Pardis Mahdavi

As we continue to monitor the situation in Afghanistan, many are concerned about the safety of women and young children in the country. Taliban fighters are notorious for taking young women, particularly as their brides. Dean Pardis Mahdavi is the head of social sciences at ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and has family connections in Afghanistan—we talked about the ordeal earlier.

Some people have origin stories. Pardis Mahdavi has a hyphenation story. Her Iranian family was the target of a hate crime in Minnesota. She was stripped of her citizenship in Iran. Eventually she embraced the hyphen between the words ‘Iranian’ and ‘American’ as her identity: two cultures within one person. But what exactly is the function of a hyphen? Does it unite two ideas, or divide them?

The political impact of the United States pulling out of Afghanistan has received a lot of coverage, including whether the Biden administration’s handling of the process is hurting the president in polls and could affect 2022 House and Senate races. But the most striking images are of residents of Afghanistan trying to get help to leave the country, likely in fear of Taliban rule.

Changing Hands Bookstore presents Pardis Mahdavi, author of "Hyphen," dean of social sciences and director of the School of Social Transformation at ASU in a virtual event on Monday, June 21, 2021 at 6 p.m. To hyphenate or not to hyphenate has been a central point of controversy since before the imprinting of the first Gutenberg Bible. And yet, the hyphen has persisted, bringing and bridging new words and concepts. "Hyphen" follows the story of the hyphen from antiquity – the word "hyphen" is

We Should Be Hyphenating the Fuck Out of Everything In the summer of 2007, Pardis Mahdavi stood before a podium at the University of Tehran and prepared to speak about the Iranian sexual revolution. She'd been studying the cultural movement for the last seven years, and she wanted to go live with the results before her book on the topic, Passionate Uprisings, published in the United States. With her anthropological work, Mahdavi, whose parents had immigrated to the U.S. while she was still in

A Social and Personal History of the Hyphen To hyphenate or not to hyphenate, that is the question. It has been a central point of controversy since before the imprinting of the first Gutenberg Bible. And yet, the hyphen has persisted, bringing and bridging new words and concepts. In conversation with Rich Smith, Associate Editor of The Stranger, academic and anthropologist Pardis Mahdavi shares an introduction to the hidden life of an ordinary thing—the hyphen. With support from her book Hyph