Tracing the Long Arc of Learning and Social Change: Parenting, Worldbuilding and the Iranian Left

• In Event: Counterhegemonic Inheritances: Following Anti-Imperial Family Histories From the Diasporic Iranian Left

Abstract

This paper shares key insights and analysis from a project that considers 1) how elder Iranians who identify as leftist narrate their own political learning and development across the life course, including how their political experiences came to shape the ways they raised their children; and 2) how the children of the left interpret the role of these political histories in their own upbringing, lives, work, and approaches to parenting. Drawing on the first author’s experience as the child of an Iranian communist in conversation with in-depth qualitative interviews with Iranian elders and their adult children in the United States and Canada, we consider the variegated afterlives of Iranian revolutionary movements across time and place (Davari, 2020; Moradian et. al., 2019), with a central focus on the role of parenting. The interviews are also complemented by in-depth archival and historical investigations into the intellectual and everyday culture of the left during that period as interwoven with interviewees’ reflections on their experiences. Our emergent findings trace how elders in diaspora describe their political learning as complex and ongoing, the everyday pedagogies they practiced to sustain various political and ethical values in the space of the home, and how their children build on, wrestle with, and recreate their political inheritances in myriad and dynamic ways. We also describe the specific tensions and challenges families navigated given the material conditions of childrearing following the 1979 revolution, internal debates among the left, and the demands of migration/forced exile, as well as the ways elders engage in layered practices of storytelling and self-reflexivity with regards to their growth over time as parents. We further consider how the adult children of Iranian elders describe the complex ways these histories mediate interactions with their own children, and in some cases their interactions with students as educators.

These forms of intergenerational learning are important to understand both for our view of how macro-political scales of change-making shape everyday life, learning and interactions with children, and how micro-interactional scales can become important contexts for worldmaking, or the process of imagining, embodying, and midwifing possible futures in the here-and-now (Bang, 2020; Bayat, 2020; Espinoza, et. al, 2020). We aim to bring questions of intergenerational learning into greater dialogue with scholarship on multi-scalar history (Keshavarzian, 2021), political affect (Moradian, 2022), and small histories (Sohrabi, 2020), including how social movements change the actors that forge them, and the ripples that emerge over longer arcs of time. We also consider how our theorizations of social movements can grow when children and families are treated as central to how we understand stories of revolutionary change, and the new horizons and variegated forms of learning and becoming they can engender.

Authors

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

• Mahdi Ganjavi, University of Toronto