 Hello and good evening to all our guests who are joining us in Europe and I would imagine a range of greetings, good morning, good midday to our friends in the United States and South America and perhaps good night we're ready to talk you in bed if you are in the Middle East and South Asia and Southeast Asia. It is an absolute pleasure to welcome you all and of course first and foremost welcome our tonight's speaker Dr Nargis Barjokli. My name is also Nargis Farzad and I wear several hats. I am the senior lecturer in Persian and chair of Center for Iranian Studies and with my wonderful tireless colleague Dr Dina Matta chair of Center for Palestinian Studies we put together the lectures famously known on our Tuesday evening Middle East series lectures for the London Middle East Institute. It's our last lecture of term one and it really is wonderful to be able to have a speaker who knows her field so well and has been a student of this field as well as now a scholar and a teacher. Nargis Barjokli is a wonderful, she's really home from home because I think Nargis John was in the early 2000s I think that she spent what was then called as the junior year abroad at SOAS with us. As you know we always say that the speaker needs no introduction but this is really indeed true of Nargis. Nargis is currently assistant professor at the University of Middle East Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She is not just an award-winning writer but she is also a filmmaker and writes outside academia as well. She is a regular contributor to the media global media including BBC World Service and all the US and other media outputs. As you know we try to invite our guest to this lecture series who have had a book published in the past 12 to 14 months and we've been trying in fact to get Nargis for a while but she has a lot of teaching and research commitments so finally she very graciously squeezed us in at the end of her teaching term and the reason that we're very keen to have Nargis speak to us is the book her recent book which is Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic. Iran Re-Framed so the main title is Iran Re-Framed and it is extraordinarily fascinating that Nargis' research for this book was very much in situ and many of the people who feature in her book are people who she interviewed in person. I know that in these days of online access you can all look like this often read her extraordinary output for such a young academic so I won't take any of her time and I know you're not here to listen to me. So Nargis John as you know it gives me an absolute personal as well as institutional pleasure to welcome you back home. It is of course online but I feel you are back at SOAS. Thank you for accepting our invitation and the floor, the internet, the Wi-Fi is yours and also of course all you people out there I have to apologize that if I disappear or my screen goes peculiar it's because the landline. Do you remember landline? Those good old days will ring and when that happens my internet drops so if I disappear you need not worry because wonderful Aki Alborzi who of course I should have thanked first and performers will be at the helm and Nargis will talk away. So I should put myself on mute but I present Dr. Nargis for your plea to you. Thank you so much Nargis. It's wonderful to be here. I only wish that I could be present and with you all in person at SOAS. It's one of my favorite places on the entire planet that year that I spent there. I learned so much and I go back to thinking about it constantly. I really appreciate this invitation. I love being here with all of you and I look forward to your questions. I also really want to thank Professor Nargis Farzad and Professor Dina Matar for inviting me to give this talk and Aki Alborzi for all of the help that he's given throughout as we're getting ready for the talk today. I just want to quickly apologize because I have a dog who's gotten a little bit older and he will maybe be snoring so if you hear snoring it's him and I do have a little daughter who's out right now but in case she barges in you'll you'll sort of know who that is. I'm going to give a brief talk about the book as I've been asked to do. I'm going to share some images as well for about the first half of the talk and I'll take it back down. I'll stop sharing my screen at that point so let me just pull that up for you really quickly and then we can get started. Hold on one second. I think I have the wrong one up. There we go. Okay so I was sitting in a production meeting with a group of commanders of the Revolutionary Guard who were in charge of media production in Iran. About 20 minutes into the discussions of the films that they were going to be producing for the new Iranian year one of the commanders in the room said this youngest generation doesn't care about our religious language anymore. We're wasting our time with the things that we make. They don't care about it that's why so many of them were in the streets protesting against our system last year. It had been just over let's see if I can change this. There we go. It had been just over two years since the 2009 Green Movement in Iran which at that time was the biggest mass uprisings in the country since the 1979 revolution. I had joined these men in numerous meetings since that uprising and in each they contemplated what had made so many young Iranians come out into the streets and the numbers that they had and the demonstrations went from where is my vote to very quickly turning into slogans of down with the dictator. The slogans of the 2009 Green Movement were actually eerily similar and some were facsimiles to the 1979 slogans of the revolution. Demonstrations in which many of the men in the Revolutionary Guard had participated in as teenagers at the time. In that same meeting that I spoke about one commander of the Revolutionary Guard whose wife and children had joined the Sea of Protesters in 2009 said to his colleagues these kids don't care about the revolutionary stories we've told them the past 30 years and that's our fault. We can't blame them. We haven't properly communicated our stories to them. We need to bring them back to our side by telling them better stories. Now what does it mean to have the commanders of Iran's most powerful military apparatus the very force in charge of defending the revolution admit that the majority of the population no longer understands the regime's revolutionary and religious language. My book starts with the classic paradox of any successful revolutionary movement namely how does the commitment from a revolutionary project get transmitted from one generation to the next as historical circumstances change or to put it in different terms what happens when a revolution becomes the status quo and the the revolutionary government then tries to communicate the commitment to a revolution to its younger generations without inducing them and creating a new revolutionary movement against what has now become the status quo. So to answer this I did fieldwork over a 10-year period in Iran with the passage paramilitary organization and the Revolutionary Guard and in particular with their media and cultural producers in order to understand how they envision the future of the Islamic Republic as it enters its fifth decade. So what can we gain from understanding the Islamic Republic from those charged with communicating what it stands for? I started my research thinking that most of my time would be spent with Revolutionary Guard media producers on films and work that targeted those generations of young people who had risen up against the state in 2009 and while there was a lot of that the discussions behind closed doors focused much more on heated debates among the different generations of the Revolutionary Guard and Besiege particularly the first generation who fought in the war the war of the 1980s between Iran and Iraq and who are now at the helm of power and those who are the third generation of the revolution and at the time that I was doing my research they were mostly in their 20s and early 30s so a big part of this book is looking deeply at generational changes in revolutionary systems. A revolutionary state has the dual project of appealing to citizens while simultaneously defining what the revolutionary project will mean over the long term. How to achieve this goal without losing the revolution altogether is a contentious question. Now there's been such a wealth of scholarship on areas of resistance to the Islamic Republic but our understanding of the state remains two-dimensional and our notions of those who make up Iran's arms and paramilitary forces are caricatures and by shining an ethnographic lens on media producers of the Islamic Republic I found a state much like any state project around the world and we can see this much more clearly now in the COVID era that is in the constant process of becoming. The concerns of the men of the Islamic Republic and those who helped create its vast media output were not confined to religion and Islamic politics rather they tended to focus on class generational differences and social mobility so as much as this is a book about new media productions it's also about deeper social phenomenon. Those who have viewed Iran's politics over the past 40 years exclusively through the lens of Islam have overlooked important social dynamics that undergird the regime. My findings led me to question not only the existing depictions of these men but more generally the predominant frame of analysis when it comes to understanding the Islamic Republic. Since 1979 when revolution swept through a country that just one year prior the US president Jimmy Carter had been into Iran and had toasted as an island of stability American policymakers and Western policymakers more generally have scrambled to understand an upheaval that not only blindsided them but that expressed a deeply felt anti-imperialism as Iranians demanded independence from Washington. US news media at the time of the revolution and this is my newer project that