“We Will Never Forget, We Will Never Forgive”: The Impacts of the PS752 Tragedy on the Iranian Community in Edmonton, Canada

This paper explores the impacts of the tragedy of the Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, an international civilian passenger flight from Tehran to Kyiv, that was shot down three minutes after taking off by two Iranian surface-to-air missiles. Most of the 176 victims were headed to Canada; 55 were Canadian citizens and 30 were permanent residents. This paper particularly focuses on the ways in which the Iranian community in Edmonton, Canada, was affected by the tragedy. Drawing on a qualitative study of the Iranian community in Edmonton, we argue that the downing of the PS752 Flight has transformed the Iranian community’s socio-political organization abroad through the emergence of a new subculture that seeks truth and justice for the families of the victims, and the creation of new political boundaries between community members. The experience of grieving in liminal places, spaces, and times significantly transformed precarities of diasporic citizenship and contributed to the layers of competing emotions that our participants reported feeling in the months after. Through collecting oral histories of a diaspora and documenting collective memory of a historical trauma, this paper draws upon and contributes to four bodies of literature: immigrant liminality and inbetweenness; collective memory of trauma; immigrant emotions and diasporic grief; and sense of belonging and diasporic citizenship.