Tawasil, Amina U. (aut2101)

Research:

(Middle East) women’s mobility; women’s Islamic education; gender

(Urban Spaces): graffiti

General Interests: anonymity; psychogeography; slow work; performance; affect; apprenticeship as education; labor migration; gentrification; humanistic anthropology; decolonizing ethnography; ethnographic writing; ethnology

B.A., San Jose State University; M.A., Stanford University; Ph.D., Teachers College, Columbia University; Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Middle East & North African Studies & Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, 2013-2015. 

Academic Publications:

Paths Made by Walking: The Work of Howzevi Women in Iran, Indiana University Press (September 2024)

The Ongoing Work of New York City Graffiti Writers During the Covid-19 Epoch, in The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty (November 2023)

Reading as Practice: The Howzevi (Seminarian) Women in Iran and Clair de Lune, Anthropology and Education Quarterly (March 2019) 

Towards the Ideal Revolutionary Shi'i Woman: The Howzevi (Seminarian), the Requisites of Marriage and Islamic Education in Iran, Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 13(2015)

The Howzevi (Seminarian) Women in Iran: Constituting and Reconstituting Paths. Dissertation Abstract, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 11(2). July 2015.

Manuscripts in-press

"Graffiti Writers and the Spray Can." In Writing Artifacts, edited by Cydney Alexis and Hannah J. Rule, (Palgrave, forthcoming 2026).

Manuscripts in-review

“The Work of Giving: Sisters from a Family of Martyrs and War Survivors.” (Special Issue—Gift  Giving and Economic Anthropology, Anthropology of the Middle East, Berghahn Journals)

“Alternative Inscriptions: Religion, Belonging, and Statelessness Among the Tausug of Labuan.” In Stateless Religion: Undocumented Reimaginings of Citizenship, Law, and Sovereignty, edited by Spencer Dew & Benjamin Sax

Web-based Publications:

Contextualizing Exclusion: Lessons from Kambis, Allegra Lab: Anthropology, Law, Art, World. September 16, 2015.

Buses in South and North Tehran: Education and Schooling, Allegra Lab: Anthropology, Law, Art, World. August 12, 2015.

Measuring Up: Where Has the ‘I’ Gone in My Writing?, Anthropology News. October 2014.

Islamic Education and the Howzevi (Seminarian) Women of Pirouzi-Tehran, Anthropology News. June 2013.

On the Edge of Protest in Tehran: Discontinuing, Shifting Boundaries, Anthropology News. January 2013.

Down on Vali Asr: Encounters with Tehran's Street Children, PBS Frontline Tehran Bureau. May 2012.