I'm working on described Iranian society as quote possessed by madness and Iranians is blinded by a religious forever and seeking martyrdom at all costs. Such explanations may have answered an immediate need to understand on simple terms and to undermine the revolutionary government and the aging editorial at its helm. In essence over time this frame has hadn't had the effect of rendering the Iranian state and the revolution as irrational but this framework unfortunately has not evolved much in the four decades since 1979 and it's left us really ill-equipped to understand the Islamic Republic today. What happens I ask if we reframe our study of Iran from the vantage point of the supporters of the Islamic Republic if scholarly and public culture analysis has failed to understand the supporters of the Islamic Republic and all of their complexities over the past 40 years what happens if we take a different approach to contemporary power in Iran one that insists as anthropology the discipline from which I come from demands on an actual curiosity about the positions and worldviews of the Islamic Republic on their terms. So as a bit of a quick background I'm not going to go too much in it because I know the audience here already knows much of this but Iran has a bifurcated military apparatus so there's the formal military or what's called the Airtish and Persian that existed prior to the revolution and Ayatollah Khomeini feared that this military the Airtish would potentially stage a coup against him and the new revolutionary government once the Shah had left and so they he helped create the Revolutionary Guard Corps in 1979 and throughout the 1980s in the Iran-Iraq war the Revolutionary Guard got favored access and resources and so by the end of that war that eight-year war it developed into a parallel military organization like the like the formal military and the Basqueh paramilitary organization was created to recruit volunteers to the war front for the war effort in the post-war period there has been a lot of emphasis on how and thinking about how to demobilize the paramilitary organization throughout the 1990s and then there has been a lot of resources poured into them and fighting these soft wars that I'm going to get to in a little bit. Now today also it's important to note that about 75 percent of the population is under the age of 40 meaning that they don't remember the revolution or the war which are the two defining moments of the Islamic Republic and for those who are social scientists in the audience or who study societies you know how incredibly important foundational stories are to keeping state projects alive to those who are looking at what's happening in the United States for example and all the controversy that's boiled up over the New York Times's 1619 project as fundamentally questioning the foundational story of the United States goes to show you how when foundational stories are either not remembered correctly or begin to be questioned what an incredibly destabilizing effect that can have as far as how to then create a narrative about the state and what the state stands for so foundational stories are crucial and this was a really big part of the of the discussions of what was happening in Iran when I was doing my research. So Masoud Dehameke is the man with the megaphone in the middle of this picture. He's the founder of Ansar-e-Hezbollah in Iran and he's turned into one of the most commercially successful filmmakers in the country today. He started making films in the early 2000s and he said in an interview during the Iran-Iraq war we had to shed blood for the revolution and we did. Later we believed we should publish journals and books for the revolution and we did. Today we think cinema best expresses our goals so we make movies. But Dehameke was not just talking about technique he's speaking about a wholesale shift in emphasis for him the quest to make revolutionary subjects is a struggle to be waged in visual media. Dehameke represents a shift away from the blunt propaganda of the first two decades of the Islamic Republic to creating new entertainment to attract younger audiences. And it should be noted that Dehameke was in charge of leading paramilitary forces to squash the student uprisings and the University of Tahan overall but especially the dormitories in 1999. So he went from that kind of background to creating films that break box office records over and over again. And so that shift to me was really fascinating and I was following his blog at the time when people wrote more blogs and he talked about the need to create workshops for younger Basiji and Hezbollahi members to create more films like his and that's when I knew that this was the story that this was the research project I wanted to work on and I wanted to understand how those workshops functioned. Now first off every government around the world creates propaganda some are just more savvy at producing it than others. And second national militaries can be intimately involved with media production. A prominent example that scholars have long studied is the very close relationship between Hollywood studios some Hollywood studios and the US military. There are more recent studies out now by social scientists who look at the ways in which the Israeli and Colombian militaries for example are also active media producers. In the study of revolutionary governments scholars have done much work over the years on the Soviet Cuban Chinese cases for example. And although there is much much amazing scholarship on research on Iran one gap remains the media that's produced by the state which spends the most money on media production in the country. Now given how long it took me to gain access and what an inhospitable place Iran can be for long-term social scientific work it's not surprising that we don't have much scholarship especially in an ethnographic way that looks at this kind of media production. Now I'm going to very briefly talk about methods because of the nature of this research and because I know that it's a question that people often have. As an anthropologist I sought to do long-term research. I knew I didn't just want to rely on interviews because like state elites the world over they would only give me formulaic answers and if I wanted formulaic answers I could look in the newspapers I could look at press releases I wanted to go beyond that. I wanted to know not only about their work but to see them produce it to be present as their projects evolved as they sat down in the in the studios their editing rooms to understand where the funding was coming from because that was where the rich data was. But doing long-term participant observation in this project was not straightforward. I had been working on these issues for many years at first in relation to war veterans exposed to chemical war weapons as you can see in the slide that's up here. I directed an oral history project at the Tehran Peace Museum which is the picture that I'm in with some of the veterans and folks at the Tehran Peace Museum and also directed a documentary film The Skin That Burns about chemical weapons survivors from the Iran-Iraq war. It was only because I had already worked closely with veterans exposed to chemical warfare for four years that I was later able to get my foot in the door with their media producers. In my earlier work with veterans I got to know some of the main doctors and veterans involved in the care of the war wounded and I showed them that I could be respectful of their worldview and empathetic to them as human beings even if I did not agree with them. So once I had decided on this research I mentioned it to them and one of them in particular who was a war veteran turned physician introduced me to key media makers throughout the country and especially in Tehran and he told them that he trusted me and it was only through this introduction from someone so well trusted within that world that I was able to get my foot in the door. Coming from what the regime considers a counter-revolutionary background with parents tied to the leftist movements of Iran and on my maternal side tied to high government positions in the Shah and Mossad death's governments and as an Iranian-American which we all know that the state sees as a potential spy or and more and more so unfortunately lately with Iranians from diaspora and especially academics it took another two years of constantly showing up at events and trying to set up meetings that I eventually convinced them to allow me into these spaces. I knew throughout that my social media presence my writings and even my cell phone conversations in Iran were being monitored during this early phase of research. Over time I was granted full access but I knew full well that the doors could shut on me at any moment yet what I did not expect was the degree to which the US government would attempt to curtail my academic freedom because I was doing research on a sanctioned country and because I'm a dual national. My university ended up spending tens of thousands of dollars on legal fees for me to be able to do this research something that most universities would not be willing to do especially for a graduate student at the time and they ended up hiring a big law firm in Washington DC to defend my right to do this research. In addition as an Iranian-American my loyalties were constantly questioned by the US government. As we know dual nationals are often the targets of aggressive foreign policy from Japanese Americans during World War II to Muslim Americans after 9-11 and I'm just talking about the US cases I know there's much more in places like the UK and other and other parts as well so this is an issue that that is really an issue that I think we need to constantly talk about as researchers. As I wrote in an academic paper that I had come out last December being a researcher that's seen as a national security threat is not just the domain of authoritarian regimes over there but very much the domain of our governments right here as well. Nonetheless I stood