Politics of Representation: Nationalist Discourse, Normalization, and the Afghan Diaspora in the Iranian High School Textbooks

Education contributes to justice, belonging, or even identity formation among human beings, irrespective of any language background, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, or class. Yet, sometimes, voices of individuals, people, groups, ethnicities, or minorities are not heard, due to many factors, such as the majority dominance, war, migration, asylum, and/or social and political marginalization. As a result, they are not represented in the society. Likewise, their voices are silenced even in the educational system, including textbook materials. Refugees or asylum seekers might even be at a worse condition in some countries. This goes on so far so that the society at large is not informed of their suffering or are not even given enough educational opportunities as to how to deal with them fairly. The aim of this writing, therefore, is to explore the selected textbooks offered at high schools in Iran to observe how the voices of refugees or migrants are represented in the selected Iranian textbooks at high school.