International Sociology - mind blown

Last Thursday, for International Women's Rights Day, I went to see "En Secret" (released in the US as Circumstance).  It is a film about two high school girls in Iran, and deals with sexuality, homosexuality sexism, religion, the moral police, etc.  Click here for the trailer.  It was a really interesting movie, although it certainly had its faults.

What was most interesting for me was the discussion with Mme. Direnberger afterwards.  She has a phd in Political Sociology and her dissertations was entitled: "Genre et Citoyenneté politique en Iran et au Tadjikistan" (Gender and political citizenship in Iran and Tajikistan).

It was so interesting! And so different from what I think of when I think of the Sociolgy PhD track.

Her dissertation seems to have mostly focused on feminism in Iran.  She went and lived in Tehran, giving lectures at the university and doing her research (and has obviously also researched in Tajikistan, but that was less the focus of the talk).

When I think of political sociology, I don't think of people writing their dissertations about Iran.  Based on the sociology courses I took in university, including a political sociology course, it seemed that we tended to focus on the US - and sometimes the US in comparison to other countries (these were usually northern European countries). Her research in Iran seemed so different from the usually US-centric (and sometimes European-centric) sociology I had seen in university.  (I am sure there were some exceptions, but they were rare.)  And when I think of political sociology, I don't think of feminist movements - although that's less of a jump from my political sociology course.

So I went up to her after.  First, I asked her if she spoke Farsi - which apparently she has learned in order to do her research.  Ok, so she got to combine learning languages with sociology? So cool! Can I do that?  My second question was less a question and more of a this isn't the type of sociology I saw in university...  And her response was that she was not the only one. Plenty of other people are researching/working in similar subjects.

So basically, you can combine study social justice (see feminism), international contexts (see Iran) and Sociology (see PhD)?  It's like my two big spheres of interests - sociology and international contexts/languages - just collided. So I don't have to chose?  That's incroyable!  I'm working on learning more about what other people in that field are doing. And totally geeking out with excitement in learning about this subsection of sociology.