Downloaded By: [McAuliffe, Cameron] At: 22:20 3 March 2008 Transnationalism Within: internal diversity in the Iranian diaspora CAMERON McAULIFFE, University of Western Sydney, Australia ABSTRACT Transnationalism research is dominated by studies of national groups. This paper instead looks at the internal diversity of one national diasporic community. The analysis draws on research with the children of Iranian migrants from Baha’i and Muslim backgrounds in Sydney, London and Vancouver. This paper shows the differential reproduction of homeland class relations in different cities of the Iranian diaspora, and how these processes are influenced by the internal diversity within the Iranian diaspora. The reproduction of homeland class relations in the diaspora in part aids in the reproduction of real and imagined links to Iran, fostering transnational social fields that extend from the upper class areas of north Tehran into the suburbs of Kensington in London, West Vancouver, or St Ives in Sydney. Connections by socioeconomic status, or class, by religion, by generation and time of settlement are shown in this paper to exist alongside national affiliation as possible lenses through which transnational communities can be understood. All of these forms of communal belonging produce distinctive and yet intersecting transnational social fields. KEY WORDS Iran; Baha’i; Muslim; transnationalism; religious identity; class; second generation. This paper expands on other research that challenges the limitations inherent in transnational discourses that rely too heavily on a national framework to the exclusion of other scales and modes of belonging (Mavroudi 2007; McAuliffe 2007; Wimmer & Glick Schiller 2002; Werbner 2000). Many studies continue unpro- blematically to deploy national migrant communities as objects of analysis, treating migrant groups as internally coherent and homogeneous (e.g. Snel et al. 2006). Since its inception as a conceptual framework for understanding new patterns of migration in a global context (Glick Schiller et al. 1992) research on transnation- alism has tended to focus on the fluidity of trans-border relations involving flows of people, goods and ideas between nation-states. Contemporary research has pointed to the need to recognise that the formative nature of relations between places need not be limited to movements between homogeneously constructed nations. In some cases translocal connections form the more appropriate frame of reference (Velayutham & Wise 2005). In other cases nested relations compete across scale, with regional and global relations precipitating communal connections ISSN 0004-9182 print/ISSN 1465-3311 online/08/010063-18 # 2008 Geographical Society of New South Wales Inc. DOI: 10.1080/00049180701877436 Australian Geographer, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 63Á80, March 2008