Launching our new season of the POMEPS Conversations podcast, Narges Bajoghli discusses her book, Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic. In this book, Bajoghli provides an inside look at what it means to be pro-regime in Iran, and the debates around the future of the Islamic Republic.
“The book is an anthropological and ethnographic look at the Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and paramilitary forces that it controls in Iran— specifically their media producers within these groups. I have two main purposes with the research project in general: one is that— even that there has been a plethora of wonderful scholarship on media production in Iran— one of the big gaps remains remains the media produced by the state and especially the military forces, which invest the most amount of money in media production in the country.” said Bajoghli. “We have a lot of great scholarship on an era in post-revolutionary Iranian studies on areas of resistance to the state…my goal with this project was to was to sort of flip the lens and do an ethnic graphic project on local locations of power.”
“The Islamic Republic has had a very robust media production since the 1979 revolution. Now with the regime itself much of that has tended up until fairly recently to sort of manifest itself in state television and to to be things like documentary films and narrative fiction films. And some television serials and things like that. More recently however they’ve sort of become more sophisticated at how they’re doing their media production. So they’ve created a lot of Internet television channels. They’re doing a lot of music videos now,” said Bajoghli. “And for the purposes of the project I was focusing much more on just their production domestic production within Iran for domestic audiences because really my question was how are they trying to communicate the revolution to this younger generation domestically.”
Dr. Narges Bajoghli is an award-winning anthropologist, filmmaker, and writer. Her work focuses on the intersections of power and media.
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