Dr. Maral Karimi

Maral Karimi has a PhD from the department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. She specializes in social movements and media and communication studies with a focus on Iranian politics. in her PhD dissertation she has developed a theory of "protest cycles" that examines social movements in Iran and beyond.

She further examines the role of social media in general and political communications in particular in social movements, especially revolutions and mass uprisings.

Karimi was born in Iran in the interregnum between the 1979 revolution and the war with Iraq in 1981. The violence, volatility and vengeance she witnessed and that touched her life made her acutely aware of the political conditions of the surrounding world at an early age. Those conditions gave rise to questions that she then carried into her adult life and sent her on an academic quest in search of answers. She is the author of “The Iranian Green Movement of 2009: Reverberating Echoes of Resistance”, Rowman & Littlefield, published in 2018. In that book, she examined political communications of the Iranian Green Movement of 2009, linking the events both to the revolution of 1979 and the protests of 2017-2018 to develop an understanding of the conditions that contributed to the demise of the movement. The book, which was well received both by academia and media in Canada, the United States and Europe, examines the quest for democratic self-determination of the Green Movement and developed rudimentary concepts for the theory of ‘protest cycles.’

Karimi's PhD dissertation is interdisciplinary where she explores the recurrence of resistance movements (with a special focus on women, working class, ethnic groups and other marginalized social actors) in contemporary Iran in pursuit of democracy, self determination and “republicanism” and the impact of the “empire” on this quest. Building on elementary concepts she developed in previous research, her doctoral dissertation theorizes collective social action in Iran and beyond in a framework she's named “protest cycles”. In short, the theory is a blueprint for unravelling and understanding the multitude of forces, both domestic and international, involved in social movements and their quests for democratic self-determination, in authoritarian contexts. Furthermore, Karimi's research pays special attention to the role of public discourse and political communications and their emancipatory potential in social movements.