out in this environment because I was the only women female in most of the places that I was in even though I had spent a decade prior to this research living in Iran there was no way that I could blend into this crowd. Not only is the world of the revolutionary guard and vestige masculine but the media world is especially masculinized. This is very different from the non-regime media world because Iran actually boasts one of the highest numbers of female directors in the world and within the bastige there's actually a very large contingent of women in these organizations but they do not focus on film production they're much more involved in oral history recordings writing of stories and I'm happy to go into some of the gender dynamics of the media world in the pro-regime sort of sphere during Q&A if anyone is interested. Methodologically I was a participant observer in editing rooms production meetings funding meetings on film shoots and during the sob titling of films. Since I was trained as a filmmaker myself they took me more seriously throughout the whole process and asked me to participate in all the workshopping sessions about the different stages of the films that were being made. I also went on many domestic and international trips with different filmmakers and producers as they were distributing their work in order to get a sense of how they were presenting their work to different audiences. Now we tend to think of the revolutionary garden bastige as homogenous groups of men when the supreme leader gives an order it's followed down the line however what I discovered are men who work in ad hoc ways fight over resources and disagree with one another all the time in other words they were far from uniform or cohesive and I'm going to stop sharing my screen because that's the end of the slides. One of my main interlocutors who in the book I called Mr. Ahmadi joined the 2009 Green Movement with his family he's a veteran of the war and he had both of his legs blown off by a bomb and so when he enters any kind of place outside of his home he's very readily seen and identified as someone who is pro-regime. Now what do I mean by that because of the way revolutionary citizenship was regulated based on dress in Iran sartorial choices end up mattering not just for reasons of fashion per se but because they signal some kinds of revolutionary belonging the friend enemy divide that's been written a lot about in the soviet and other cases and in Iran it's it divides itself into the hodji or qaeda hodji the us versus them and so when Mr. Ahmadi and his family joined the protesters in 2009 the bastige who were in charge of suppressing the protests had begun to single out families like his if the green movement was supposed to be anti-revolutionary then people like Mr. Ahmadi and his family should not be a part of it especially when they could be so visibly identified as being supporters of the regime but yet also a part of the screen movement uprising. The first two days when he went out into the streets with his family nothing happened to them but by the third day when they began to clamp down on the and suppress the movement that day he got beaten he was beaten so badly he got pushed he got knocked out of his wheelchair and a few weeks afterwards he got kicked out of a very prominent cultural center by loyalist of then president Ahmadinejad during his second term in office. The Mr. Ahmadi was not dismayed he believed that he and his cohort had just as much of a say over what the future of the Islamic Republic should look like as this youngest generation and so he ended up opening his own production studio and started making regime media for freelance and he started becoming a freelance producer and because of his connections within the pro-regime world he had access to different forms of funding and the ability to get the films that he was making and the content that his young filmmakers were making into television and film movies and film festivals. By forefronting these issues I'm able to show how contestation in the Islamic Republic is not just between the regime and the people or the old generation versus the young generation as it's often sort of presented. Instead through an ethnographic lens on the supporters of the Islamic Republic this book illustrates how contestation in Iran today involves conflict over the very boundary of what the regime and the revolution are. Let me illustrate a bit what I mean by this intergenerational divide. So one afternoon in I was in central Tehran at the Art University and I had been attending weekly meetings put on by the university's Bastej and Hezbollah organizations and the student Bastej organizations on university campuses is by far one of the most hard line elements on university campuses and especially in the aftermath of the 2009 movement they were in charge of consistently looking out and trying to suppress any kind of organizing that was happening on campus. So in these meetings at the art university they would invite regime filmmakers to discuss and show their work and sort of have a workshop with them and that day they had invited someone in the book who I call Mr. Hosaini who is a leading regime filmmaker and was a captain of the Revolutionary Guard. Mr. Hosaini is a leader in the first generation of Revolutionary Guard film producers and he's trying to build a new media strategy to engage the young people who have protested against the green who have protested against the state and the green movement. During this meeting at the art university Mr. Hosaini was telling students in attendance that regime media had failed and that they needed to work on projecting a much more inclusive vision of the Islamic Republic to be able to reach out in a way and bridge the divide with the younger generation. The leader of the student Bastej organization got up in the middle of Mr. Hosaini's talk he pointed his his finger very angrily at him and he said your generation may be tired of confrontation but not ours. When we left that meeting Mr. Hosaini turned to me really exacerbated and he said these young Bastejis don't realize that distancing ourselves from the general public is what got us into this mess that we now face. We need to reach out to the other side that's protecting us not alienate them as these kids once. You know what their problem is? They don't know what it's like to be marginalized in society. They don't remember because they were born after the revolution. All they've ever known is a system in which our side has been in power. The leaders of the Islamic Republic's armed forces have more at stake today even than the defense of a political system. These men and their families did not command respect in Iranian society prior to 1979. The monarchy of Muhammad is a path that the formerly marginalized religious families and the Iranian intellectual elite of the day and today continue to look down on them as well. The creation of the Islamic Republic gave pious Iranians of Mr. Hosaini's class and generation a sense of purpose and a place in society. I often heard them wonder aloud anxiously if circumstances in the country change would they be driven to the periphery again. This is the central issue at the heart of protecting the Islamic Republic and Iran today among its supporters. It's about having a place in society about counting and not being marginalized. And in essence it's a question of power. So Mr. Hosaini continued, the younger Basijis, and this is what he was saying to me after that meeting, the younger Basijis don't know that if we don't take care of this revolution, we'll be relegated back to the margins of society. They don't know how quickly things can change. And that generation continually said these things to me because they remember how quickly things changed in the revolution and they thought that the youngest generation did not understand that power is not something to be taken for granted. Now of course in this endeavor they've ended up marginalizing whole sectors of the population themselves, which presents the bigger problem in Iranian political and social life looking into the future. Yet interestingly Mr. Hosaini and his colleagues in the first generation didn't let their own children join the Basij. The very organizations that they had joined themselves as teenagers in the 1980s because for them they had now gone up on the social ladder and they saw their children joining the Basij as going down that social ladder that they had already scaled. So while this is about maintaining their place in society, deeper social phenomenon such as class and social and cultural capital have now led to divisions among the supporters of the Islamic Republic. So who are these younger Basijis and why is there such a divide? I slowly got to know the leader, the student leader of the Art University's Basij organization, the one who stood up and angrily pointed his finger at Mr. Hosaini in that meeting. I called him Mostafa in the book. Younger Basijis such as Mostafa feel that the revolution has gone astray because the older generation has lost touch with its values. Like many of his classmates in the University of Basij organizations, Mostafa hails from a pious working class and lower middle class family that migrated to Tehran from smaller towns across the country. When as a teenager, Mostafa wanted to pursue filmmaking. His family couldn't afford the expensive equipment necessary for photography and filmmaking and they didn't have a wide social network in the capital that could help them. His father, who was the supporter of the Islamic Republic, encouraged his young son to join his high school's Basij organization in the hopes that maybe they could help him get the camera and the necessary equipment. One of his mentors at the Basij organization in his school had worked in film and photography previously and was able to provide the resources and social network that Mostafa's family could not provide for him in the capital. He ended up going to the Art University and once he graduated with a degree in film, Mostafa