Stewart Hoover delivers the conference keynote address

Relations between the United States and Iran might appear to have been steadily eroding for some time, but a pair of SJMC faculty members recently took the opportunity to explore common research interests with Iranian scholars.

Professor Stewart Hoover and Assistant Research Professor Lynn Schofield Clark (Ph.D. '98) were invited to speak at the Tehran International Conference on Religion and Media in November. Hoover delivered the keynote address, and Clark presented a paper on religious commodities and emerging trends in religious popular culture in non-Western religious traditions.

Both said they made important contacts with faculty colleagues and students from Iranian universities.

"The conference was also an important one for our Iranian colleagues. They expressed interest in reducing Iran's scholarly isolation," Hoover said.

While international conferences in hard-sciences fields and engineering are not out of the ordinary there, the religion-and-media conference was one of a relatively few in the social sciences and was the first conference ever in Iran involving the fields of media studies, communications or journalism.

It also proved interesting in terms of issues such as academic politics and gender roles and relationships in Iran, Clark said. She said she found her interactions with female faculty and students – the undergraduate population at the University of Tehran is 65 percent women – to be particularly interesting,

"Today's college students there have no memory of life before the revolution," she said. "Despite the prominence of Islam in everyday life, many seem to be as neutral or uninterested in religious practices as are the college students of the U.S."

Yet, Clark noted, they are not uninterested in politics. "Women students in particular are committed to receiving an education that will help them to have a greater voice within the Republic, and both the male and female students were interested in learning about how journalism functions in a democracy."

Hoover said students at the conference were dynamic and motivated.

"For many of them, this was a unique opportunity to interact with academic scholars from abroad. As higher education is particularly valued in Iran, and as the universities are at the center of social and political ferment and change in Iran, the interests and aspirations of students provide insight into some of the direction Iranian culture will take in the coming years."

Lynn Schofield Clark is interviewed by an Iranian reporter.

The Iranian revolution is seen as a unique moment in history, a time when a pure Shia Islamic state might be brought into being, and communications media are seen as central to this project, he said.  

In his address, Hoover suggested that religious authority would always tend to be threatened, rather than supported, by modern media.

Clark's talk pointed to questions of who participates in the power relations in culture and how media increasingly look into places where social and cultural power is exercised.

She told the conference participants that "modern, commercial and commodity culture will increasingly be an alternative to formal centers of authority, particularly for young people and people who have traditionally been left of political and social centers.

"Raising questions about how state-owned media could be open to voices of dissent was something that seemed to resonate among the students and those at the margins of power," she said.

"It was not an idea that was warmly embraced by the clerics and mullahs in attendance, however."

Hoover and Clark said they were interviewed many times by Iranian public and student radio, television, print and online media. They also appeared together as the sole guests on "Interview," Iran Broadcasting's weekly English-language international public-affairs program that is distributed throughout the Middle East.

"We found a great deal of interest among Iranians in the United States and a sense – at least from those we met – in improved relations between the U.S. and Iran," Hoover said.