Michael Saleki

My case study for ANT380 focused on the Iranian Student Association at the University of Toronto, informally referred to as UTIRAN. My reasoning for selecting UTIRAN for my case study was not fundamentally tied to the organization itself, but rather, holistically speaking, stimulated by an aim to empirically demonstrate how co-ethnic community organizations propel Iranians to a multifaceted integration into Canada. Subjectively, this interest owes to my positionality, as a second-generation Iranian Canadian, alongside challenges that stem from a situational negotiation of my ethnocultural identity throughout my upbringing. I spent my younger years in Thornhill, which has a large Iranian community, and I was well-connected with fellow Iranian peers, but after moving at the age of 9 to Markham, where I currently reside, I encountered challenges in establishing co-ethnic interconnections because Markham’s Iranian community is peripheralized in comparison. Combined with a Farsi-language attrition due to having few co-ethnic peers to converse with, my sense of ethnocultural consciousness dwindled throughout my adolescence.As a major in sociocultural anthropology, I had an epiphany that I had read and conducted in-depth case studies about various ethnocultural groups, from reading about the Nuer of South Sudan to writing an ethnography about the Indigenous Legacy Gathering. But I had not yet investigated my own ethnocultural group, particularly how co-ethnic community organizations have contributed to the preservation of their cultural affinity whilst seeking integration into Canada. If sociocultural anthropologists are expected to acquaint themselves with different ethnocultural groups, why shouldn’t I do so with my own? I searched intensely for an Iranian community organization as a field site. One site I discovered was Parya Trillium Foundation, which was located within driving distance from my home in Markham, but I was refused entry because their newcomer clientele primarily comprised displaced persons. Eventually, I selected UTIRAN because its target audience comprises Iranian Canadian students like me, and as a UofTSG student, its primary location within the St.George campus makes it readily accessible. This spatial essence, alongside its formal emphasis on cultural preservation among Iranian and Iranian-Canadian students alike, led me to interpret UTIRAN as a fixed co-ethnic social network that enables fellow Iranians to come together and, in theory, share both cultural and socioeconomic resources to facilitate their integration within their host society. In practice, I discovered, through attending on-campus events and interviewing executive members, that UTIRAN’s membership primarily comprises Iranian-born graduate students, with fewer fellow second-generation students involved. Whilst this produced both language and cultural barriers, as the majority of UTIRAN’s members were fluent Farsi speakers who emigrated from Iran recently, I learned about their subjective challenges in connecting withfellow Iranians and their motivations for joining UTIRAN as a means of doing so. I learned about their experience of leaving Iran and their socioeconomic experiences in Canada. These findings helped me acknowledge that UTIRAN furthers Iranian students’ ethnocultural consciousness by allowing them to connect with fellow Iranians from diverse age groups, and in doing so, disseminate their socioeconomic background to provide them resources for integration.