Beyond Captivity, Beyond Confinement: Emancipation as Lived Possibility

By Amin Moussavi Nezhad, PhD Student in Political Science at the University of Alberta

I would like to dedicate this piece, first of all, to Mr. Ali Reza Kazemi, the Managing Director of ISSH, whose leadership made this path possible. I am equally indebted to all the professors and instructors whose labour sustains this vital academic space. In particular, I want to express my profound gratitude to Dr. Mohammad Reza Nikfar, Dr. Saeed Peivandi, and Dr. Zeynab Peyghambarzadeh, whose teaching, mentorship, and intellectual generosity profoundly shaped my academic journey and my understanding of emancipation.

—Amin Moussavi Nezhad
PhD Student in Political Science at the University of Alberta

When I reflect on the trajectory of my life — from arrest in the midst of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, to release on bail, to this moment as a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Alberta — I realize that what sustained me was not merely hope, but an experience of emancipation. Not the abstract emancipation often invoked in theory, but a concrete, tangible emancipation: intellectual, existential, and deeply personal.

My interest in social sciences was never just academic curiosity. It was a desire, perhaps even a need, to understand power, injustice, and liberation. But for me, pursuing that path in Iran was effectively closed. When I was detained, and later released under surveillance, I thought the door had slammed shut forever. It felt like my academic dream had been crushed under the heavy weight of repression and fear.

Yet at that very rupture, the Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (ISSH) entered my life. Its free Master’s program in Social Studies was not just a program; it was a lifeline. It was a signal; that even in confinement, knowledge can flow; that even when a regime tries to silence us, we can still learn, think, and imagine otherwise.

Emancipation as Intellectual Freedom

In my research, I draw on the critical theory notion of emancipation in two senses. First, as the liberation of the self from dominating social structures; second, as the expansion of one’s capacity to act meaningfully in the world. The ISSH program embodied both.

Academia in authoritarian contexts often means self-censorship, silence, and fear. But the ISSH program offered courses that were uncensored, critical, and fearless. It challenged us to think about power, identity, inequality; not as abstract, academic problems, but as lived, urgent realities. For someone like me, who had just tasted repression, this was more than theory; it was therapeutic, empowering, and subversive.

Through readings, discussions, and writing, I found that emancipation was not only a conceptual ideal — it was a claim I could stake for myself. I could refuse to be defined by the identity imposed on me by the state. I could reclaim my subjectivity, my dignity, my voice.

Emancipation as Existential and Psychological Survival

Beyond intellectual freedom, the ISSH program offered what I lacked most after my arrest: a sense of belonging and purpose. Detained persons are often reduced to numbers, to “cases,” to problems. Survivors are often haunted by shame, fear, and isolation. For me, ISSH was a space of restoration.

I reconnected with a world of ideas, of solidarity, of possibility. I met peers who understood what it meant to struggle, to risk, to hope. Each essay I wrote, each discussion I joined, was a small act of defiance; against despair, against erasure, against the silence the regime wanted to impose.

In that program, emancipation meant survival. Not just bodily survival, but the survival of my inner life: my sense of dignity, my right to think, to critique, to dream.

From Emancipated Thought to Transformative Action

Completing the ISSH Master’s was transformative. It awakened in me not only academic ambition, but also a moral and political vocation. It was the bridge that allowed me to imagine a future beyond confinement and statelessness.

Because ISSH kept the flame of critical social thought alive in me, I could survive the transition, the migration, the losses. More than that: I could carry with me a commitment: that knowledge should remain uncensored, accessible, free, especially for those deprived of it.

Now, as a PhD student, I study political structures, power relations, and the meaning of emancipation itself. But I also carry within me an embodied memory of what it is to be silenced, and what it is to be heard again. That tension shapes my scholarship, guides my questions, and fuels my determination to produce knowledge that is not just academically rigorous, but socially meaningful, morally resonant, and politically emancipatory.

Why Such Stories Matter — For Academia and Emancipation

Personal testimonies like mine are not just stories. They are proof that emancipation is not merely theoretical. It is a living possibility. When an institution like ISSH provides free, uncensored education to those excluded from it, it demonstrates that emancipation is not a privilege — it can be a right.

In contexts where power seeks to dominate not only bodies but minds, where regimes police thoughts as much as actions; free, online, uncensored education becomes resistance. It becomes survival. It becomes the planting of a seed that may one day grow into a forest of critical thinkers, dissenters, activists, builders of more just societies.

My journey did not end with hope. It did not end with triumph. It continues as emancipation: an ongoing process of thinking, acting, resisting, and rebuilding.