Department of Sociology

Aghil Daghagheleh is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology, Rutgers University. He is currently a graduate fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University (CCA) and recently finished a project on social movements and electoral politics in Iran. In his current research project, "Refusal: Resistance, Subjectivity, and Construction of Arabness in Iran," Aghil explores the geography of social marginalization in contemporary Iran, a topic which brings together research on the politics of marginalized communities, social movements, race and ethnic relations, nationalism, political economy, religion, and resistance. Through an ethnographic study of the everyday experiences and politics of Arab minority, Aghil shows how ethnicity becomes a significant facet of subaltern politics and explores modalities of resistance, subversion, negotiation, and refusal that marginalized communities deploy to cope with the effects of ethnoreligious nationalism and to unsettle ethnicity, nationhood, and citizenship, as major products of state classification. He problematizes the notions of citizenship and belonging in the Islamic Republic by highlighting the work of classification in perpetuating structures of power and forms of everyday domination and resistance. Aghil is also participating in a comparative research project, "The Rise of The Peripheral," that explores the conflicts about the extraction of natural resources that are increasingly expressed in indigenous, ethnic, racial, and decolonial terms. He works with Dr. Zakia Salime (Rutgers) to examines the collective and individual forms of resistance at the nexus of neoliberal economics and political authoritarianism in the United States, Morocco, and Iran.