An Iranian Seminarian Woman Navigating Religious Conservatism and Secularism

This presentation is part of a chapter of a forthcoming book (2024) about *howzevi* or seminarian women who use their Islamic education to do the work of supporting the Islamic Republic of Iran. They are women historically caricatured as puppets of the Islamic Republic. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tehran, I complicate this narrative by demonstrating how a young seminarian woman's use of Islamic knowledge helped her navigate religious conservatism in a women’s seminary and secularism in her extracurricular English classes. In doing so, I argue for the importance of anthropology’s humanizing endeavor at a time in Iran when it has become easy to disregard women’s diverse experiences.