Dr Yasamin Alkhansa

Independent Scholar Fellow 2023-24

The Inner Life of the State: Authoritarianism and Official Narrative Change at Schools in Iran Under the Islamic Republic

The research comes at a time when historical revisionism is on the rise. With the recognition of the ‘uses and abuses’ of history, especially (but not only) in authoritarian contexts, it offers a unique and nuanced understanding of such attempts through the case study of the Islamic Republic of Iran since its inception in 1979. The research focuses on school history textbooks, an integral element in the machinery of hegemonic production of official narratives of the past. Theorised as an ‘archive of the state’, it is the first longitudinal analysis of changes in official history, as codified in textbooks, situated in and through the socio-political transformations of Iran.

More information

Areas of interest

Education Ethnography Iran

Cohort

ISF10

Biography

Yasamin Alkhansa holds a PhD in International Education from the University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom. She has been researching education as it is implicated in the formation of nations/states and how it contributes to the contested narratives of the past. For her ethnography of official history in schools in Iran, Yasamin received the British Educational Research Association’s (BERA) Doctoral Thesis Award in 2019 and has since worked in different European institutes such as Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France, and George Eckert Institute for Educational Media (GEI) and Leibniz Research Association in Germany. She is currently a visiting scholar at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland where she is writing her first monograph on the politics of State-sponsored history supported by ISRF.

Biographical details correct as of 14.01.25