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An inside look at young Iranians navigating poverty and stigma in a time of crisis In Coming of Age in Iran, Manata Hashemi takes readers inside the lives of Iranian youth. Drawing on first-hand accounts, Hashemi shows how the young Iranian men and women known as the "burnt generation"—those between the ages of 15 and 29, who came of age after Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution—face their future prospects.With a compassionate eye, Hashemi paints a nuanced portrait of their day-to-day struggles in Iran. Hashemi spent months with these youth, observing them at bazaars, hair salons, parks, and mosques, tutoring them in English and sharing meals in their family homes. Many young Iranian men and women are jobless, living with their parents, and delaying marriage, ultimately failing to meet what they consider the traditional benchmarks of adulthood. Hashemi follows their stories, one by one, as they try to climb up the proverbial ladder of success.Coming of Age in Iran sheds light on the inner lives of a new generation of Iranian youth as they struggle in the face of ongoing economic crisis

AbstractThis article argues that symbolic boundaries and their spatial manifestation into embedded enclaves have become new forms of urban social exclusion. Based on participant observation and interviews among lower‐ and middle‐/upper‐class residents in the city of Sari, Iran, the article analyzes how the poor's physical circulations in the city and their performances of class and status have led to an elite backlash, as the latter find more refined markers of social separation in an effort to bolster their own exclusivity. Social distancing through the denigration of the poor and the construction of embedded enclaves brings to the fore the class tensions that are temporarily masked by the urban poor's spatial practices and cultural mimicry. As an advanced form of codified status inequality, embedded enclaves rely on the poor's citywide circulations and on increasing inter‐class interactions in order to communicate difference. Embedded—rather than cordoned off—in prominent areas of the city, such enclaves function as a reminder to the poor of all they cannot have. The upsurge of such establishments in the wake of Iran's shifting economic environment represents an attempt to shore up social position and restore the status quo.

This dissertation demonstrates how poor youth in Iran manage to not simply survive, but to become socio-economically mobile given their limited opportunities. The study examines how poor young people's motivations and aspirations affect the strategies that they use to attain their goals. Social scientists have argued that poor people in the Middle East resist the consequences of large-scale economic restructuring by reasserting their power within extended family networks or maximizing their wealth by engaging in petty illegal practices. However, if we assume that these theoretical perspectives are correct, then we should expect that all poor young people in Iran would adopt similar practices in response to similar macroeconomic conditions. This study nevertheless finds that there are patterned differences in the ways that poor youth in the country think and react to their social worlds. Current theoretical perspectives, due to their exclusive focus on the poor's reactive acts of political agency, cannot provide explanations of how varying motivations inform how poor individuals move in their pursuits. This dissertation draws from two years of ethnographic research in two urban capitals in Iran, Sari and Tehran, to examine the mechanisms involved in shaping poor young people's ideas of the good life and the strategies they use to attain them. The findings show how three, interrelated elements help to explain precisely how poverty influences individual and/or collective action: (1) the moral compass guiding poor youth, (2) their conceptions of the desirable that arise from this moral compass, and (3) the strategies they deploy to get their desires. My findings suggest that poor youth adopt two moral systems that provide them with a sense of right and wrong and an evaluative code for conduct: that of honor and that of the Muslim work ethic (chapter 2). By enabling poor youth to lay claim to the respect that is accrued to the honorable, these moral systems provide them with an intangible route for social status as well as a unique scale that poor youth and their communities use to assess each other's honor. In this way, these two moral codes function as a type of stratification system hierarchy among youth in the lower classes. While the moral codes of honor and work are the means by which individual character is sustained, they also influence poor young people's ideas of what constitutes the good life (chapter 3). While these wants are not much different from the desires of the Iranian middle class, the ends - either honor or prestige - that each group sees as salient for pursuit are key for explaining differences in outcomes between the two classes. Furthermore, different combinations of contingencies shape how successful poor youth are in realizing their pursuits. The tools that poor youth themselves bring to the table including their social contacts, street smarts and risk-taking abilities in combination with their limited opportunities for formal sector employment and beliefs in divine determinism operate to either facilitate or thwart poor young people's ability to get what they want.In attempting to pursue their wants, poor youth deploy various strategies that revolve around accumulation and investment (chapter 4). Placing effort by accumulating and investing is consistent with these young people's adoption of the Muslim work ethic and the moral code of honor. For the former, effort is instrumental to socio-economic achievement; for the latter, undertaking strategies to escape poverty is critical for the young person to be able to support his family in order to maintain his honor and subsequently enhance his social standing. However, the presence of facilitating and constraining factors, not the least of which include the individual's place of residence, his/her familial ethos and his/her ability to take on moderate risks influence the extent to which the poor youth will be able to bring his/her efforts to fruition. Moreover, strategies such as accumulating capital to start a business or investing by participating in mutual exchange networks are contingent on the resources that the individual can bring into effect. As such, the individual's own initiative must be placed within the context of the social and economic resources that he can bring into his quest for upward mobility. For instance, while participating in gift-giving and exchange networks adds to the coffers of the poor youth, it only does so if the poor youth has been able to oblige his end of the reciprocal exchange. In this way, the success of a particular socio-economic strategy is dependent on the interaction between individual initiative and the resources that the poor youth has at his/her disposal for undertaking a particular course of action. The findings of this dissertation show that attempts to explain the nature of poverty among poor youth in Iran cannot ignore the salient role that cultural systems play in shaping poor people's strategies of action. The strategies that poor young people deploy to better their lives emerge as a result of a particular type of social environment found in Iranian society that is centered on the dual pursuits of honor and work. Poor young people's strategies subsequently materialize as a cultural response that seeks to improve their social standing and economic positioning within this social world. Providing explanations of how individuals in the Middle East respond to poverty requires us to move beyond static theoretical perspectives of political agency and toward an understanding of the widely diverse nature of poor people's struggles that reflect the highly integrative nature of urban poverty. It is only by doing so that we can sharpen our theories of poverty to reflect how conditions of economic deprivation persist, how they provide a sense of purpose to actors who are caught in them, and how they can ultimately be overcome.

1. Street children, AIDS orphans, and unprotected minors : what you read is not what you see / Lewis Aptekar -- 2. Longitudinal repeated ethnography : theoretical implications for a cultural, social class and gendered understanding of children on the streets in Kenya / Philip L. Kilbride -- 3. Refugees in the Middle East : identity politics among Sahrawi, Palestinian, and Afghan youth / Dawn Chatty -- 4. No balm in Gilead : childhood, suffering, and survival in Haiti / J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat -- 5. Children at toxic risk / Javier Auyero -- 6. (Im)permeable boundaries : why integration into affluent white-majority schools for low-income minority students is elusive / Prudence L. Carter.

This volume brings together ethnographers conducting research on children living in crisis situations in both developing and developed regions, taking a cross-cultural approach that spans different cities in the global North and South to provide insight and analyses into the lifeworlds of their young, at-risk inhabitants. Looking at the lived experiences of poverty, drastic inequality, displacement, ecological degradation and war in countries including Haiti, Argentina and Palestine, the book shows how children both respond to and are shaped by their circumstances. Going beyond conventional im.