The death of the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Jina Amini in September 2022 sparked a movement that immediately captivated the Iranian diaspora around the world. The morality police had detained Amini in Tehran for allegedly improper hijab. Protests began in Iranian Kurdistan, where Amini was from, and spread across the country to regions and sectors of society that have historically been less involved in political protests than major urban centers like Tehran. What began as a street protest became a full-throated rejection of the status quo. Merchants, teachers, and students organized coordinated labor strikes, while protesters and security services clashed in the streets. Additional economic sanctions were implemented against Iran's government by the United States and Europe; the United Nations Human Rights Commission initiated an independent investigation of the government's response to the protests; Iran was expelled from the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women; and the European Parliament cut diplomatic ties with Tehran. The United States has nearly abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) even as it was in the final stages of renegotiation, while calls by activists and the European Parliament to designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist group are ongoing.1 We also saw significant global solidarity protests in numerous major cities in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

This article studies the influence of the antineoliberal social movements in Peru and Ecuador in the face of the Multiparty Trade Agreement (MTA) between both countries and the European Union (EU). To identify and analyze this influence, a transdisciplinary theoretical framework was created, integrating debates and concepts from social movement theory and critical international political economy. In Peru, the movement used European allies to establish their demands on the EU’s agenda, which resulted in increased pressure on the government to enforce labor rights and environmental standards. In Ecuador, the movement was able to establish food sovereignty and the rejection of free trade in the national constitution. As a result, the negotiations with the EU were delayed and Ecuador achieved certain exceptions in its adhesion protocol. Nevertheless, both movements were unable to maintain their influence, due to political and socioeconomic dynamics on the domestic and global levels.

The vast uprisings across Iranian cities in the fall of 2022 caught many of Iranian studies scholars and academic feminists in the diaspora off guard. My first confrontation was with trauma. Like many others, I worried about the lives and safety of my loved ones, political dissidents and prisoners from different ethnic backgrounds, feminists and queer activists on the ground, and, of course, the millennials and Gen Z, who unexpectedly emerged as the new revolutionaries. However, with the first wave of emotional encounters settled, the uprising unlocked another level of cognitive puzzlement critical to my academic life. I struggled to find comprehensive theoretical frameworks and supporting scholarship within Iranian studies or Iranian academic feminism to help my media and scholarly audiences grasp what was unfolding. In this reflective piece, I discuss how the scholarship of Iranian studies and feminism/s formulated the question of gender in liberal and radical essentialist multiculturalism and argue that Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi; WLF) urges us to adopt an antiracist and radical democratic approach, deconstructing the imagined Iran in the scholarship, and reconstructing it as a welcoming and inclusive discursive space for racialized and queer Iranians.

Aside from the obvious and central role of women in Iran's Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) uprising that began in the fall of 2022, two other (f)actors have played a crucial role in defining the movement's demands and propelling it forward, namely, students and music. University students have a long tradition of serving as righteous agitators of uprisings in Iran, both before and after the 1979 revolution, as does music in inspiring and soundtracking them. But in this arguably greatest ideological and political threat to the Islamic Republic since its founding, something unprecedented happened: the fusion of student activism and song in the form of a recognizable genre, unattached to a specific political ideology although fully supportive of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising and its demands for liberation and freedom for all.

Anti-Black language ideologies manifest in exclusionary language policies (e.g. Sung & Allen-Handy 2019), educational tracking (e.g. Sung 2018), and scholarly claims of Black ‘deficiency’ (Smitherman 2000). A liberal educational research tradition has countered with ethnographic accounts of cultural ‘mismatch’ (Michaels 2006) vis-à-vis Black educational ‘failure’. Conducting a textual analysis of an archive of ethnography of communication texts, I locate multiple genealogical linkages holding between ‘mismatch’ and deprivation discourses, principally ones centered on representations of ‘pathological’ Black ‘matriarchy’. Paralleling Black feminist theorizations of ‘fungible Black flesh’ (e.g. Hartman 1997), I account for these representations by conceptualizing ‘fungible Black sound’. I further argue that ‘fungible fugitivity’ (e.g. Snorton 2017), that is, how Blackness fluidly responds to white incursion is linguistically realized in acts of ‘signifyin(g)’ (e.g. Mitchell-Kernan 1999), yielding the analytic category ‘fungible(ly) fugitive Black sound’. Lastly, I reread an ethnographic text with this analytic to illustrate its affordance for (re)imagining Black futurity. (Black sound, fungibility, fugitivity, raciolinguistic ideologies, ethnography of communication, Black studies)*

