Danae Khorasani

Lecturer
M.A. University of California, Riverside, 2012

Expertise:
Labor and social reproduction, political economy, gender and labor, human evolution, property and ownership, Hawaiʻi/Pacific

Clark Hall 463
408-924-6545
danae.khorasani@sjsu.edu

Danae Khorasani received her PhD in 2023 and is an anthropologist whose research examines labor, social reproduction, and political economy across both human evolutionary and contemporary contexts. Her work focuses on how dominant narratives and institutional arrangements organize labor, care, ownership, and access to resources, and on how women’s labor, caregiving, and agency are often obscured within those processes. Her published work addresses women in human evolution and the sexual division of labor, as well as historic shifts in labor and land relationships in Hawaiʻi. Across these projects, she asks how political-economic arrangements structure the division of labor and access to resources, and how those arrangements are reproduced and contested.

Selected Publications:
Khorasani, Dänae G., and Sang-Hee Lee. 2025. “Demystifying the Sexual Division of Labor: A Look from Human Evolution.” In The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Anthropology, edited by Pamela L. Geller, 171–184. London: Routledge. ISBN 9781032432045

Khorasani, Dänae G. 2023. “Fractured Ownership and the Tragedy of the Anticommons in Hawaiʻi.” Economic Anthropology 10(2): 223–232. DOI: 10.1002/sea2.12287

Khorasani, Dänae G., and Sang-Hee Lee. 2019. “Women in Human Evolution Redux.” In Evaluating Evidence in Biological Anthropology, edited by Cathy Willermet and Sang-Hee Lee, 11–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/9781108569125.002