Sociology’s Sadri, Benjamin write on Iran’s culture revolution

Dec. 9, 2025 - DENTON - TWU sociology professor Mahmoud Sadri, PhD, and TWU PhD student Victoria Benjamin have published “The ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ Uprising in Iran and Abroad: Political or Culture Revolution?” an article in Cambridge Core, the online academic journal of Cambridge University.

The article examines Iran’s 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, coining the term “culture revolution” to underline this movement’s distinctive characteristic. While Iran’s cultural revolution (1982–84) forcefully usurped the country’s public, educational and artistic sphere, the culture revolution decisively ended the regime’s ideological domination of the public sphere.

Sadri and Benjamin explain how culture, using its innate resources of language, performativity, resignification, free play and the collective trauma process, successfully reclaimed the autonomy of the cultural sphere and the physical and moral integrity of its citizens.

Click here to read the article.