Date of Award
Winter 2023
Project Type
Dissertation
Program or Major
Education
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
First Advisor
Andrew D. Coppens
Second Advisor
Judy Sharkey
Third Advisor
Shirin Vossoughi
Abstract
In this dissertation, I reflect on how my work with Iranian immigrant parents in the US is informed by my lived experiences and research as a member of the minoritized group both in post-revolutionary Iran and the US. I recognize these experiences as informing my research on diasporic parenting throughout different stages, from designing the methodology to curating the theoretical framework and analyzing data.The desire to engage with minoritized ways of being and knowing beyond static essentializing viewpoints informs my approach to designing methodological processes that centralize confusion/disagreements with dominant practices and ideologies. In my study’s methodology, I use stories of Iranian immigrants’ collectively shared tensions around parenting in interviews with other Iranian immigrant parents. Parents within my study are therefore invited to reflect on their counterparts’ typical tensions in different parenting areas (e.g., Children’s academic performance, social relationships, gender roles, and cultural messages). Using this unique methodology, I examine different epistemological resources Iranian immigrant parents draw on, challenge the distinction between the “cultural insider” and “outsider”, and prioritize the emerging situated processes of co-construction and re-imagination at the moment of study. This approach enables me to leverage transformative possibilities, drawing on participants’ and the researcher’s moves across multiple axes. My conceptual framework borrows different concepts from various studies. Prolepsis (Brescó de Luna, 2018; Cole, 1996) provides the lens to view narratives as future-oriented and past-informed simultaneously. Critical theories help me to understand the liminal spaces constructed and lived by immigrants, and post-colonial theories, help me recognize different modalities of their agency (Bang, 2017; Mahmood, 2011). When reflecting on their confusion/disagreements with dominant practices and ideologies, I show how parents navigate their epistemic resources to curate their unique interpretation of the encounter and, at the same time, their action plan for future experiences. In an attempt to understand the overall meaning behind their everyday agentic moves, I show how parents’ small stories of encountering these tensions reveal and communicate their concerns and endeavors for their children’s and their families’ belonging, but not belonging to what is already there, in its passive assimilationist sense, but belonging to not-yet-there utopias. In this sense, Iranian immigrant parents are recognized as political and social actors engaged in change-making. I will show how the researcher and parents can leverage the possibilities for social change within these moves. I will end the dissertation by inviting us to take three design commitments seriously when working with Iranian diasporic families toward possible futurities: drawing on critical post-colonial approaches to design different stages of the research process, as researchers, committing to making visible practices that may be invisible to those immersed in them instead of struggling with the binary of researched and researcher (Vossoughi et al., 2021), and an ongoing dedication to move beyond past-informed representation toward future-oriented actions for social change.
Recommended Citation
Hajnaghizadeh, Fatemeh, "Studying US Iranian Immigrant Parents Negotiating Movements Toward Future Belonging" (2023). Doctoral Dissertations. 2785.
https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/2785