Announcing a New Phase of the Freedom of Thought Journal and a Call to contribute to the Journal’s two forthcoming issues

We are pleased to announce that the Freedom of Thought Journal, after five years of publication, will be making a number of major changes in its format and editorial procedures in order to enhance its international and professional standings as a leading Iranian social science and humanities periodical publication.

Starting with its volume 11 (2022), the Freedom of Thought Journal will be published bilingually (Persian with English abstract and vice versa) using a new editorial management system for solicitation of articles, submissions, peer reviews, editing, and publishing in digital and print formats. Each published article will receive a unique and permanent international ID indexed in the data-base platforms such as Google Scholar and Crossref, and will be searchable in both Persian and English.

The upcoming two issues of the Freedom of Thought Journal (volume 11, Nos. 1 & 2) will be devoted to the theme of “the Turn of the Century: Looking back at the problems, achievements and lessons of the fourteenth century in Iran.”

According to the official Iranian calendar, the year 1400 is the end of the fourteenth solar century and the start of a new century. Over the past century, Iran has witnessed numerous and major transitions, and changes. Fifteen years before the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Constitutional Revolution opened a new political horizon for Iranian politics as the country was waking up from its medieval slumber. Despite this critical historical event, the fourteenth century in Iran witnessed deep political crises, challenges, and tensions that continued through the rest of the century.

Over the course of the century, Iran’s population increased more than eight folds, from 10 million to 84 million. Oil shifted from the margins to the center of Iran's economy, with the state budget becoming increasingly dependent on oil revenues. Despite the experience of two very different political systems, the Iranian society failed a transition to democracy that the constitutionalists had aspired to. The institution of religion, marginalized in the first decades of the century, seized political power after the Islamic Revolution. Subsequently, matters of personal and political freedoms, women’s status, socioeconomic equality, minority rights, environment, and economic mismanagement have plagued the country. In foreign policy and relations with its neighbors, Iran has gone through a tense century including a devastating and bloody war with Iraq, interference in the region and continuing tensions with the United States and other Western powers. If at the beginning of the century migration was an effective way to train future educators and a skilled and efficient workforce, at the end of the century emigration by specialists and educated elites from the country has led to a depletion of qualified experts in many fields. It is our hope that contributors to the forthcoming two issues of the Journal will provide thoughtful and critical analysis of the problems by placing them in the historical context of the past 100 years and explore the lessons to be learned for the country’s future.

The following is a list of potential themes and problems that we hope to be addressed by its contributors to the 2022 issues of the Freedom of Thought Journal.

• Problems, limitations, and consequences of the “Islamization” of the humanities and its impact on academic research and teaching in the fields of humanities and social sciences since the 1979 Revolution;
• Consequences of Islamizing education at all levels, instrumental and ideological use of education for social control, and the transition from a limited and elitist higher education to mass higher education;
• A century of restrictions and suppression of freedom of thought and expression and the implications of these limitations on the country’s social and political development;
• The failure to establish an independent judicial system, the “rule of law”, and to protect the basic rights of citizens;
• Changes in the norms, discourses, and relationships concerning sex, gender, and sexuality; including the status, equal rights, and participation of women in society, as well as women’s social movements over the past century;
• The presence and role of religion in the cultural, social and political spheres of life, the dominance of a theocratic system of governance, and the challenges of secularism;
• The tension between universal principles of human rights and religiously-based legal traditions and laws (Shari’a);
• How did water scarcity become a pervasive crisis in the last decades of the century, and what are the country’s urgent environmental challenges?
• Cause and pattern of migration in different periods of the fourteenth century and their impact on Iran’s labor force and economic development.
• The role of religious and secular intellectuals in Iran’s cultural and political life;
• Changes in the social stratification system of the Iranian society increasing socioeconomic inequalities;
• Changes in Iran's foreign relations and paradigms governing Iran’s regional and global policies;
• Unequal status, discrimination, and exclusionary policies against religious and ethnolinguistic minorities.
• ...

To contribute to these issues please go to the website of the Freedom of Thought Journal  submit a maximum 300 words abstract of your proposed article to contact@azadiandisheh.com. The deadlines for the submission of abstracts, final copy of the paper, and publication of issues 11 and 12 (2022) are as follows:

Submission deadlines and publication schedules:

Issue No. 11 of the Journal

Deadline for submission of manuscript: December 15, 2021

Publication date for issue No. 11: February 28, 2022 

Issue No. 12 of the Journal

Deadline for submission of manuscript: July 30, 2022

Publication date for issue No. 12: September 15, 2022

A conference on the general theme of the above issues is being planned by Iran Academia to take place in the Netherlands in 26 and 27 August of 2022. More detailed information about the conference.

Editorial board (in alphabetical order):

Ali Banuazizi, Roja Fazaeli, Mohammad Reza Nikfar, Saeed Paivandi, Nayereh Tohidi

Editorial Manager:  Ali Reza Kazemi