This article interrogates the scientific conference as a means by which the organizers of the World League for Sexual Reform's 1929 conference attempted to marshal the ‘scientific spirit’ in order to present progressive sexual reform as a rational and scientifically informed undertaking. The conference was carefully curated to make the sex reform movement (and the assorted characters that gathered under its banner) look serious, legitimate and, most importantly, scientific. The conference was also an attempt by organizer Norman Haire to exert control over the strategy of sexology, an enterprise that put him at odds with other prominent sexologists of the time. Crucially, Haire understood sexology as inherently intellectually interdisciplinary, but was strategically convinced that the only sound rubric through which to promote and gain acceptance for the movement was through medical science. This central debate, about how best to define the contested concept of sexology, continues among historians today. By examining how the 1929 conference organizers wrestled to define their sex-reforming remit and how they curated the conference to that end, this paper will offer a window onto the mechanisms via which adherents of intellectual communities contend with heterogeneity, how we judge forms of knowledge and, ultimately, what constitutes science.

In this article I argue that the judicial concept of non-marriage racialises and orientalises minoritised communities and their marriages. Applying a critical postcolonial lens, I show how the development of non-marriage has been influenced by colonial racialising attitudes towards marriage. This has led to its application in racist and orientalist ways to demean and other minoritised marriage practices. My analysis of the case law exposes three patterns in the judicial discourse in this area. First, that the courts emphasise “English (Christian) marriage” and its supposed hallmarks when deciding if a ceremony is non-existent; second that judgments foreground the technical, formal aspects of the law obscuring the use of personal judicial opinions which are orientalist. Finally, the application of this concept to playacting, sham and forced marriages at the same time as legitimate minoritised marriage practices is demeaning and insulting to the already marginalised communities that practise them.

Hundreds of thousands of conferences have taken place since their first appearance in the late eighteenth century, yet the history of science has often treated them as stages for scientific practice, not as the play itself. Drawing on recent work in the history of science and of international relations, the introduction to this special issue suggests avenues for exploring the phenomenon of the international scientific conference, broadly construed, by highlighting the connected dimensions of communication, sociability and international relations. It lays out a typology of scientific conferences as a way of gaining an overview of their diversity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that the international scientific conference is a central locus for understanding science as a social, cultural and political practice.

This article explores the influence of worker resistance to Taylorism on industrial relations in Sweden. By analysing archival material from workers at the Separator Corporate Group, the Metal Workers’ Union, and the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, this article highlights the interplay between shop floor activism, discussions within trade unions, and central labour market relations. It demonstrates how rank-and-file activism compelled union leadership and the central labour market organizations to adopt a series of agreements in the 1940s aimed at addressing worker resistance to Taylorism.

Despite worker discontent, scientific management spread during the 1930s and 1940s. This eventually contributed to the Metal Strike of 1945, which had significant impact on labour–capital relations. According to the metal workers, scientific management, particularly time-motion studies, reduced their bargaining power by concealing labour processes and methods for wage determination, thereby allowing management a monopoly on knowledge.

Following the strike, negotiations between the Trade Union Confederation and the Swedish Employers’ Association resulted in the 1948 Work Studies Agreement. This agreement provided a platform for resolving conflicts and encouraging workers’ support of rationalization via the Work Studies Council. Worker resistance consequently drove Swedish labour market centralization, inadvertently promoting closer labour–capital cooperation.

This article argues, among other things, that although worker resistance failed to upend scientific management, it resulted in it being regulated within a corporatist framework. This highlights the important historical role local trade union activism has played in shaping labour market institutions and the broader political economy.