easily found a job at a production house run by Basijis that made documentaries for state television, allowing him to be a full-time filmmaker and to be able to provide a middle-class life at that time precinctions for his wife when he had just married. The revolution offered Mostafa and his family a social mobility to which they saw the corruption of the older generation of revolutionaries as a threat. They're the ones who are soft, not us, Mostafa said to me. We appreciate their sacrifices during the war, but they've become corrupted by money and obsessed with making themselves like the secular elite. So central to these debates is not only what revolutionary stories to tell, but who can tell them? Who are the rightful heirs to the revolution? It's a question with ever-shifting boundaries. In the book, I offer a range of media strategies that I observed them undertaking and I'm going to really briefly just sort of go through them. There are three techniques, but one is dissimulation. Dissimulation techniques are basically, they understood that anything that goes on state television or that they put out with sort of aesthetic markers that anyone who's watched pro-regime media in Iran can very quickly say, oh, that's pro-regime media. So they understand that people watch this and think that it's propaganda. So instead, what they've begun to do is to create films and to create media products where they try to remove their fingerprints. And so audience members are watching and they don't realize that what they're watching has been made by pro-regime filmmakers and studios in Iran. This has become actually much easier today actually. So at the time when I was doing my research, one of the ways that they would do this is that they would make films and copy them on VCDs and DVDs, burned ones and give them to the street sellers in Iran who sell banned films. And this way people would buy them and think that they were buying underground films. Today with social media having sort of moved in the speed that it has, they now are just creating internet television channels and social media accounts and spreading and sort of putting on their different kinds of short media. And oftentimes people who are watching this media don't know who's produced it. And I've seen especially in the past two rounds of a protest that have happened in Iran last November and the winter before that, that activists will oftentimes circulate this media that's being made from certain pro-regime forces in Iran that move forward some protest against the regime but not fully to the extent that the protesters have been. The second technique are new distribution techniques. So instead of putting things on television in Tehran, for example, because they know and as they said to me over and over again, anytime we put something on state television in Tehran, the diaspora media picks up on it and starts writing against it. So we don't want to allow them to do that. So what they do instead is that they begin to show a lot of this media in the provinces. They set up different kinds of film festivals, especially in places that don't have movie theaters. And they circulate the media first in this way and they end up showing it in Tehran at the very end. Now this is counterintuitive to any kind of media distribution strategy, whether in Iran or anywhere. It's as if, for example, you don't start showing your filmmaker in the UK and you deliberately don't show in London first but you show in some of the smaller places. So this is very counterintuitive. Filmmakers don't want to do this, but they've realized that in order to get more and more of the population to see this before outright dismissing it, they end up going from outside and then moving into the center. And the third is reframing their stories through nationalism rather than Shi'ism. So I saw them and this you could really see in the aftermath of the Soleimani execution in January of 2020 where this really came to fruition. But they, using Soleimani but also beyond Soleimani, moved their media production from forefronting issues of Shi'ism for a domestic audience into forefronting issues of Persia nationalism and moving symbolic markers of Islam very much into the background. Now nationalism has always been a part of the Islamic Republic's media outputs, but there is something that was fundamentally different to what was happening after 2009. And part of that was their desire to try to build a bridge to the younger generation who was protesting against them. And the way that they thought to do that was to to make the Islamic Republic be a defender of the Iranian nation and Persian civilization rather than just the Islamic Republic. Now in their external media products, which I don't talk about as much in this book, but what they export to Iraq, Lebanon, other places, Shi'ism is still very much at the forefront. So again, they're extremely nimble in the ways in which these different messages come out. Yet again and again, my conversations with members of the Revolutionary Guard in Basij turned back to issues of corruption, social and cultural class, and generational differences. Often my interlocutors turned their anger on one another much more than on those who are not supporters of the regime. Their vast and nuanced disagreements revealed a complicated political reality that cannot be contained in familiar binaries that are often used to describe Iranian politics, such as reformist versus hardliner or anti-regime versus pro-regime. I saw many folks who went from coming across as being reformist in one setting and then coming across as being more hardline in a different setting, depending on what was going on. So these identifying markers that we tend to use in English to talk about Iranian politics are much more fluid on the ground. In fact, in the aftermath of the nationwide 2009 protests, last in 2019 protests last November, over an increase in fuel prices and the subsequent bloody suppression by the state, two of my main research interlocutors in the youngest generation, the third generation that I write about in the book, made public statements against the decisions of the state to clamp down. One of them at an award ceremony for a film that he had just made, said in public, I've been to Syria. We've heard the refrain, be careful not to turn Iran into Syria. And it's true, but that refrain has always been directed at the people. Now it's time to direct that refrain and message to the heads of states. Be careful not to turn Iran into Syria with your actions. And so this is actually something that's been developing since I finished my research, which is that this third generation is one in which the generation that's empowered today is starting to have a lot of problems with because they actually cannot get them to stop criticizing them and figuring out what to do with that politically is becoming a big question. As the Islamic Republic enters its fifth decade, keeping the revolution alive will depend on the ability of its image makers, not only to appeal to a younger population that wants change, but also to build consensus among members of the younger generation within the Islamic Republic's own ranks. The task before the post-revolutionary state in Iran is to win over a broad cross section of its citizens while simultaneously defining what shape its revolutionary project and its state apparatus will take over the long term. In this dynamic, how best to achieve this goal without losing the Islamic Republic's founding vision altogether presents a reality in which everything becomes both a possibility and a problem. Now in conclusion, the men who appear in this book as well as their families challenged everything I thought I knew about Iran, revolutions, and states. This book is not only about state media, but about the men who produce this media and what it means to doubt what they have fought for, not know what is to come, and be wrought with anxiety about the fact that they may be relegated back to the margins of society if their political project fails. Thank you so much. Fantastic, Nagesh, Dr. Vajor, really amazing. I'm just trying, as you were speaking, I was trying to visualize just with the love to have been a fly on the wall during all that period when you were there, and in many ways, so perhaps extraordinary for them to have a filmmaker, a female brought up outside Iran to be with them, look at them, research them. It must have been just an extraordinary. That in itself is your travel log must be quite worthy of reading. There are several questions. Really you've touched upon so many topics that each one is enough to start a different lecture. For me, what really leapt out of your talk was this shift from the emphasis on religion and on she-ism, then more towards nationalism, which seems that every ruler at some point realizes that perhaps has more value amongst the population. It's something that during Ahmadinejad and particularly Isfandiyar Rahim Mashaoui, when he started this discourse of Islamic Iran, Islamic Iran, which of course lost him many allies amongst the Lebanese, and in the Arab world, and they thought, what is that? Islamic Iran, but certainly catapulted him, raised his profile as well as his popularity, not that it did him any good. We know where he ended up. But quite a few questions already. There's a whole range of topics. We have one that, for example, I mean, I'll read them out as they come, Nargis John, and it says, you know, every single speaker thanks you very much for this fantastic talk. And it starts with the first question. It refers to Ibn Khaldun and his ideas on Asabiyah. Now, if I'm on no authority on Ibn Khaldun or Asabiyah myself, if I know this was some of the quotes about tribalism and clan solidarity, I think I stand to be corrected on Asabiyah. And it says that it's been in how the Iranian revolution has arguably lost its way in the last 30 years. I presume if I just pluck that out and please audience do correct me if I've misunderstood by Asabiyah. But if we take on this idea of tribalism, if whatever