Student Movement and the Framing of Political Protests

One of the common approaches for explaining how a revolution is constructed is to analyze the ideology of revolutionaries. Ideology legitimizes the conflict and facilitates the mobilization of forces by providing an answer to the question ‘What should be done’ and developing a semantic system for the revolutionaries. But some thinkers such as David Snow believe that such semantic systems can’t be reduced to ideology and besides that, the attention must be paid on the frames that conduct the action of protesters. Frames are semantic systems that conduct the choice and position of revolutionaries in an unwritten and even unconscious way and as a mediating factor, they materialize revolutionary ideas and facilitate political mobilization of forces. This article deals with the memories of student movement activists during Pahlavi II in the Oral History Project of Harvard University to examine the process of politicization of student activists by analyzing the dominant frame of their action and choice. The findings show that Tayefe-Keshi is the frame that plays an important role in this process which has the function of developing boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and reproducing the political conflict and competition in the university.