A Young Diaspora Raises its Voice: Creating Iranian Alliances Across Borders

By: Amy Malek, a board member and conference director of Iranian Alliances Across Borders (IAAB) for Ajam Media Collective. In 2002, a group of Iranian-American students studying abroad made a wild and exaggerated observation: Iranians are everywhere. Of course, we didn’t mean on TV or in the movies. We meant that all of a sudden, Iranians seemed to be everywhere we went. We were young and traveling, discovering Iranian-Italian restaurants in Dublin, studying with Iranian-Norwegian classmates in London, and meeting Iranian-Colombian seatmates on high-speed trains across the continent. Our observation became a long-running joke: did we have Persian radar or something? How did we just happen to encounter one Iranian establishment after another by sheer luck? Or, could it be that there are really that many Iranians abroad, and we really are everywhere? Click here to read full article.