Acknowledgments
Tables
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: The Green Movement
Chapter 2: Historicizing the Green Movement
Chapter 3: The Green Movement through a Conceptual Lens:
Structuration, Social Action and the Public Sphere
Chapter 4: The Research Methodology and Design
Chapter 5: Participating Social Actors of the Green Movement
Chapter 6: Analysis of the Public Discourse of the Green
Movement
Chapter 7: Analysis of the Public Discourse of Ayatollah
Khomeini
Chapter 8: The Impact and Implications of Speech
Epilogue
Appendix A: Video Transcriptions of the Green Movement
Appendix B: Summary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Claims
References
About the Author
Maral Karimi is a doctoral student at the Department of Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.
Maral Karimi's work, "The Iranian Green Movement of 2009:
Reverberating Echoes of Resistance", is a link in a chain of
clarification and understanding of this globally significant civic
eruption, one, because of the country within which it
occurred-Iran; two, the domestic social conflicts inducing its
occurrence-a revolt from disgruntled urban, pro-Western,
middle-class professional intelligentsia, students and, small
business owners; three, the opponents choice of social media
technology for voicing, in this case, globally, their grievances
against the established political authority of their Iran, namely,
the Mullahs of the Islamic Republic; fourthly, their choice of
modern media technologies echoed similar revolts from below in
North Africa (think: the Jasmine Revolution; and, Arab Spring)
where mass use of modern social media technologies caught
dictatorial regimes by surprise temporarily escaping their control
exposing to them a new vulnerability in their authority profile of
their regimes in the minds and eyes of their domestic publics and
global communities, namely, their inability to control both the
forms and contents of the narrative of social conflicts within
their countries and externally vis a vis the rest of the world.
The Green Movement was a pioneering political movement in the
modern history of Iran which demonstrated the awesome liberating
power of social media technologies and of their destabilizing
consequences for dictatorial governments such as the country's
Islamic Republican Government. Maral Karimi's work puts the reader
front and center in this struggle for a new political authority and
political culture in the Iran of 2009 by bringing the language use
of the main players in the conflict under critical examination,
exposing their self-deceptions, silences, commitments, assertions,
capitulations, compromises, organizational weaknesses and political
fears. The reader acquires a measured understanding via discourse
analysis of the intellectual innards of the government officials
and civic leaders in opposition to the government and is able to
understand the why's and wherefores of events that subsequently
unfolded. For example, one can pinpoint why the recent 2017-2018
revolt of unemployed workers, unemployed students, underemployed
citizens, housewives and government workers in cities and districts
away from Tehran, the nation's capital, took the spontaneous form
they took and were absent the leadership of the urban middle-class
(leaders of the Green Movement) which did not voice their specific
material concerns during the 2008 revolt. As unemployed and
underemployed workers and unemployed students they were on their
own and had purchase on the moral conscience and political
authority of the Mullahs since the latter frequently wrapped its
cloth of legitimacy (vis a vis its urban middle-class political
competitors, for example) in claims to be institutional
representatives of the downtrodden of Iran, the very constituencies
that took part in this spontaneous revolt.
Maral Karimi's work assists all those seeking a fuller
understanding of modern Iran an opportunity to do so because of its
signature critical discourse analysis of the conflict's main
players and acknowledgement of the mobilising role of social media
in the conduct of the conflict/political competition between the
Islamic Republican rulers of the country and their less religiously
partisan middle-class critics. A recommended work.
*Charles Simon-Aaron, PhD, Ryerson University*
Maral Karimi’s book is a must read for anyone interested in an
in-depth analysis of the Iranian 2009 Green Movement. This
theoretically sophisticated and methodologically innovative
empirical research makes a significant contribution to our
understanding of the emergence and demise of the popular uprising
following the contested presidential elections as well as the
consequences of this failed movement that further undermine
democratic values and the viability of Reform Movements.
*Goli Rezai-Rashti, professor of social justice education,
University of Western Ontario*
An excellent example of a critical discourse analysis case study
with concrete implications for directions of resistance movements
beyond the context of Iran.
*John P. Portelli, professor of leadership, higher and adult
education, University of Toronto*
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