for disciplinary power introduces students to the educational process, which consists of a set of unequal and mainly stereotypical interactions, and with a high concentration on the continuity of its formal symbols. This process ultimately leads students to a kind of subjugation and alienation. In other words, the queue, which appears to be a means of teaching law in the school, in practice, draws students to passive and disempowering processes. As a result, they see their education separate from themselves and ultimately become subordinate actors.

This paper examines the factors affecting the physical health of Turkish and Kurdish ethnicities living in Tabriz and Mahabad with an emphasis on lifestyle (behavioral dimension). The study was conducted in the form of a survey and 500 people were selected using a multi-stage cluster sampling method. The theoretical framework of the research is based on Dressler's models and other related theories. The research findings showed that socioeconomic status, the sum of cultural, social and economic capitals as well as lifestyle have a positive and significant effect on physical health. In other words, when these variables increase, the levels of physical health among ethnic groups increase too. Also, the physical health of the members of the Turkish ethnic group is greater than that of the Kurdish people. Moreover, the lifestyle-related health of Turks is also better than Kurdish.

In general, research is divided into quantitative and qualitative categories. Qualitative research has several types, most notably ethnography, grounded theory, phenomenology, discourse analysis, hermeneutics, and semiotics. Critical ethnography is a kind of ethnography rooted in the Chicago School and developed by the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in England. The main purpose of critical ethnography is to critique and interpret culture and change it in favor of equality of power in social relations and the empowerment of subjects under study. Therefore, critical ethnography is always related to the problem of power, and change, value-orientation and the relationship between agency and structure are among the characteristics of this method. One of the methods in critical ethnography is the method of Carspecken that emphasizes the communication experience and has been influenced by pragmatism, neo-marxism, and phenomenology. By placing the concept of validity within the theory of meaning, Carspecken emphasizes the inner relationship between meaning and validity. He has a five-step approach to critical ethnography. These are: collecting original documents; analyzing collected observational data; generating conversational data (emic approach); the discovery of relationships between what is discovered and the fields broader and, finally, linking the findings from the earlier stages to macro-sociological theories and constructions, to illustrate the processes of production and social reproduction.