you'd like to frame as losing its way in the 30 years, obviously, that means probably post war, do you think that's accurate? Do you think tribalism has a place in that? Do you think the revolution regards have lost the clan solidarity from the time you spent with them? Well, the revolutionary guards never really had clan solidarity because they're not, it's very different from like the armed forces under the Bathis in Iraq or even Syria. And so the revolutionary guard actually very much, and even if you go back to their earliest media productions, and you talked to, and I interviewed especially from that first generation of over 150 members of them, they, it really was especially the beginnings of the revolution. It was about a Shia and Islamic understanding of Iran and also a national very much because of the war. And this is the other thing, it's very difficult to talk about the revolution and separate that from the war because so much of what ends up happening because it comes on the heels of that. And so for this question, I don't, it's an interesting question and I haven't thought about it in this way. And I appreciate the person who asked this because I'm going to sit down and think about this more. But you know, this question of having lost their way, that is something that I would push back on a little bit because I think I'm not here to say that they have lost their way or their haven't, but I think actually politics and especially revolutionary politics, I mean, I think that we study the Iranian Revolution very differently than we study other revolutions and I don't quite understand why. I mean, I have ideas, but I especially talking at a university, I think that we should, when we study the French Revolution, we don't just siphon it off at a specific period and say, well, there was there the French Revolution and now it's done in the Iranian context. It's very similar to all of these other revolutionary states in the in the sense that the revolution is is something is an especially a revolution like Iran's, which was a massive uprising from below. There's a lot that changes in a society when there's a massive uprising like that from below and that part of what the Islamic Republic has tried to do because of the power struggles that are endemic to revolutions is they've tried to demobilize the population from the beginnings of that revolutionary period. And the war obviously helped them demobilize, but in the aftermath of the war, that mobilization from different sectors has come out in different ways, whether it's civil society, whether it's activism, whether it was journalism, whether it was the art sphere, whatever it might be. And I think that we need to understand the revolution of Iran as first of all, not just tied to the Islamic Republic, but understand it as a much wider social and cultural phenomenon. And then also understand how the Islamic Republic attempts to respond to these different mobilizations that happen across across society. So I'm actually not ready to put the death knell in the public because for as long as I can remember, since I was a child, everyone was ready to put the death knell in and they it's we've been proven wrong. So I think that we need to have a different framework by which we sort of agree. Yeah, absolutely. That was Ian. If I'm moving to a question by Bruce Stanley, what type of relational networks link these filmmakers to other allies or filmmakers outside Iran in other cities around the world? Is there a network? Yeah, sorry. No, I was going to say with the emphasis that the relational level with allies and filmmakers. Yeah. So part of what these filmmakers, regime filmmakers in Iran, part of what they're consistently disappointed and angry about is the fact that the aid of what the filmmakers, the filmmakers that are not part of the regimes, the ones that have gotten all of this, you know, attention in the outside world, the as far as the Kiorostami is all of all of these folks. They think from their point of view that it's because they have all of these preexisting connections and networks and social and cultural capital to diaspora Iranians and to Westerners who are anti Islamic Republic. And so from their perspective, their work is not being shown to that degree outside because they don't have that. Now, some of them actually their work is not being shown because it's not very good, but they do have talented filmmakers as well. And so part of what they're trying to do in relation to the question that you're raising is trying to create allies and networks where they can show their work outside. It's very difficult for them. One of the one of the things that they try to do is and one thing that I've been tracing out is looking at their connection to Latin America, especially Cuba and Venezuela. They created his he spawn TV, which is a Spanish language television station. So there are there are ways in which they try to do it. They do show their work in different film festivals, especially in developing countries. But this is very much an issue that they have and that manifests itself. I have a whole chapter in the book, which is basically about this fight between pro regime filmmakers and writers and filmmakers that are part of the aid of hoodies and how the fight comes to this question of we may have power in Iran, but but our work, especially as filmmakers, not circulating the ways that it matters as artists on an international basis. How recipient are the internal media and broadcasters? I mean, do they get the films on IRIB or CEDOSIMA or whatever? I mean, are they do they have just an open door from the state apparatus in terms of support, financial support, media exposure or not? They have a lot of it depends on who the producers are and what kind of connections their producers have. They don't they don't always have an open door. It depends on the channel on television. Sometimes the directors of certain channels are more open to newer ideas or newer kinds of media and sometimes on something. So again, it's really context specific. But no, they also have to fight. And again, one of the things that I try to bring out in the book and that's playing out again now in different ways is that when Ahmadinejad took over when his administration took over, they pushed out the folks who were pro regime, but did not agree with Ahmadinejad. And so all of a sudden those folks become they're trying to figure out ways to get access again. And so, so, you know, being pro regime is often not enough in and of itself. It also requires lots of other contingent factors such as who who can connect you to those who are empowered today if your side is the one that's not in power today and things like that. But nonetheless, they are able to get more resources than an independent. And there's probably no shortage of funds for them. Just moving, obviously, if you can imagine, this has led to all sorts of secondary tertiary questions. And one of the things that is of interest for several people question that is this discourse of nationalism. And if I mix a few questions that obviously the public are slightly more emboldened on various national days that there are all the slogans about the pre Islamic regime and, you know, a longing and nostalgia for that that if that is one side of nationalism. And another question is that transformations towards nationalism within Iran. And are there any leads that you can have for people who are working on this discourse? Are you yourself interested or are you working at that? How is this notion of nationalism versus she is a manifest itself? Obviously, the range of questions are some that are this nostalgia or longing or perhaps looking up to the pre Islamic regime. And for some, as you said, born out after the revolution, a new nationalism emerging from Islamic Iran. So part of what's important about the first half of that question is that what I am describing and what I sort of talked about here is the regime media world. But the regime media world doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's a part of a media on Iran media about in Persian that gets broadcast into it is a mass and vast expanse of media world of what we call it and what we study. And part of what's been happening actually from places like London is that there have been these very wealthy stations that have started up like my television broadcasts out of London, which holds it seems to be much closer to the pre revolutionary government. And Manoto is I find a very, very fascinating place to say I hope somebody out there is studying Manoto actually in these critical ways. Because what I find really fascinating with a place like Manoto and I saw I think this is part of the question that you're referring to Nargis is, you know, these protests, slogans that have come out in support of the pre revolutionaries, or, you know, pathways. And part of that I wrote a very short piece about this a couple years ago. But part of that I think you have to trace out these media narratives that are coming from places like Manoto that are coming from places like Iran International, other other other sites around. Because they are working on this question of nostalgia. They are working on this question of a particular kind of nationalism. Now that doesn't mean, and I this is what I don't want to come across media is not so simple, whereby you put a narrative out there, and then people are just stupid, and they take it in, right? Not a can't you can't it's not a shot, you can't give it to people. So people take it in in various ways. But over a long period of time, when certain narratives are built and sustained, they do create some kinds of social realities. And so thinking about the nostalgia for the old, I think it's also very, very important to look at these kinds of diaspora media productions and what the types of messaging that that's coming out. As far as she is them versus nationalism, I would actually say that I think we have to complicate this a lot more. And it's not she is them versus nationalism. But it's, in some ways, as you had said before, referring to folks around Ahmadinejad, this particular kind of Iranian Islam that they have been working on and articulating in various ways in Iran. And, and I think that that you know, understanding that, and it's it's also not just post-revolutionary Iran, these things. I think another thing for those who are interested in studying these things is to not think of 1979 as this cutoff period where everything changes and everything before that is something else, but to try to understand the continuation of these things. And especially with media narratives, what is grabbed on from the pre-revolutionary period that sort of sustains itself afterwards? