by Roja Bandari, NWI rapporteur
I’m packing my laptop, some music, and a blow-up pillow for the plane ride and I’m intensely hoping for the person sitting next to me to be interesting. I feel tingly at the thought of being at the conference, in the same room as many world-renowned and outstanding scholars and activists and I consider myself privileged to have the opportunity to be there. I admit that I feel just a little nervous since although I have been active in a women’s rights campaign, my main field of study is not at all related to the subject of this conference. I’m a PhD student in electrical engineering and I wrestle with a computer program all day trying to find the trade-off between the number of wirelessly communicated bits and detection performance of a sensor network. Somehow I doubt that I will be speaking much about my research to anyone in this conference.
I might not have related academic background, but I am hoping to bring a few things of my own to the conference. I feel that I have the passion and maybe a good intuition about women’s rights and especially women’s condition in my home country, Iran. I grew up in Iran and I was 20 years old by the time I moved to the US in 2000. My teenage years were definitely bittersweet, on one hand I had to deal with unreasonable restrictions at my all-girls’ school (junior high was not fun), and on the other hand I formed lasting friendships with my strong, lively, audacious, and funny classmates and learned calculus and physics -all those manly subjects- from extremely intelligent and passionate female teachers. Maybe something from all of that pushes me to care more about what happens to women of Iran.
I have spent the past five or six months obsessively reading about a campaign called the “One Million Signatures” campaign, initiated by Iranian activists inside Iran last summer. The goal is to gather one million signatures to demand a change in the discriminatory laws in the Iranian legal system, specifically those which discriminate with respect to gender. Everything about this campaign intrigues me, from their face-to-face method that emphasizes education and dialogue to their non-hierarchical structure where activists collaborate without the restrictions of a hierarchy. I was impressed by the amazing writings of my sisters in Iran where you can sense their wisdom and courage radiating from every single line you read. About four months ago, along with some other students and young professionals in California, we decided to establish a group to advocate for this great campaign in our community and spread the word about their cause. This campaign is one of the most commendable movements taking place in Iran and we hope that it gets the international support it really deserves.
I am hoping to meet other participants in the conference who might also be interested in this campaign (I already know I will have a great conversation about this with Rebecca). I also hope to learn about ways that the international community can help campaigns such as this one. This is especially a delicate subject since some forms of international support can lead to increased pressures on activists inside countries like Iran. I’m glad to see that a few of the sessions focus on how the media and the international community can play a role in the struggle for peace and women’s rights. I’m also very happy to see that the conference seems to have an emphasis on drawing tangible conclusions and identifying practical steps that lead to action.
It’s going to be a very exciting and busy week. For now, I will keep packing while thinking about the weather in Galway and what it’s going to be like to see the sun shining until 10 pm.
