Though many scientists and cultural theorists have come to critique the association of science with progress and depoliticized objectivity, scientific discourse and research nevertheless retain many of the privileges connected with these ideas.  My own research, often modeled on and about the very idea of scientific research, assumes this privilege precisely for the purpose of calling it into question, even as I use it in order to articulate a set of ideas which require precisely this kind of protection from both political and religious intolerance.

The progeny of Iranian scientists, my relationship to these issues is necessarily complex, and is still more so now given a political climate in which certain views are increasingly suspect. Indeed, we live in an era in which some speech is increasingly censored – often with the most extreme consequences for the speaker, and as such my own work is of necessity as veiled as it is explicit, as personal as it is political and as critical as it is tolerant. In short, it has been the challenge of my work over time that it develop a language complex enough to accommodate my own highly complex relation to this contemporary tangle of science, politics and theology.