Pardis MahdaviExecutive Director, UC Berkeley Executive Leadership Academy

Belong: What It's Like to Live in the Hyphen With Pardis Mahdavi

15 Jun 2020 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:55

In this introductory monologue, Pardis Mahdavi—Dean of Social Sciences at Arizona State University and an anthropologist—reflects on her experience as an Iranian‑American navigating a hyphenated identity. After being expelled from Iran, she realized she needed to actively create spaces and languages of belonging in the United States. She describes how she discovered a community of other hyphenated Americans forging alternative belonging spaces, and she launched a curated playlist that brings together refugees, youth, families, filmmakers, psychologists, and scholars to explore the complexities of identity and belonging. The video serves as an invitation for viewers to join this collective journey, emphasizing the authority and empowerment that arise from embracing the hyphen between cultures.

Chapters

It took getting kicked out of my ancestral home to wrap my limbs around the hyphen. Embracing my hyphenated identity helped me learn to belong. Hi, I'm Pardis Mahdavi, and I'm the Dean of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. An anthropologist by training, I have been studying social movements and gender and sexual politics for 2 decades. I'm also Iranian American, and for many years I tried to understand where I belong in this world. Too Iranian in America, too American in Iran. And so for many years I existed in a fog, betwixt and between, not belonging anywhere. Then I got kicked out of Iran, told never to return. It woke me up. I realized I would have to make spaces and languages where I did belong in the U.S. To do that, I had to embrace my many identities. I looked around and realized I wasn't the only one. Scholars and other hyphenated Americans were creating alternative spaces of belonging. I could join them. I created this playlist to invite you and others to join me in this journey to find belonging. I invite you to meet refugees, young people with different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and families in these different clips who search for belonging and find it in the most unexpected of places. Listen as filmmakers, psychologists, anthropologists, and people of all hyphenated identities explore their many selves, helping us learn to make belonging as we embrace the authority that comes with living in the hyphen.