Every year BERA recognises academic excellence and rigour in research by a Doctoral student. This underscores BERA’s commitment to developing capacity, advancing quality and methodological originality within the field of educational research.

This year we received a number of high quality applications and the judges were very impressed by the volume of exciting new researchers.

We are pleased to announce the 2019 Winner of the BERA Doctoral Thesis Award is Yasamin Alkhansa(University of Sussex) for her thesis Selective Histories: Living and Teaching in Iran under the Islamic Republic

The abstract for her thesis is below:

“Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran, growing scholarly debates have criticized the theocratic State for its authoritarian imposition of a singular historical narrative in education and beyond. Pointing to the way the Islamic Republic has ideologically selected and (re)appropriated a nation’s history to sanction particular identities, these debates have overwhelmingly focused on the power of the State at the expense of marginalizing the role of social actors such as teachers as the mediator of the curriculum. Drawing on an extensive ethnographic research study in Tehran-Iran from 2014 to 2015, this thesis brings to light teachers’ lived-world inside and outside the school. By telling their story, it demonstrates that despite real constraints, teachers do act against the imposition of official history and trivialize the State’s claim to historical truth through – quiet and unassuming – acts of everyday resistance, which contradictory accommodate it. Informed by Gramscian notion of contradictory consciousness, the study captures this complexity and shows how their pedagogies are  simultaneous acts of resistance and submission to the status quo. This thesis also introduces a new method of textbook research building on Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) – which combines the analysis of textbooks’ historical content with its pedagogic style and socio-linguistic features. By so doing it critiques the dominant literature on the post-revolutionary Islamization of curriculum, nuancing the concept in terms of the absolute and authoritarian claim to historical truth and legitimacy; key features of the official history observable in (similar) authoritarian contexts. ”