Parenting Toward Belonging to the Not-Yet-There: Identity and Imagination in Iranian Immigrant Families

• In Event: Global Politics, Educational Self-Determination, and Intergenerational Learning in the Iranian Diaspora

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: This study explores how Iranian immigrant parents rework their identities through childraising practices in transnational contexts, resisting binary framings of assimilation or cultural retention. Rather than replicating past models or fully adopting dominant norms, these parents engage in ongoing, reflective processes to craft new values and practices that speak to both their current lives and imagined futures. Their parenting becomes a site of identity work, rooted in local conditions but informed by global discourses and long diasporic histories. This inquiry is situated within the political terrain of the Iranian diaspora, shaped by authoritarian repression and protest movements in Iran, as well as racialization, surveillance, and shifting immigration policies in the U.S.

Theoretical framework: This study utilizes a particular sensibility to context informed by Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), emphasizing how human action is shaped by social, historical, and material conditions (Engeström, 1987; Cole, 1996). It incorporates relational and longitudinal understandings of identity from cultural and narrative identity studies, viewing identity as an ongoing, socially mediated project rather than a fixed category (Wortham, 2006), Additionally, it draws on critical Iranian diasporic approaches that foreground the entanglements of race, displacement, and political memory, challenging homogenizing or apolitical accounts of Iranian immigrant experience (Maghbouleh, 2017; Talebi, 2011).

Methods+ data source: This study draws on audio-cued proleptic interviews with 55 Iranian immigrant parents in the U.S., following an initial ethnographic phase that included ten communal and individual conversations to better understand the experiences of recent arrivals. Inspired by Video-Cued Ethnographic Interviewing (Tobin, 2019), audio clips from these early sessions were used as referential prompts in the interviews. The analysis focuses on how parents engage narratively with everyday concerns, collaboratively reflecting on and adjusting to their new context through small, situated stories.

Results: This paper illustrates the diverse trajectories parents develop to make sense of their circumstances and curate their parenting moves, specifically examining the ongoing and relational pathways of sensemaking in one case’s narratives. I delve into the significance parents collectively and intergenerationally construct and reconstruct as they work to establish a sense of belonging within yet-to-be-attained circumstances. I illustrate how Iranian immigrant parents cultivate their aspirations for their children and families. Their aim is not to conform to the existing state of affairs, but rather to belong to the envisioned utopias that are not yet realized. Consequently, Iranian immigrant parents emerge as active participants in the realm of politics and social change.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work: This study contributes to scholarship on immigration, identity, and parenting by moving beyond binary models of assimilation and cultural retention. It highlights how Iranian immigrant parents engage in reflective, future-oriented identity work through childraising practices, crafting new values that draw from but do not replicate past or present norms. Through different theoretical lenses, the research foregrounds belonging as a proleptic, world-making process. It offers a framework for understanding immigrant identity as unfinished, relational, and actively shaped in response to both local conditions and global histories. [497]

Author

• Fatemeh Hajnaghizadeh, Northwestern University