Berkeley Lecture Presents
A Talk by
Dr Ali Ferdowsi
Topic:
Some Reflections on a Recent Debate in Iran over the Politics of Armed Struggle in the Pre-Revolutionary Period
Date: June 8, 2014
Place: Berkeley, CA
We Are also What We Have Lost, Ali Ferdowsi June 8, 2014
A variant of the following question persistently presses itself on political discourse and debate in contemporary Iran: Why did the Iranian intellectuals and the country’s youthful political activists ushered in, and ended up supporting, a revolution that resulted in an Islamist State? Over the past few months, an element of this question, namely the place and the responsibility of militant insurrectionary politics (e.g. jonbesh-e cheriki) was hotly debated in Iran. This talk is a report on that debate by one of its participants.
After receiving his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985, Ali Ferdowsi studied as a post-doctoral fellow in the Graduate Program in Demography at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught for three years as a visiting professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Tokyo University for Foreign Studies in Japan.
After working for five years as an International Specialist for NHK (Japan Broadcast Corporation), he returned to the United States in 1997 and began teaching in the Department of History and Political Science at Notre Dame de Namur University.