Join the LSE Middle East Centre and the Department of Anthropology, LSE for the launch of Dr Amina Tawasil's latest book Paths Made by Walking: The Work of Howzevi Women in Iran published by Indiana University Press.

This book is available to read open access here.

This groundbreaking ethnography on Iranian howzevi (seminarian) women reveals how ideologies of womanhood, institutions, and Islamic practices have played a pivotal role in religiously conservative women's mobility in the Middle East. Paths Made by Walking examines how Iranian women have participated in Islamic education since the 1979 revolution. 

Applying over a year of ethnographic fieldwork, Tawasil analyses how the Islamic education of seminarian women has propelled some of them into powerful positions in Iran, from close ties with the state's supreme leader and chief justice to membership in the Basij (voluntary military organization). At the same time, these women often choose to remain "hidden" or to otherwise follow practices that seem inscrutable or illogical from a framework of politicised resistance. By centering the howzevi women's senses of self and revealing their complex interpretations of their beliefs, Tawasil offers a fresh perspective on forms of feminine identity that do not always mirror supposedly universal desires for recognition, autonomy, leadership, or authority.

Taking readers into the classrooms, living rooms, and compounds where howzevi women participate in intellectual discourse, Paths Made by Walking invites readers to reconsider their conceptualisations of the women who support the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Meet our speaker and chair

Amina Tawasil is an anthropologist serving as a Lecturer in the Programs in Anthropology at Columbia University's Teachers College since 2017. She has published several articles from her fieldwork in the Islamic Republic of Iran on seminarian women, and has recently published a book entitled, Paths Made by Walking: The Work of Howzevi Women in Iran through Indiana University Press. Previously, she taught at the International Studies Institute, University of New Mexico after serving as the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Middle East and North African Studies program, with courtesy appointment in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. She is particularly interested in ethnographic and theoretical framings of anonymity, slow labor, time, urban situations, and performance. She is currently completing her fourth year of ethnographic fieldwork among graffiti writers in New York City, Philadelphia and urban New Jersey, which she has published a chapter on in the Ethnography of Reading at Thirty edited volume.

Yazan Doughan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at LSE. Yazan is an anthropologist whose work straddles the linguistic and socio-cultural branches of the discipline, with close engagements with social and legal theory, conceptual and social history, and moral philosophy. His work blends ethnography, genealogy, and history to shed light on the question of social justice in contemporary postcolonial contexts, with Jordan as a primary field site.