Precarity and Possibility: The Labor of Underground Video Dealers in Iran

Blake Atwood is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at the American University of Beirut, where he also serves as the Chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies. He has published widely on media in Iran and Lebanon. He is the author of Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic (Columbia University Press, 2016).

In this presentation, Atwood demonstrates that post-revolutionary video dealers were cultural laborers, even as they worked informally outside the bounds of state and corporate regulation.