Sara Naderi

My name is Sara Naderi. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Victoria and my MA in Sociology from the Allameh Tabatabaie University in Iran. I have taught at the KPU Department of Sociology since 2021. I also taught several courses in the Department of Sociology and the department of gender studies at the University of Victoria as a sessional lecturer since 2018, for which I got the UVic President's Fellowship in Research-Enriched Training.

My areas of interest revolve around the Sociology of Knowledge from a postcolonial, feminist, and critical standpoint. My interests include gender and women studies, political sociology, cultural studies, Middle East studies, Postcolonial theories, media studies and subaltern studies. Questions such as, "How and through which institutional and epistemological mechanisms is modern social knowledge produced and reproduced? Is there any consistency between the aim and function of our modern mainstream sociology? And what are the practical, political, and epistemological influences of social scientific knowledge on the life of people (especially subaltern) to whom the knowledge was supposed to give voice, represent, and/or emancipate?" are the most eye-catching questions for me during my sociological inquiries in teaching and research.

As a woman born and raised in post-revolutionary Iran, most of my research projects have revolved around Iranian women's subjectivity, which arises from their marginalized subject position as women belonging to postcolonial society in the modern world. My doctoral dissertation focused on the shaping and reshaping of Iranian women of the generation of the eighties [Zanan-e Dahe-ye Shasti] individual and collective self as the result of their lifelong encounter with androcentric and Orientalist discourses (both Islamic and secular) that claim to represent, give voice, or liberate them! In this research, inspired by those women's self-narratives and equipped with historical and theoretical investigation, I tried to reveal the colonization process of knowledge of and about these women and initiate some steps toward decolonizing their lifeworld and knowledge production about it.