Limited space and RSVP required by Feb. 14, 2023. Please note, a separate RSVP is needed for the Reception and Film Screening. Filming of conference proceedings is prohibited.
The Iranian Diaspora in Global Perspective conference will feature new and cutting-edge scholarship in the growing multi-disciplinary field of Iranian Diaspora Studies. Across two days of panels, over 50 scholars and practitioners selected from a call for presentations will gather in Los Angeles to share their work and reflect on the past, present, and future of the Iranian diaspora. Films will be shown in the Redwood Room at the Faculty Center during the conference, the short film schedule can be viewed HERE.
The Conference is the culmination of a year-long collaboration between three institutional co-sponsors: the Center for Near Eastern Studies at University of California, Los Angeles; the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University; and the Iranian & Persian Gulf Studies Program at Oklahoma State University.
Concurrent panels will take place in the afternoons.
Tentative Schedule of Events (subject to change)
Day 1: Thursday, February 16, 2023
8:45 – 9:00 AM Welcome Remarks
Ali Behdad, UCLA
9:00 – 10:30 AM Global Iranian Diaspora Studies: Critical Reflections on the State of the Field
Moderator: Persis Karim, San Francisco State University
Methodological De-Nationalism and Multilayered Diasporas
Shahram Khosravi, Stockholm University
Transnational Feminism and Iranian Diaspora Studies
Manijeh Moradian, Barnard College
Historicizing "Women's Rights/Human's Rights" in Iran and the Diaspora
Nima Naghibi, Toronto Metropolitan University
The Idiom of the Iranian Diaspora
Nasrin Rahimieh, UC Irvine
10:30 – 10:50 AM Break
10:50 – 12:20 PM Articulations of Transnational Politics
Moderator: Afshin Matin-Asgari, California State University Los Angeles
Affects of Solidarity: Iranian Foreign Students and Third World Internationalism
Manijeh Moradian, Barnard College
The Global Mobility of Affluence: Jewish Iranian Migration in the Wake of the 1973
Oil Crisis
Teal Mingledorff, Oxford University
The Trajectory of Iran Regime Change Discourse in the Digital Diaspora
Nahid Siamdoust, University of Texas, Austin
12:20 – 1:20 PM Lunch Break
1:20 – 2:50 PM Race, Class, and (Un)Belonging in Diaspora
Moderator: Loubna Qutami, UCLA
Are We a Part of this, too? Political Consciousness among Second-Generation
Iranians
Sahar Sadeghi, Muhlenberg College
"Wearing the Homeland": Sanctions Capitalism and the Racial Politics of Iranian
American Consumerism
Parmida Mostafavi, New York University
Iranians and the "Sense of Brown": Articulating Frameworks of Solidarity in the
Global South
Ida Yalzadeh, Harvard University
US Federal Race/Ethnicity Categories, the MENA Question, and Suggestive
Evidence for the Case of Iranian Americans
Neda Maghbouleh, University of Toronto
1:20 – 2:50 PM Diasporic Narratives of the Past, Present, and Future
Moderator: Domenico Ingenito, UCLA
Borderless Genres, Flexible Forms, Digital Futures: Neocolonial Precarity and the
Iranian Diasporic Techno-Lyric
Marie Ostby, Connecticut College
"Do you want pain to be your legacy?": On Death and Dying in the Diaspora in
Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde's What We Owe
Allia Ida Griffin, Santa Clara University
Contemporary Iranian Writings in Australia
Laetitia Nanquette, University of New South Wales, Sydney
Narrating the Past, Rewriting the History in Negar Djavadi's Disoriental (2018)
Farzaneh Ebrahimzadeh Holasu, University of Nevada, Reno
2:50 – 3:10 PM Break
3:10 – 4:40 PM Against Reduction: Unpacking How the Iranian Diaspora is Imagined and
Studied
Moderator: Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University
Unexpected Intimacies: Tracing the Ties that Bind Iran and Oceania
Tala Khanmalek, California State University, Fullerton
Refusing Representation: A Materialist Approach to Diaspora Studies
Tahereh Aghdasifar, California State University, Dominguez Hills
No More Pomegranates: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Iranian Diaspora
Alexander Jabbari, University of Minnesota
From Not Without my Daughter to Tehran: Representations of Iranians in Western
Cultural Productions
Rojeen Harsini, University of Southern California
3:10 – 4:40 PM Diasporic Performance & Cultural Production
Moderator: Laetitia Nanquette, University of New South Wales, Sydney
The Pleasant Pain: Performing “New Generation” Iranian Immigrant Bittersweetness
in Aisan Hoss’s Dance-Theatre
Heather Rastovac Akbarzadeh
Queer Iranian Futurity: Elasticity and Static in Contemporary Diasporic Performance
Art
Nat Nesvaderani, Laval University, Canada
The Second Narration - Negotiations of Emprisonment, Flight and Intergeneration
Trauma in Theatre Plays by German Iranians
Azadeh Sharifi, University of Toronto
Double Trouble: Claiming Complex British-Iranian Womanhood Through Cultural
Production
Leila Dara, Utrecht University
5:30 PM Reception & Film Screening at Fowler Museum, separate RSVP required.
