Grad student proud to represent Iranian women at United Nations symposium

Negin Saheb Javaher admits that she didn’t expect a response when she sent in her proposal to make a presentation at the United Nations (UN) Commission on the Status of Women Symposium in New York last month. After all, as the first-year MA student from the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary says, “I’m just a newbie and I haven’t had any experience with international conferences. I didn’t expect I’d ever hear back from them.”

However, because she was encouraged by her supervisor, assistant sociology professor Pallavi Banerjee, Saheb Javaher decided to send her presentation proposal to the UN commission.

She’s now happy she did because in March she presented The Experiences of Female Rice Workers in Northern Iran (also the topic of her MA thesis) at the UN symposium. This is a highly impressive achievement, not only because of the significance of an event at the UN, but also because Saheb Javaher was the only student making a panel presentation at the symposium.

“It was an amazing experience to be there,” says Seheb Javaher, who recently completed her undergraduate degree in sociology from Simon Fraser University. “I felt like it was important to represent the University of Calgary at the symposium but also to be representing Iranian women. I’m from Iran and Iranian women have often been absent from these events because of visa restrictions. So, I felt it was very meaningful to have been at this table.”

Saheb Javaher spoke about how the northern region of Iran is being transformed from a place of agriculture to a hub of development, with buildings being erected where farms had been. “With this shrinking of the agricultural centre there comes many issues and I wanted to draw attention to these women who have worked the land,” she says. “They’re often not even considered as farmers, but they do the majority of the work and they have the knowledge. I want to ask, with all of these lands being sold to building projects, what happens to these women? This is what I’ve begun to explore.”

With her MA project underway, Saheb Javaher has big plans for her academic future, including completing her PhD in sociology. In addition, she is doing an internship in India this summer, as part of the Queen Elizabeth Jubilee Scholarship program, and she hopes to one day land an internship at the UN.

“I want to pursue the field of development,” she says. “These experiences combine hands-on work with academia. I think that is the perfect training ground.”