Ehsan Aqababaee

Ehsan Aqababaee currently serves as an associate professor at the University of Isfahan in Iran. His primary area of expertise is the sociology of Iranian cinema. He initiated his research by examining the role and position of men and women in Iranian cinema of the 1990s as a master’s degree student. Subsequently, he investigated the correlation between ideology and social reality through desire and fantasy in Iranian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s as a doctorate student. His subsequent book, ”Film and Iranian Society” (2022) in Persian, examines the representation of social institutions, social classes, women, ethnicity, and war in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. In a book titled “Film and Ideology in Iran,”(2023) Aqababaee, in collaboration with Rafiei, examined the relationship between reformist and fundamentalist discourses and the logic of representation in Iranian cinema in the 1980s. Aqababaee has published articles in Persian on the relationship between social classes, corporeality, social problems, religion, and intellectuals with the film industry in Iran. Her academic contributions include the publication of articles on the representation of women in Iranian cinema, the portrayal of students, and the depiction of social classes in English-language journals such as Contemporary Review of the Middle East, Critical Research on Religion, and Quality & Quantity.

Contributions

Ideology and Social Classes in Twenty-First Century Iranian Cinema

Figure 1: A still from the film Crazy Rook (Rukh-i dīvānah), directed by Abulhasan Dāvūdī, 2015. Abstract In Iranian cinema,…