She greets all with a warm hug, brushing back dark, curly hair from her lean figure to reveal a friendly smile.
Leila Forouhi’s outgoing nature can be witnessed by fellow students in the Texas Tech University College of Media & Communication.
While currently a 32-year-old graduate student studying mass communications, Forouhi began her career in journalism far from Texas Tech.
After graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a degree in environmental studies, she began living in Tehran, Iran.
Leila Forouhi smiles for a photograph in the Texas Tech University College of Media & Communication. (Allison Terry/The Hub@TTU)
“My mom is American, but they met in Iran,” Forouhi said, of her mother and Iranian father, explaining the two are both physicists and met while completing research. “They lived with each other unmarried for, like, almost a year in Tehran, which is very taboo.”
Forouhi said she moved to Iran in her mid-20s and began working for Iran Environmental News Network, after a brief stint teaching private English language lessons.
“The work environment is different,” Forouhi said, in comparison to working in the United States. “It’s more hostile toward women and just in general.”
In a transition to a journalism career, she began working for the news agency Press TV, based in Tehran, as a website news writer. Though the multi-platform publication subscribes to mainstream news gathering organizations, such as the Associated Press and Reuters, the student admits Press TV had a bias and only presented stories from a particular viewpoint.
“They always told us that the political stance is anti-imperialist,” Forouhi said. “They’re basically saying any dirt we can find on the U.S. or a western power, we’re going to highlight that.”
Forouhi said reporters for Press TV did not need to come from a journalism or writing background. The main criteria when hiring was speaking English, along with Farsi, the language of the country.
“The managers had connections with the political elite,” Forouhi said, “which is very conservative in Iran, and somewhat dangerous. They have a lot of power. So a lot of unqualified people have these manager positions.”
The three years she spent in the country, she noticed cultural differences from her original California home. She noted the mega-city of Tehran has millions of people living in it, changing the environment simply with sheer numbers. Forouhi also appreciated the aspect of sharing food at meals, and maintaining a close family environment that she feels is missing on the West Coast.
Leila Forouhi
Forouhi said she met her now-husband, Hamid, in Iran, but she remained in Tehran for a year while Hamid moved to Lubbock to earn a Ph.D. in business. The two maintained a long-distance relationship when she moved back to California and began taking journalism courses and writing for the student paper, La Voz, at De Anza College, a junior college in San Jose.
“Again, it helped fuel this desire,” Forouhi said, in her pursuit of journalism. “I remember writing about this law about the humane treatment of farm animals. I remember writing about the Israeli-Palistian conflict. The prisoner trade, and that sparked some controversy on campus.”
When she finally moved to Lubbock, Forouhi said she considered herself unofficially engaged to Hamid. She said she worked for a semester at Richard Milburn Academy, a Lubbock school, then began teaching part-time at the ELS Language Center in 2012.
“The class is an emersion class,” Forouhi said, of teaching the English language, “and we take a communicative approach. Even though we have students from different countries and levels, we only teach in English.”
She explained the institution has 12 levels of classes, that stair-step levels of speaking English — from knowing none of the language to becoming fluent. Each session lasts four weeks, so determined students may be able to complete the program in one year.
Forouhi noted the reward of watching students grow, but said the job does include challenges. Of these, one is the heavy workload of lesson planning on top of teaching classes. Another is aiding students’ adjustments to a new culture.
“There was definitely cultural clashes because we have students from different countries and different beliefs,” Forouhi said.
She has had students from African countries, parts of Asia and Latin America.
“Some students, for example, from Saudi Arabia, women and men are not used to being in class together,” Forouhi said. “Sometimes I would try to force a female student to work in a group with male students and sometimes they wouldn’t, and I had to kind of adjust my own point of view and lesson plans.”
One year after beginning at the ELS Language Center, Forouhi found herself traveling to another country, once again. As a part of a human rights delegation, she interviewed and videotaped more than 60 native people of Honduras over a 10-day period.
“It has the highest murder per capita rate in the whole world right now,” Forouhi explained. “And there’s different struggles different struggles and resistant movements going on, like the privatization of the land.”
Her husband, Hamid, along with one of his professors, wrote an article questioning the exploitation of the people and critiquing the type of business model in which corporations enter third world countries in order to mine minerals, according to Forouhi. She said the article is waiting for review to be published in a journal.
“We went to one rally protest in front of a courthouse in La Esperanza,” Forouhi began, “where an indigenous activist leader, she, and I think two other people were being persecuted for their activism.”
According to Forouhi, the activist was attempting to halt the construction of a Chinese company’s hydroelectric dam on a river the indigenous Lenca people depend upon for their land.
“This Lenca community put up barricades, they did protesting to stop them from taking over the river,” Forouhi said, “but now the leaders are being persecuted, you know, for trespassing.”
Following the protest, Forouhi said her group moved from community to community, allowing the Lencas to record their stories and injustices opposed on them.
More recently, Forouhi’s activism past has led her to becoming involved with the West Texas Accountability Project, a Lubbock organization for responsible gas and oil extraction.
“The city of Lubbock created a committee,” Forouhi said, “Oil and Gas Citizen Advisory Committee, to come up with recommendations to update the current oil and gas ordinance which hadn’t really been looked at for a long time.”
She explained the former ordinance had given liberty to oil and gas companies to drill less regulated. On Feb. 26, Lubbock City Council voted 4-3 to increase the perimeters of drilling around homes and businesses to be setback from 300 to 600 feet.
“They were really able to introduce really impressive recommendations that got passed,” Forouhi said. “We came up with a campaign to lobby to get a 600-foot setback in addition to get mandatory inspections of all of the oil and gas activity in Lubbock, annual inspections.”
While Forouhi has already had experience at multiple publications, she is new to Texas Tech.
“After being in Lubbock for two years, I decided why not,” Forouhi said, of attending the university. “I heard about the program where you could get your master’s in mass comm in one year, and I thought well, my now-husband, he’s getting his Ph.D., I could get my master’s in mass comm.”
Aside from her classes, Forouhi works as a teacher’s aid in the College of Media & Communication for Kent Wilkinson, a regents professor in Hispanic and International Communication, in his Ethnicity, Race and Gender in the Media course. The graduate student is also a research assistant for Assistant Professor Sun-Young Lee.
“I’m working with Dr. Lee and researching corporate social responsibility, and how companies use that term,” she said. “We’re basically collecting data or content about CSR content online.”
While maintaining her grades in courses and assisting professors in the college, Forouhi said she enjoys preserving her writing with a blog, she titled “Free Voice Project.”
“I basically blog my opinion on current events,” Forouhi said. “I’m really interested in things having to do with Iran. Prisoners, raising the minimum wages, workers, things like that.”
She admits now that she is a student again, it is difficult to find time for writing, but she is looking forward to more opportunity in the future.
About Allison Terry