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I get very cross sometimes as if you know, the revolution, whatever one's relationship or reception of it might, it didn't just pop out of nowhere that this is the fact that on either side within Iran or not, at the same time, whether they congregate around Orangohi Kourosh and all that, never mind the Pahlavi absolutely ancient Iranian rhetoric. And then they might go back and do a Nazarene among Rezaud. It's not as if she is an Iranian nationalism or so easily to separate and vice versa here. It's not the most ardent monarchy. It's might must or might also be extremely religious. It's not the Orangutchi. And it's, you know, regards at this much more complex than that. And the media that you mentioned, it's obviously Iranian, whether it is an IRIB or independent, by city filmmakers or whoever, that they are very sensitive to the power of these external forces. And because they're very quick in responding and producing a domestic version, if it was Manitou's Bethan Wacham, come dine with me, which in itself is something out of ITV or Fame Academy, within months Iran produced a version of that. And therefore, and also something much more easy to access, it wasn't interrupted, the signal wasn't interrupted. So it's not as if they're just working in isolation for that. I'll go back to the questions. I have a question from Professor Arshin Adib Mughaddam, who sends his greetings to you, Nargis Jar, and a wonderful talk. And he says that, you know, you discuss anthropology or refer to anthropology as a discipline that heads the subjectivity of the other. In that regard, how easy or difficult is it to study Iran the way you do under the current social political circumstances in the United States? That's a great question. So first of all, hi. I wish we could be seeing each other in person. Okay, so that question. I think in the past four years since Trump, this project would have been pretty much impossible, because we are in a, for all intents and purposes, a situation of war and maximum pressure on Iran. And we can see this in the ways in which Iran has unfortunately put increased pressure on academics and researchers. So in this particular environment, I think it's very, very difficult. But I do think that regardless, especially if this, please correct me if I'm not taking this question in the way that you want me to, but I'm going to sort of directed a lot to students and potential researchers of Iran. There are, so studying places like Iran, it's difficult, it's not easy. And it requires you as a researcher to do a hell of a lot of homework and legwork before you actually begin the research. I mean, I, as someone who grew up in the United States, I was born in Iran, but I was four when we left. I knew that if I were to go just based on my summer trips to Iran to visit family and my Persian and that I had taken in school and all of this stuff, that that would not be enough for me to be able to really do this kind of in-depth work, because I needed to find a way to, first of all, for myself to understand all of the different levels of complexity of the post-revolutionary state and society in Iran. And what that required of me was spending years and years in Iran, really working on my Persian, really working on learning how to come in and out of these different social spheres, understanding how I came across, trying to work on my habitus in a place like Iran versus who I am in the United States. And that's not to say, and again, I talk about this a lot in the book and also the article that I had mentioned before, which I wrote last year about how to do research in a foreign spaces, which is that you have to be fully honest about what it is that you're doing, because especially in places like Iran, because if you're not, then that means potential, you know, you go off into prison because you, you know, that raises all of these red flags. But also, it means that you have to, I think for students and for me, this is what I took away from it, is to understand that no matter what the stories are that you grew up with, whether you grew up in inside Iran, outside Iran, wherever, whatever country you're working on, that in order to undertake this type of research anthropologically, it means that you have to have a respect for how people make sense of their world and of their life, even if that's not how you make sense or the people that you love make sense of it. And so for me, in order to even get to that point, it took so much of prep work because I had to work past so much of what I had read, so much of what I had heard growing up that was all very valid at the same time. But I had to come to understand that they, the folks that I was working on also had their valid stories. And for me, and, and I know you're not talking about writing here, but since Nargis had brought this up earlier, it also meant that during the research phase one, the biggest part was just listening. I was constantly listening. I was constantly trying to take it. And then the second phase was coming here and writing. And in the writing stage, I mean, I was in day in and day out with people that I didn't agree with. I respected them as human beings, but I didn't agree with them. And it was very, very difficult to try to write past that. And there was lots of moments when I was angry at things that I saw. And, and it was about, I think the writing phase is also about research, which is how do you make sense of the things and how do you analyze it and do it in a way that I think especially for those who do anthropological or ethnographic work. At the end of the day, they gave me so much of their time. And I know that if I gave a researcher access to the level that they did to my life, they're going to find things that they really don't like about me either. And yet it's about how do you respect that invitation, but still remain and create a critical distance that will allow you to give analysis that is critical and that is not just about what they told you. I was fine, and Arshan thanks you for being candid and so honest. I mean quite a few questions, but I tried to pick one from the theme. So one from Roger Higginsons. And again, thank you for your fascinating talk. From all the interviews that you conducted in the course of your research, did you get a sense overall of the extent to which the government of Iran either is or feels itself to be more or less stable today than say it was 20 years ago about the confidence of the state as far as their longevity that they see will not be threatened. So I think as far as regional issues are concerned they feel extremely stable and confident and especially in comparison to 20 years ago when it comes to domestic I would not I would not say that they feel extremely confident but I also wouldn't say that they are fragile and so I think that the answer lies somewhere in between there. I think especially when you know I think when they're left to when it's too left to their own devices without the sort of extreme external pressure that the United States has imposed on Iran over the past four years especially they understand that they know they know that they have a lot of problems they know that they have an issue of communicating with their younger generations they know that a lot of the younger generations have feel like they can't that the state is not theirs anymore that the government is not theirs and so they they understand that this is an issue and again remember it's because so much of the first generation of those in power today in Iran came from a revolutionary moment and so they understand that but but this kind of extreme pressure it exerts a lot of anxiety but it also they are able to use this pressure to talk about external external forces right and and and that is a way to stabilize what is going on internally once this external pressure releases itself if it does then I think that their conversations will slightly change again and that is what I you know in doing this research in the aftermath of 2009 I started the research project in the summer right after the summer and so there was when they were discussing a lot of these kinds of issues too and they know they understand that they're not blind to it now can they respond to it that's a completely different question but but I think on a regional level they're very confident and the question very much to the point from Sarah sell back then have you had any feedback from your subjects about the book you've written and I've had some feedback we're getting it translated into Persian and so I'm I think I will have more feedback at that point but I have had some feedback and and they've been from what they've been able to to see from or clean from it because a lot of them don't read English well enough to be able to sort of get through a book a book length manuscripts but that is it's important for me and and that is why I'm working on having it translated into Persian yeah a couple of questions about this absolutely people are bedazzled by the fact that you really pulled off this project and were there again because of being a female and they just want to know what was it just a little more about the environment that you were operating with the boundaries as a woman in such a male environment just a few more reflections or snippets there's several questions about that there um so