Alinejad’s new book explores how the children of Iranian immigrants in the US utilize the internet and develop digital identities.
Taking Los Angeles—the long-time media and cultural center of Iranian diaspora—as its ethnographic field site, it investigates how various web platforms are embedded within the everyday social, cultural, and political lives of second generation Iranian Americans. Donya Alinejad unpacks contemporary diasporic belonging through her discussion of the digital mediation of race, memory, and long-distance engagement in the historic Iranian Green Movement. The book argues that web media practices have become integral to Iranian American identity formation for this generation, and introduces the notion of second-generation “digital styles” to explain how specific web applications afford new stylings of diaspora culture.
About the author
Donya Alinejad is a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC project “Digital Crossings in Europe: Gender, Diaspora, and Belonging” at the Department of Media and Culture Studies at the Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
The book is available for purchase here.
Reviews of The Internet and Formations of Iranian American-ness
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“This book, well grounded in scholarly ethnography, provides valuable new insights that help us go beyond traditional research on the Iranian diaspora by foregrounding social media and the material dimensions of digital communication. In particular, Alinejad’s concept of ‘digital styles’ highlights the various modes through which inherited and collectively developed notions of identity are played out amongst second-generation Iranian-Americans through social media and web applications.” (Daniel Miller, University College London, UK)
“The children of immigrants in the United States are growing up in a digital age, yet there are no scholarly books on this timely topic. Furthermore, traditional research on social networks may underestimate the role of the internet among the second generation. As the first case study of how Iranian diasporic youth negotiate their ethnic and racial identities in a digitally connected world, this book makes an important contribution to the burgeoning literature on the second generation.” (Mehdi Bozorgmehr, City University of New York, USA)
“Alinejad’s volume is a welcome addition to debates around migration, media, race, and identity. Drawing on a multidisciplinary body of literature, it provides an empirical account of diasporic media practices and lived experiences.” (Miyase Christensen, Stockholm University; KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)