About

Kevan Harris is a Professor of Sociology at UCLA, focusing on the political economy of the Middle East, particularly Iran, and the global history of social policy and welfare states.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Anthropology
• Gender studies
• Law
• Art
• Physics
• Statistics
• Mathematics
• Philosophy
• Ethnology
• Linguistics
• Optics
• Development economics
• Economics
• Economic geography
• Economic system
• Aesthetics
• Geography
• Political economy

Selected publications

• Capitalism as a Concept of Difference in the Historiography of Iran

  Iranian Studies · 2023-04-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In the historiography of Iran, capitalism is commonly evoked as a “concept of difference.” By this, I mean that the term is regularly used to characterize socioeconomic phenomena as modern versus traditional, leading versus laggard, foreign versus indigenous, or hero versus villain in an assumed direction of history. As Jürgen Kocka remarked when coining the phrase, most definitions of capitalism since the nineteenth century have been used by intellectuals to distinguish experiences of their own time from either the past or the future. And it is in terms of this rhetorical function that its significance and limitations for Iranian historiography can be analyzed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• LABOUR REGIMES, SOCIAL REPRODUCTION AND BOUNDARY-DRAWING STRATEGIES ACROSS THE ARC OF US WORLD HEGEMONY

  Agenda Publishing eBooks · 2022-02-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Difference in difference: language, geography, and ethno-racial identity in contemporary Iran

  Routledge eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Geography
  • Anthropology
  PublisherDOI

• Labour Regimes, Social Reproduction and Boundary-Drawing Strategies Across the Arc of Us World Hegemony

  2022-01-31

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Difference in difference: language, geography, and ethno-racial identity in contemporary Iran

  Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2021 · 23 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • Sociology

  Three approaches to portraying ethno-racial and national identity for Iran are common: a discretizing approach that groups and conflates ethnicity, language and geography; a civic-territorial conception of nationalism as supra-ethnic Iranian-ness; and an ethno-nationalist approach that criticizes the former for privileging a state-centered, Persian-Shiite majority’s culture and status. Instead of arbitrating between them, we propose a sociological approach that compares different forms of ethno-racial self-identification in modern Iran. Using the 2016 Iran Social Survey, which asks open-ended questions on ethno-racial self-identification, we find wide variation in how ethnic identity is expressed. On the one hand, the findings suggest that a sizable degree of mismatch exists, where concepts of ethnic groupness are confusing or not fully recognizable to many individuals. On the other hand, we also find that multi-ethnic self-identification is common, including across the ethno-racial boundaries often portrayed as closed and mutually exclusive groups in Western discussions on Iran.

  PublisherDOI

• 4 Myths of Middle- Class Political Behavior in the Islamic Republic

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2021-04-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Front Matter

  American Journal of Sociology · 2020-07-01

  paratextOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 3. A Martyrs’ Welfare State and Its Contradictions: Regime Resilience and Limits through the Lens of Social Policy in Iran

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Unraveling the Middle Classes in Postrevolutionary Iran

  2020-09-22 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract One of the concepts most commonly evoked in order to characterize and explain the zig-zag trajectory of political dynamics in the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the “middle class.” Yet there is no scholarly consensus on a fundamental approach to identification and measurement of the middle class. Rather, the category of the middle class is both a category of analysis – long debated within social theory – as well as a category of practice – routinely deployed in political behavior and social distinction. In order to better conceptualize and understand the formation and role of Iran's middle classes in the country's sociopolitical dynamics, theories of class formation in the global South should be rearticulated away from a reified notion of the middle class as a transhistorical subject. To do so, this chapter is divided into four sections. First, internal debates over the role of Iran's middle classes in the country's recent political history are assessed and data from the 2016 Iran Social Survey is used to test a long-standing demographic assumption on the class dynamics of electoral behavior. Second, the tradition of theorizing the social power of middle classes is reassessed, drawing on the growing scholarly attention to the heterogenous origins and differentiated internal composition of middle classes across the global South. Third, a typology is proposed of four middle classes across the twentieth century shaped by varying state attempts at “catch-up” development. These types are then applied in a revisionist telling of the making and unmaking of middle classes in postrevolutionary Iran. Finally, implications of this framework beyond Iran are sketched out for global waves of protest in the twenty-first century.

  PublisherDOI

• Pandemic Politics in Iran

  Current History · 2020-11-19 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran and its reimposition of US sanctions put the Iranian economy back into a stranglehold and discredited the reformists led by President Hassan Rouhani who had secured the deal. With the country already reeling from the US sanctions, the COVID-19 pandemic has delivered a heavy blow. As political factions mobilize for the 2021 elections, the situation is more unpredictable than ever.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jan Breman

  Oxford University Press (United Kingdom)

  7 shared

• Marcel van der Linden

  International Institute of Social History

  6 shared

• Ching Kwan Lee

  6 shared

• Rasmus Christian Elling

  2 shared

• Phillip A. Hough

  Florida Atlantic University

  2 shared

• Brendan McQuade

  University of Southern Maine

  1 shared

• Andrew G. Fountain

  1 shared

• Jerry Sauter

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Sociology

  Johns Hopkins University

  2012

Awards & honors

• Nikki Keddie Book Award
• Political Economy Book Prize