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Israel Opinion Palestine

Israel Needs a Plan in Gaza. Don’t Look to the West Bank for Ideas

Posted on November 22, 2023 by Alex Shams

Originally published in Newsweek on Nov. 20, 2023. One of Elias Deis’ first childhood memories is running from soldiers opening fire on his neighbors. It was 1989. The First Intifada

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Arab World Palestine Reporting

‘They Don’t Want People to Know We Exist’: Palestinians across the West Bank describe what life has been like since October 7

Posted on November 10, 2023 by Alex Shams

Originally published in New York Magazine on Nov. 10, 2023. Over the last month, Israel launched an assault across the Gaza Strip in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack, in

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Iran Reporting

‘We Have to Know When to Hope and When to Be Hopeless’: How six Iranians feel about the Woman Life Freedom movement, one year later

Posted on September 16, 2023 by Alex Shams

First published in New York Magazine on Sept. 16, 2023. As told to Alex Shams. One year has passed since protests first broke out across Iran following the killing of

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Iran Reporting

How Bazaar: The surprising way a Japanese soap opera shaped the Iranian secondhand economy

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Alex Shams

Originally published in Mildew Magazine, Sep 2023, based on an article in Ajam Media Collective.

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Iran

Woman, Life, Liberty: A Movement In Its Context

Posted on August 26, 2023 by Alex Shams

Presentation in Spanish on August 29, 2023 at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, about the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran to mark its one year anniversary, as part

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Iran

Persianate Futurism: First Time on the Overnight Train from Tehran to Samarqand

Posted on June 21, 2023 by Alex Shams

Originally published on Ajam Media Collective on May 28, 2023. This post is part of the Persianate Futurism series, a collection of works which asks: What will the Persianate world

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Iran Reporting

‘We Have Broken the Wall of Fear’: Iranian protesters on what brings them back to the streets four weeks in

Posted on October 13, 2022 by Alex Shams

Originally published in New York Magazine on Oct. 13, 2022. Written by Alex Shams. Since mid-September, Iranians have taken to the streets to protest the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini

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Iran Opinion

Iran has a long history of protests. This time it’s different

Posted on October 8, 2022 by Alex Shams

Originally published in the Los Angeles Times on Oct. 8, 2022. Three weeks in, Iran’s protests show no signs of stopping. Sparked by the death of a young Kurdish Iranian

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Iran Opinion

What Role Does Religion Play in Iran’s Protests?

Posted on September 28, 2022 by Alex Shams

Alex Shams was interviewed by AJ+ about the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in Iran that began in September 2022. He discussed how protestors were navigating the complex relationship between religion

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Featured Iran Reporting

Hormuz: A Psychedelic Ride through a Geological Wonder

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Alex Shams

Originally published in Kinfolk Islands in September 2022, pgs. 74-85. The Strait of Hormuz gets a bad rap. Sandwiched between Iran, Oman and the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf, this

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About me

Alex Shams is an Iranian-American writer and a PhD student of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

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Recent posts

  • “Why Did So Many People Think This War Was a Good Idea?”
  • Looking A Tyrant In the Eye: Iran’s Long Struggle for Freedom and Justice
  • Iran After Khamenei
  • Iran’s Protesters Are Caught Between State Repression and Foreign Intervention
  • Quiet Solidarity: The Underground Networks that Defied Israel’s War on Iran
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About

Born and raised in an Iranian-American family in Los Angeles, Alex Shams has long been fascinated by the stories that places can tell us. Growing up, he learned Persian and Spanish; in college, he learned Arabic and studied abroad at the American University of Cairo before moving to Beirut after graduation. After receiving his master’s in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard, he moved to Bethlehem, Palestine, where he was a journalist at Ma’an News Agency, the largest independent Palestinian news organization. He received his PhD. from the University of Chicago in Sociocultural Anthropology. His dissertation, entitled “Constructing Islamic Modernity: Power, Religion, and Masculinity in Post-Revolutionary Iran,” was based on three years of ethnographic research in Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan as well as archival research in the British Library and Ba’ath Party Archives.

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