Profiles in Courage: Transnational Resistance from the United States and Iran

Julia Harte, Persis Karim

This conversation will spotlight the stories of individual Americans and Iranians who transcended geographic, ideological, and political borders, seeking solidarity with other freedom-seeking movements while being demonized and persecuted by domestic and foreign authorities. It will feature a director of a recent documentary about Iranians who moved to the Bay Area since the 1970s, forging alliances with civil rights movements in their new home, and the author of a new book about Americans who traveled abroad to join revolutionary liberation causes and were targeted by the U.S. government as a result. The discussants will explore what motivated these individuals throughout their perilous trajectories, what made their forms of transnational resistance so threatening to repressive regimes at home and abroad—and what we can all learn from them about applying universal principles of social justice in a truly universal way.