yeah it was um first it was not easy being around military folks in general I didn't I don't come from a military family it's a different way of being I've also done research and interviews and work with us vets um I'm working on a separate issue on on chemical weapons and you've depleted uranium use it's also difficult for me in those situations so one is being around folks who are just sort of in a military environment but then the gender issue yes look it was I mean there were moments when when I would like leave Iran in the middle of research and I would get on a plane and I would just sort of let my body go and I felt like I had been it was like I was still everywhere was just stones I had been holding myself in so much because I had constantly had to be aware of my body language I constantly had to be aware of was I smiling too much was I looking too directly at people where was I positioning myself in the room how was I sitting was my head job okay you know and and I talk about this a little I write about this in the book but like I did not I didn't change the way that I wore my head job I wore it in the same way that I would outside in a non-research environment simply because I knew that if I tried to look more pious I would come across as faking it and I didn't want to happen so I went to who I was but assuming who I was also meant that I women in that world it took a lot longer for them to warm up to me the men in the first generation it was hard at the first but then they really took me under their wing especially the ones who had daughters because I was more or less and I didn't wear makeup when I was doing research so I looked younger and so I was more or less around the same age range as their daughters especially those who are older and so for them those who had daughters really took me in and I didn't realize this until the sort of the end of my research because I was like huh why is it that XYZ all of these people are like so good to me and then those people are just ignoring me and I realized the common denominator was that they all had daughters around my age um the younger guys the third generation that took me a very long time to get to access to because those guys were very close in age to me um it was very difficult for them to um to talk to me just to sit down and have interviews with me we had to figure out ways in which it was not crossing any social or religious or red lines so that that those relationships took the heart it took the longest and were the hardest for me to build um and um um and there's an interruption I mean you're interceding by Anthony Wynne who says that surely that must have actually been an advantage perhaps to be a woman in that environment she would obviously perceive there's so much less of a threat and uh did you feel that did you think that at times it was actually an advantage that you were yeah so I think that yes for the daughter ones for sure because they took me in both to protect me and and also to teach me and as a researcher especially an ethnographer you I love it when someone thinks that they have to teach me things because that's when they get really start talking and right in there they're showing you what they know so in that way it was definitely an advantage I think I know that there are some personal things that they may have not said to me that they may have said to a male researcher I don't know but I think um you know regardless yes there were some limitations but I do think in some way that also opens some doors yeah um so but maybe there are two things that obviously this is the questions addressed to you as possibly an analyst looking at Iran I for example what next for the IRGC after Ayatollah Khamenei's demise but perhaps you know keep in the media but there and there's a question from a journalist from Iran I think he's there right now and Kenta Ijumia thank you for this great presentation I am Kenta Ilijima a Japanese journalist and Asaas alumnus living in Tehran right now after the death of Osim Soleimani we have many media things in relation to Soleimani including the advertising boards at traffic intersections documentary Brooks TV programs and so on as well as street names and squares now named after him what do you think and you just briefly touched upon this what do you think the regime's aim is by representing Soleimani in such you know media uh uh produced um a presentation and do you think are they being successful I mean they're used all this multimedia um uh having him there in all the billboards or advertising or whatever so that's from a Japanese colleague in Tehran sure so this question of success um when it comes to media is um is is a question that we sort of have to take a longer term analysis of because um especially when it comes to state propaganda or when it comes to advertising even um it's not so much whether any one product or even one series of products works or is successful or not the mere repetition of it over a long period of time creates certain realities now with Soleimani I think what's really fascinating for what's Soleimani and I followed around some of his media team in Iran and I write about it in one of the chapters in the book is that Soleimani was different because he was prior to Soleimani usually the pro regime media would focus on martyrs very much and they realized that young people just didn't care about martyrs because they they felt you know like this was a long time ago and so they wanted a live hero they wanted to present a new hero that young people could relate to so Soleimani became that in many ways and and it was quite successful actually and now with his death the way in which he was killed factors in so nicely to all narratives that are extremely powerful in Iranian society whether from Imam Hussein to right like to to understand how the United States killed Soleimani in another country when he was there on an official an official trip fixed into this broader conversation and narrative about standing up to the oppressor and so because of that it's actually they're able to fold it into some of that type of narrative already and this is why you see so much of his face everywhere his media images everywhere now will that what what's going to be the repercussions of this or how will people feel about this I think it's a little bit too early to tell but one of the things I think is really fascinating and I think as a journalist I think especially to think about related to Soleimani is his daughter Soleimani is taking on the man the public mantle she is extremely well versed in media a very very outspoken in Arabic in English and in Persian so I think one of the things to pay attention to moving forward and sort of looking forward is these younger generations both the men but especially the women because they have a lot of resources at their disposal the women especially his wife women have been they are much better organized in their male counterparts I mean it's actually it's not really that surprising right they're much better organized they are extremely committed and they are they are they are they've taken a big turn from their mother's generation in which they are completely comfortable being in the limelight and being in the spotlight and so I think Soleimani today falls into a lot of the narrative of martyrdom from the 80s and 90s and early 2000s what happened to Soleimani before his death I think was very new in the Islamic Republic but now it sort of goes into that narrative of the past but I think instead what we should look for is people like his daughter the children of these folks and the ways in which they either continue or swerve a little bit on the messaging of their families yeah and they are they've sort of as these as the doors is a bit their time they have observed there are so much more street savvy as well and of course she has been quite a divisive factor some see her as incredibly privileged and having just you know inherited this wave of popularity even those who were not necessarily a supporter of Soleimani the manner of his demise as you know one people over an interesting question I like is from Mona Ajir that she shifts the balance to aspirations and motivations for the Basijit it says that there is still a religious motivation do you believe Nargis that there is a religious motivation still amongst the new generation of Basijit or is this now back to social mobility and Iran's drive to be independent obviously the sanctions if one thing has taught Iran its need to be independent it are the sanctions but do you think now the revolution in Israel is really an aspiration for you know mobility social mobility did that come across um so there yeah yes religion still very much matters to to to some folks yeah yes it matters to young Basijis um religious religion and piety wrapped up into the political discourse of that generation I think is also extreme so it's not just about social mobility by any means there's there is a deep commitment to the the the nezom to this to the system there's a deep commitment to Iran as a sovereign independent nation and a deep commitment to that at least in its current iteration under the leadership of common aid the younger generation of the Basijis are are very very committed to that there are people within them who get into these to get into this organization for social mobility for sure but that doesn't I don't think that we can extend that all throughout that generation um and so um you know I I think and and here's what I will say that I think is very different from what I did my research to today is that the actions of the Trump administration I think have fundamentally made certain kinds of impacts not just among those who are regime loyalists like these young Basijis although I think it has furthered their commitment to um to Iran as an independent nation vis-a-vis the United States but I think it's also again you know I focus so much on on on generational learning one of it and I used Carl Mannheim who's a theorist on generations and one of the things that Mannheim