Day 2: Friday, February 17, 2023
8:45 – 9:00 AM Welcome Remarks
Persis Karim, San Francisco State University Amy Malek, Oklahoma State University
9:00 – 10:30 AM Global Iranian Migrations and Circulations
Moderator: Amy Malek, Oklahoma State University
The New Demographics of the Iranian-American Diaspora
Kevan Harris, UCLA
Shiva Rouhani, UCLA
The Hungarian Gateway: New Waves of Iranian Immigrants and Using Hungary as a
Bridge to USA & Canada
Mehdi Jabbari Moqaddam, Eötvös Loránd University
Thoughts on an International Survey of Iranian Migration and Diaspora Scholarship
Houchang Chehabi, Boston University
World Making in Dubai: The Portrait of a Khodmooni Poetess (Southern Iran)
Between Two Shores
Amin Moghadam, Toronto Metropolitan University
10:30 - 10:50 AM Break
10:50 – 12:20 PM Diasporic Identities: Language, Food, Community
Moderator: Shervin Malekzadeh, Colgate University
Bilingualisms, Regimes of Im/Mobility,and the Performative Identities of Iranian
Americans in Michigan
Camron Amin, University of Michigan-Dearborn
Food, Identity, and Diasporic Iranianness
Amir Sayadabdi, Victoria University of Wellington
Imperial Nostalgia and Contests of Inclusion in the Iranian Diaspora
Amy Malek, Oklahoma State University
Portrait of a Bay Area Iranian Diaspora Community
Persis Karim, San Francisco State University
12:20 - 1:20 PM Lunch Break
1:20 – 2:50 PM Borders and/as State Violence: Film as Resistance
Moderator: Ali Behdad, UCLA
Iranian exiles and Australia's island prisons: Creativity as survival and resistance
Elahe Zivardar, Film-maker
Mehran Ghadiri, Film-maker
Omid Tofighian, University of New South Wales
Extreme Vetting
Payam Rowghanian, Film-maker
1:20 – 2:50 PM Stories, Places, and Spaces
Moderator: Camron Amin, University of Michigan-Dearborn
Vali, Valley
Arash Saedinia, Artist and Writer
Tehranto's Built Form and Stories of Our Suburban Survival
Paniz Moayeri, Ontario Association of Architects
Tales of Nostalgia and Solidarity from the Iranian Diaspora in Spain (2019-2022)
Sheida Besozzi, University of the Basque Country
Type-Face
Amir Arzanian, California State University, Los Angeles
Koroush Beigpour, Artist
2:50 – 3:10 PM Break
3:10 – 4:40 PM Diasporic Archival Creation and Creativity: Photographs, Performances, Histories
Moderator: Kevan Harris, UCLA
Soleil of Persian Square; an other landscape
Hannah Darabi
The Tavakoli Archives: Building an Archive of Iranian History in Toronto
Leila Pourtavaf, York University
Shabnam Rahimi Golkhandan, Yale University
Performing Historical Repair: Diaspora and the Family Album
Nazli Akhtari, University of Waterloo
To Die and Live Forever in LA: Iranian Diasporic Reanimations of the Pop Music
Archive
Farzaneh Hemmasi, University of Toronto
3:10 – 4:40 PM Spirituality and Communitarian Belonging
Moderator: Jeffrey Guhin, UCLA
Latin-American Missionaries and Iranian Refugees in Turkey: Dynamics of
Conversion in a Transnational Christian Network
Ana Maria Raietparvar, Universidade Federal Fluminense
To be Truly Shi’a in the Absence of Mosque: Shi’as in Italy and the Making of the
Space
Minoo Mirshahvalad, John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies
The Zoroastrian Community in British Columbia, Canada
Rastin Mehri, Simon Fraser University
Bozorg Bazgasht: Zoroastrian Return to Roots Movement in the Iranian Diaspora in
Europe
Ruzbeh Vistasb Hodiwala, School of Oriental and African Studies
E-mail Contact: CNES@international.ucla.edu Click
here for event website.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, This program is made possible by a generous gift from the Ebrahimi Family Foundation and is co-organized by Kevan Harris (UCLA), Persis Karim (SFSU), and Amy Malek (OSU) with the support of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University and the Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies program in the School of Global Studies at Oklahoma State University.