Shahrzad Mojab ~ Research Director

I am a scholar/activist and professor at the Women and Gender Studies Institute and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. My areas of research and teaching are educational policy studies; gender, state, diaspora and transnationality; women, war, militarization and violence; women, war and learning; feminism, anti-racism, colonialism and imperialism; and Marxist-feminism, revolutionary learning and praxis. My approach to the study of race, gender, class, nationality, transnationality, and ethnicity is informed by feminist and dialectical historical materialism. I am critical of theoretical frameworks which treat race, gender, and class atomistically and reduce them to the domains of discourse, text, language, or identity. I critique monopolies of knowledge and power in education and advocate dialogical and inclusive pedagogical practices.

In recent years, I have attempted to diversify the dissemination of my research and have used dance, drama, storytelling, film, and visual arts to capture the experience, desires, and dreams of political prisoners and activists. I have produced films, worked on dance projects, and curated an exhibition to speak about the experience of women encountering patriarchal capitalist state violence in prisons and refugee camps. These projects were funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Ontario Arts Council. In March 2019, I collaborated with Roshanak Jaberi and Doris Rajan on No Woman’s Land, a dance project to capture the experience of refugee women of sexual violence.

Over the years, I have written numerous articles and book chapters, they have also been translated into Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, French, Swedish, and German. My most recent books include: Marxism and Migration (co-edited with Genevie Ritchie and Sara Carpenter, 2022); Women of Kurdistan: A Historical and Bibliographical Study (co-authored with Amir Hassanpour, 2021); Revolutionary Learning: Marxism, Feminism and Knowledge (co-authored with Sara Carpenter, 2017). For more on my publications check this link.

I have also published extensively on the revolts of women, students, and nationalities in Iran. Check the links below:

Mojab, Shahrzad (2022).“Women and Education in the Middle East and North Africa.” In George Noblit (Ed.). Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. New York: Oxford University Press.
doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.ORE_EDU-01544.R1.

Mojab, Shahrzad (2022). “Women and revolution in the Middle East,” in Suad Joseph and Zeina Zaatari (eds). Handbook on Women in the Middle East. New York: Routledge, pp. 197-211.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315165219

Marx & I is a collective radical pedagogy production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npBPi4Ko9Ro

My podcasts related to revolutionary pedagogy are:

The Pedagogy of Revolution: Unsettling History, Episode 10. Liberation Pedagogy Podcast

Capitalist Patriarchy and the Gendered War, Episode 3. University of Oxford: Women & War: A Feminist Podcast.