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Iranian Diaspora

Opinion

München und die Sehnsucht, weiß zu sein

Posted on July 27, 2016 by Alex Shams

Originally published on Carta on July 27, 2016. Translated from the English original, which can be found here. Warum flehte uns der Münchener Amokläufer an, ihn als Deutschen zu betrachten?

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Opinion

Why Did The Munich Killer Beg Us To See Him As German?

Posted on July 23, 2016 by Alex Shams

Originally published by MuslimGirl.net on July 23,2016. Republished on Huffington Post and Hummus for Thought. Translated to German and republished on Magna. Around and around we go. Yesterday, an 18-year old

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Opinion

Yara Shahidi, the Iranian-American Star of ‘Black-ish,’ Is Breaking Stereotypes On & Off Screen

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Alex Shams

Originally published on Muftah on June 3,2016. Over the last two years, the hit ABC sitcom “Black-ish” has deftly explored issues of race, class, and gender in the United States

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Opinion

Congress Is About to Pass a Dangerously Racist Bill. Our Response Must Be Solidarity Against Islamophobia.

Posted on December 14, 2015 by Alex Shams

Originally published on the Huffington Post. The last few weeks have seen a dangerous escalation of rhetoric targeting Muslims and Middle Eastern-Americans, as the national media and Republican presidential hopeful

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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

  • Iran’s Protesters Are Caught Between State Repression and Foreign Intervention
  • Quiet Solidarity: The Underground Networks that Defied Israel’s War on Iran
  • Our Man For Tehran
  • Israel’s Bombs Have Stopped Falling, But Iranians Still Face an Uncertain Future
  • The Take: How can Iranians rebuild while crackdowns intensify?
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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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Popular posts

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