Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic
Key information
- Date
- Venue
- Virtual Event
About this event
More than half of Iran's citizens were not alive at the time of the 1979 Revolution. Now entering its fifth decade in power, the Iranian regime faces the paradox of any successful revolution: how to transmit the commitments of its political project to the next generation. New media ventures supported by the Islamic Republic attempt to win the hearts and minds of younger Iranians. Yet members of this new generation—whether dissidents or fundamentalists—are increasingly skeptical of these efforts.
Iran Reframed offers unprecedented access to those who wield power in Iran as they debate and define the future of the Republic. Over ten years, Narges Bajoghli met with men in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Ansar Hezbollah, and Basij paramilitary organizations to investigate how their media producers developed strategies to court Iranian youth. Readers come to know these men—what the regime means to them and their anxieties about the future of their revolutionary project. Contestation over how to define the regime underlies all their efforts to communicate with the public. This book offers a multilayered story about what it means to be pro-regime in the Islamic Republic, challenging everything we think we know about Iran and revolution.
Recording
About the speaker
Narges Bajoghli is Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. She is an award-winning anthropologist, filmmaker, and writer.
Narges' academic research is at the intersections of media, power, and military in the Middle East. Her first project focused on regime cultural producers in Iran, and was based on ethnographic research with Basij, Ansar-e Hezbollah, and Revolutionary Guard media producers. The resulting book, Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic (Stanford University Press 2019) was awarded the 2020 Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology.
Narges received her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from New York University, where her dissertation was awarded the Dean's Outstanding Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences. She was also trained as a documentary filmmaker in NYU's Culture and Media Program. She is also an alumna of SOAS.
Registration
This webinar will take place online via Zoom.
The webinar will also be live-streamed on our Facebook page for those that are unable to participate via Zoom.
Chair: Narguess Farzad (SOAS)
Organiser: SOAS Middle East Institute and the Centre for Iranian Studies, SOAS
Contact email: smei@soas.ac.uk
