Cassettes in the Masjid, Pamphlets in the Prison—Contrasts and Convergences of Marxist and Islamic Militant Knowledge Circuits in Pre-Revolutionary Iran from the 1960s-1980s

Leon Bijan Kianzad’s dissertation reconstructs and analyses the role of knowledge making and sharing in militant Marxist and Islamic Iranian movements in the 1960s-1980s. It asks about the convergences and contrasts in their strategies of working towards the 1979 revolution, and the concrete function of and interactions with media and knowledge artifacts. Rather than taking the eventual installation of an Islamic Republic as inevitable, Kianzad’s work asks about the historical contingencies of the development of competing social movements and radical organisations by drawing on both state and diasporic archives and sources.
The project recovers materials such as pamphlets, books and booklets, diaries and posters, as well as audio-visual media such as cassettes and film circulated in underground discussions in safehouses, mosques, prison cells and factories. Rather than only discursively analysing the content of these materials, the project employs a trans-sequentialist and ethnographic approach to understand how, where, and by whom they were produced and consumed. Kianzad also conducts interviews with political actors involved in Iranian Marxist and Islamic organisations, juxtaposing testimonies with material analyses and existing scholarship. 
In contrast to works on the Iranian revolution that focus primarily on the role of ideological leaders or macrosociological trends, the project retraces the advent of the Islamic Republic and the history of political action under Shah rule by zooming in on the epistemic practices of diverse militant actors, thus producing satiated historiographical accounts of key organisations on the road to revolution.
Leon Bijan received his MA from Goethe University Frankfurt.

First Supervisor @BGSMCS: Prof. Dr. Kai Kresse