talked wrote about quite a bit was that the need for some kind of fresh contact for a generation in order to be able to experience something the war was that for that first generation of Basijis in Revolutionary Guard I think Syria the the the fighting in Syria and then really importantly Trump and and what he's done over these past four years is that fresh contact for this young generation that did not that grew up under a state talking about imperialism but it was state rhetoric it was not a felt kind of imperialism yeah so what you have now in Iran is that you have a generation that much like actually the generation of the 60s and 70s who was who was clamoring against imperialism you now have a felt experience of American imperialism in Iran in a way that's different from just rhetoric and I think that that then tied up and mixed with your question about religious piety but it's not just religious piety it's religious piety combined with a certain kind of political commitment to independence vis-a-vis imperialism those are combining now generation yeah I'm conscious of several questions coming in and I don't want to sound as if I'm picking up on questions which move the narrative towards the popularity of all the you know ardent support of the Basem Soleimani even those weren't necessarily religious came to it or the abhorrence of sanctions that some say that you know but there are protesters who openly boldly set fire to Basem Soleimani banners or pull these banners down and stamp upon it or the fact that there there were this heartened Iranian when Trump was declared the loser that they actually thought that the house might have been the one and only chance of you know release from the internal oppression and I don't know these are perhaps more common but I you know I just wanted to say that you know there are a couple of participants who say that these are not and you as you yourself I said it's not you know it's not a one-dimensional country and of course I don't think any observant of any society would reduce it to just these polar opposites but I don't know whether I mean I don't watch a huge number of films that come out of Iran or I mean I saw a couple of day in MIT I thought it was again very much ahead of the game and how popular he was and his clever way of playing with the name of football teams and of course you know the you know all of those that this is are you conscious of that in your writings are you aware that there perhaps even these young filmmakers with with their own agendas know that somehow various things no longer the common look the currency the value of nationalism their idea of nationalism versus the same generation who wants simple liberation they're not anti around they're not all queuing to leave Iran but certainly just want a little more air to breathe in and do you think these third fourth generation very soon of passages are aware that they are they're their brother their classmates the other side also wants a tribute to yeah that's a great question so um first of all yeah I mean I think if I were here saying that this is what pro regime filmmakers make and therefore look it's successful in Iran you guys would have to boot me out of even being here because I you know just as you were saying social analysis and cultural analysis has to fundamentally show how these things bleed into one another and how incredibly complex it is and if we don't show that then we are not being fair or truthful in our analysis and so part of the the questions that you're raising yes of course in Iran there are many people who many people who disagree with this with this with the republic writ large and then a lot of the messaging that comes from it and coming from a family who is that I was hearing this all the time when I was doing my research in Iran and I also showed a lot of these films truth especially artists who are not part of the regime in order to sort of glean their responses to what was going on but nonetheless I also think that there is something that we have to pay attention to whether one agrees or not with the Islamic Republic or any state actually around the world you have to understand how state power works via state messaging and and even the the ways in which that kind of messaging may work when you do not agree with it because that if you understand that you understand how power parts of how power work and that is a fundamental for me it's a it's a sociological political cultural question that I think is important to understand irregardless of where your political affiliations lie now and by ignoring it it doesn't mean that it goes away now in in response to the question about or the following on from your question Nagas about the does this younger generation of Basijis understand or see their their counterparts so I want to respond to this in two ways one is that one of the things that I saw as being a moment in which they begin to shift how they think about the future of Iran especially these younger Basijis is when they have children when when they have children they have to think about the future of Iran for their children or this is at least how they articulated it to me that I began to see a significant change in political outlook among my interlocutors when they had children and it was because as they would say to me yes I still believe in the ideals that I had in the past but I want my daughter son whoever I want my child to grow up in a stable Iran and so that meant that for them a stable Iran meant an Iran not involved in either domestic or international turmoil and upheaval and so at that stage you know the quote that I read from one of my interlocutors who had accepted his award last year after the November 2019 uprisings and he said he turned and he said if you sat on him on the cats the heads of the the states you need to not turn Iran into Syria these are folks who grew up believing 100% in the Islamic Republic but now have children I mean he was up there accepting his reward with his daughter in his in his lap and another one at his knee and I think it's important to understand that however again these things are very very fluid so you have a situation now with especially Trump and with everything that is going on I think the the the events of the past few weeks sort of lenders of themselves are thinking about this with Fafnizadeh's assassination in Tehran and then now the the execution of what you have is in certain sectors of society in both the state and the opposition want division because when you have division you're able to rally forces right and so when with the execution of Fafnizadeh and Sam I think it's important to look at for example how those within the regime media world who I follow and look at are now attacking certain cultural and intellectual elites and celebrities as they call them who came out and said you shouldn't have killed Zam but did not come out necessarily and say anything about Fafnizadeh these are these are cultural modes cultural nodes that they tried to use to pin different parts of the population against one another this and this is nothing that is just exclusive to Iran or the Islamic Republic look at what's happening in the UK now with Brexit for example in the United States with the elections right these these cultural wars in effect are are and in the social media world are utilized extremely effectively to pit different parts of society to get against one another and so I think that yes there are those in the third generation of Basis who understand may not that don't agree with those of their cohort who want a different kind of Iran but understand that things need to change and then there are those or in moments like this where they they end up retrenching back into what what they believed in the other side may as well and so I think again none of this stuff is ever we can't freeze it in time and so we have to understand how these things shift throughout time yeah well that's a I think that's a very appropriate good moment to begin to wrap the talk there are several questions there they're simply are fascinated about how you set about organizing your research and they hope that perhaps you could come up with a toolkit for how as a young woman how you even begin to organize them and prepare for research in a conservative closed society so I do may have to have you back on it you could have a round table of people who have taken this and absolutely I think we all take our hats off to you I think you must have had the most well behaved dog who did not snow one certainly I didn't hear it and a very well behaved child who probably desperately now wants her lunch or something saying come and look after me now nine years it's been an absolute pleasure to have you you have made us sit up and take notice of so many things that get lost in the big stories we forget about all the other currents in such a relatively young society well thank you very much to have you as the author of Iran Reframed I recommend our participants to definitely get this book I think Anki has very kindly put in the chat room and the anxieties of power in the Islamic Republic which as you said it's just the beginning of the study on this revolution so thank you very much indeed come back we'll be eagerly waiting to hear about your next topic and to our wonderful audience who have been with us all evening and I wish you all a very happy festive season merry Christmas and happy new year under lockdown wherever you might be all the socially distanced exchanges of gifts I hope and Yalda and winter solstice and Haruka and everything we will be back with our Tuesday lectures and Dina and I look very much forward to welcome you back on Tuesday 12th of January when I hope we can bid farewell to this wretched 2020 and how wonderful to have you now just trying to wrap it up for us best wishes with all your projects and teachings and we'd love to have you back very soon thank you so much to everyone who came and thank you and I was so happy to be here so I say good night from London Middle East Institute to all of you stay