Social classes in Iran and Turkey

The Global Studies Seminars, an interdisciplinary intellectual forum for the Denison community to discuss and debate academic and policy issues of global importance, welcomes Professor Sohrab Behdad and Professor Farhad Nomani presenting, "Reconfiguration of Social Classes in Iran and Turkey in the past Decades: An Empirical Study." Why Class? • Class is the primary source of inequalities in capitalist societies, only accentuated by differentiation and discrimination by race, ethnicity and gender in specific historical contexts. • All contemporary social movements challenging the existing social inequalities, regardless of their ideological foundations, are, as E.O. Wright says, “countering the exploitation logic of capitalism.” • Our project is empirical and quantitative. We believe in what R. Crompton and J. Gubbay stand for: “abstract theories stand or fall by the illumination they lend to empirical material." Why Iran and Turkey? Two non-Arab, majority Muslim countries of nearly equal size (population and economy) with many historical similarities, particularly in their path of capitalist development in the 20th Century.