Berkeley Lecture Series Presents:
A Lecture by
Dr. Elham Hoominfar
Topic:
Environmental Social Movements in Iran, a Challenge to the Dominant Narrative
Date: Sunday, May 15, 2022
Time: 11:00 am (PST); Tehran: 10:30 pm; 8:00 pm (CET)
Place: BLS Virtual Conference Room
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ID: 854 1826 2996
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Social movements are typically presented as ways of “collective acting with some degree of organization and continuity outside of institutional or organizational channels for the purpose of challenging or defending extant authority” (Snow et al., 2004). Scholars of social movements often focus on specific stages (also called lifecycles). While movements may differ somewhat, they often include the stages of emergence, coalescence, institutionalization, and decline.
Environmental degradation through water projects is one of the most critical issues in Iranian society. The ecosystem destruction in the country has led to protests and created social movements. To better understand these movements, I apply the dominant narrative of the stages of social movements to an environmental movement in Iran that was formed against a proposed dam and water transfer project. I show how each stage does or does not play out in the Iranian case with a critical view of the dominant social movement’s narrative.
Elham Hoominfar is an assistant professor in the Global Health Studies Program at Northwestern University. Hoominfar is a sociologist whose research expertise focuses on intersections of environment and society and understanding of social inequalities and social movements with an interdisciplinary approach. She received her first master’s degree in the Sociology of Development at the University of Tehran, where she also got her bachelor’s degree in Sociology. Before she left Iran, she maintained an active research agenda and she was involved in various research and teaching projects in different institutes. She received her second master’s in Cross-Cultural and International Education program at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, and her PhD in Sociology from Utah State University. Her PhD project focused on marketization of water and environmental movements in Iran and the US.
Hoominfar has extensive teaching experience in the United States and Iran. She employs a student-centered learning method and a critical view for teaching. She is currently researching environmental justice, water governance, commodification of nature and social resistances with an emphasis on political economy in the Global South and North. She has focused on marginalized groups, and examined issues such as development, natural disasters and social inequality in an array of research publications in both Persian and English.
Lecture and Q&A in Persian
Media: This event will be streamed live in Radio Pooya.