Master’s Research
I set out systematically studying media practices first as a master’s student in cultural studies. In my master’s thesis, I examined Iranian underground music of the mid-2000s, an accessible, artistic medium of meaning production through which Iranian youth created and communicated frank, unprecedented accounts of their living experiences, emotions, and thoughts. In that research, I drew on sociological theories of articulation, media studies theories of audience, encoding/decoding models of communication, cultural studies theories of subculture and style, and the tradition of morphological analysis to examine the content of Iranian underground music. As it put contemporary popular music in the broader historical and political context of Iranian cultures and literature, my research showed a variety of identity transformations among the generation that produced the music and consumed the medium, a cohort of individuals born in the early years of the 1979 Revolution, commonly known in Iran as the Third Generation. Some of the collective characteristics of this generation, reflected in Iran’s underground music, include its realistic view of the world (in contrast to the previous generation’s idealism), a lack of trust in the outgroup, intensified individualism, and a dislike for long-term commitments.