فصلنامه تحقیقات فرهنگی ایران
سال پانزدهم شماره 4 (پیاپی 60، زمستان 1401)

Adolescence is associated with changes in one’s life including his/her behavior, emotions, and mood. One of the issues less studied about adolescents is how they deal with and receive music. Adolescents raised in the religious environment experience challenges in the process of consuming music, with girls finding themselves in a more complex situation. The main purpose of this study is to study adolescent girls' perceptions of music consumption considering their well-being in the religious cultural context. Questions such as: how do they look at the music they consume, what factors affect their perception of it, how they think about music from a religious point of view and how they approach music according to their religious background, are among the research questions.  To answer and finding the factors affecting the reception of music by adolescent girls with religious cultural backgrounds, unstructured interviews were conducted with 23 adolescent girls who have grown up in religious cultural backgrounds and studying in schools with a religious educational approach.  Based on the analysis, 4 comprehensive themes on central issue of this research were identified and it was found that adolescent girls' perception of music is influenced by family, society and how they look at religion, even some see music in the same light as they view religious eulogies.

The concept of beauty in the contemporary society is closely linked to gender. In this research, the concept of makeup and beauty has been explored from the perspective of women by using qualitative method techniques. Therefore, 35 young women of Tehran city were interviewed through in-depth and semi-structured questionnaire, and the samples were selected based on theoretical sampling and theoretical saturation. After extracting primary, secondary, and intermediate concepts of the three main categories, i.e. 1- general areas of beauty and signs, 2- make-up; and 3- consumption of media, the need for beauty and make-up was determined. The results show that make-up and beauty are defined as an important activity for young women. Beauty and makeup are intertwined with people's lifestyle and are adjusted and coordinated by it i.e., the amount and manner of makeup of women changes with their understanding of the culture that governs different environments, the type and gender of the audience, the amount of communication and the type of activity. It can be stated that make-up and beauty provide women with the possibility of creating many social relationships. In the analysis and interpretation of the interviews, we found a range of reasons such as increasing social capital, coercion or group conformity, building a new identity and self-idealism, and increasing self-confidence in explaining why makeup is done.

With the beginning of modernization in Iran during the Reza Shah period and following the implementation of control and disciplinary policies, the female body, which was previously marginalized, entered the center of politics. Although Mohammad Reza Shah lacked the political power his father enjoyed but he tried to continue his predecessor’s policies. In the early second Pahlavi era, with the decline of the political power of the government, a freer political atmosphere was provided to the press. During this period, women publications began to represent the political and social conditions of Iranian women. At that time, one of the controversial issues in women's magazines was the concept of embodiment. In this research, using the content analysis method, the concept of female embodiment in the "Bidāri-ye Mā" monthly magazine between 1944 and 1949 has been studied. Three main forms of embodiment are recognized in this journal: Traditional embodiment, puppet embodiment, and warrior embodiment. By criticizing the two forms of traditional and puppet embodiment, the magazine has determined its ideal image of the body form which was warrior embodiment. Although the magazine's ideal embodiment criticized other forms of embodiment due to the imposition of strict rules, this embodiment too imposed strict rules on the female body.

Sunni-dominated areas in Kermanshah have become the base of various Islamic discourses, including Salafism. Considering the presence, activism and expansion of Salafism in these areas, the present study aims to analyze the lifestyle of Salafists through narrative analysis method. It was found that the leisure experiences of these people are limited but purposeful and health-oriented, and they usually turn to the virtual space for the promotional reason.While observing simplicity and skepticism towards new foods, jurisprudence-based food abstinence and hospitality are the coordinates of Salafists' style, and their spending priority is focused on basic needs. In terms of clothing and makeup, while avoiding conspicuous consumption, they believe in the superiority of trimness over makeup, traditional clothing, biological and functional consumption. In body management, along with modern medicine and physical fitness, they emphasize conditional cosmetic surgery while prohibiting sterilization and avoiding abortion.In arranging their houses, they usually avoid luxury but pay special attention to functional aspects and cultural goods.In cultural consumption, they emphasize not to identify with Iranian television channels, have the dual acknowledgment of good and evil in the use of cultural means, the use of the Internet to establish religious identity, and targeted filtering.While avoiding the consumption of movies, cinema and music, they welcome multilingualism. According to the field data, the lifestyle of the studied Salafists has the nature of "jihadi", "return to tradition" and "resistance".

NEETs as those who neither study nor have a job or profession, have been the topic in statistical and social discussions of countries in recent years, in which, Iran's contribution to this concept is close to zero. This research is an ethnographic study about the lifestyle of NEETs in Tehran. Among the definitions related to the two concepts of NEETs and lifestyle, Bourdieu's perspective on lifestyle has been chosen as the central theme and concept of this research. This is a qualitative research that has been carried out in two stages of ethnographic study and semi-structured interview where a total of 30 interviews were conducted with targeted exploratory-chain sampling and with maximum diversity until reaching the conceptual saturation. The qualitative data was evaluated through foundational data theory and thematic analysis method. Finally, 5 main categories (identity, timing, biological consumption, virtual consumption and health and beauty) and 13 sub-categories were ascertained, which showed that the lifestyle of NEETs is mostly formed around the issue of identity. In other words, they identify biological and virtual consumptions, beauty and healthcare and even time in virtual space. Their collective activities are with other NEET youth who share a similar lifestyle and care about appearances, from the way they dress to cosmetic surgery. Most of them do not have a vision for the future and only enjoy the moment and do not see the need to participate in future building.

The present research, using a qualitative approach, tries to examine the shaping components of unfinished mourning during the covid-19 pandemic in the city of Sanandaj. To achieve this goal, the concepts of worry, guilt, meaningful-meaningless death confrontation, the mental suffering of victims’ families and discourse were used as a conceptual framework. In the field study, the postmodern grounded theory was used whereas the data were gathered through in-depth qualitative interviews. Samples were selected through the purposive sampling method with the maximum variety and finally 15 participants were interviewed and the collected data were coded and analyzed in the form of eleven central categories. The results show that unfinished mourning are formed under the influence of spatial, technological, therapeutic-health, psychological, organizational-medical, social, cultural, discursive, philosophical-ideological and bureaucratic regulation components; in a way that the medical discourse, by shaping the laws of organizations and institutions such as cemeteries, hospitals and public places, causes the non-performance of burial rituals, funerals, obituaries, compliance with health protocols, drug consumption, avoidance of relatives and neighbors and family tensions.  In turn, it has led to the feeling of emptiness, meaninglessness of life, delaying relief and finally, the persistent grief of mourners. Therefore, the mourners’ experience during the pandemic is the experience of connection with the medical discourse and the social space, meaning that our social world can only be understood in the form of discourse.