Sara Karimzadeh

About Sara Karimzadeh

About Sara Karimzadeh

Sara Karimzadeh is associate senior lecturer in sociology at Örebro University. She obtained her PhD in sociology at University of Tabriz, Iran, in 2018 and began her affiliation with Örebro University in 2021 as a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellow. Since 2023, she has been actively engaged in both research and educational roles within the sociology department.

Research

Sara Karimzadeh's research focuses on the sociology of consumption, with a particular emphasis on (un)sustainable consumption practices, consumption and production processes, ethical/political consumption, and sufficiency and care. She does research both in qualitative and quantitative methods and uses comparative analysis to gain a deeper understanding of the social, cultural, political, and economic mechanisms that contribute to the development of various consumption practices across different contexts and societies. In her most recent project titled "Social (im)possibilities of the formation of ethical consumption: A comparative study of Sweden and Iran", funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, she conducted a comparative analysis of ethical consumption in Sweden and Iran.

Sara Karimzadeh's doctoral research constituted an exploratory examination of the sociological determinants contributing to unsustainable consumption practices in Iran. During her PhD, she had the privilege of being a guest researcher at Groningen University in Netherlands. After completing her PhD, she embarked on a one-year postdoctoral research project with funding from Iran National Science Foundation (INSF). During this postdoctoral research, her focus was on the social acceptance of energy transition in Iran, and more specifically, on understanding the factors that influence the adoption of solar panel technology in rural northern Iran. In 2019–2020, she worked as a visiting researcher at Trento University's Sociology Department in Italy.

Teaching

Sara Karimzadeh has been actively involved in teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels for the past ten years. However, at ORU, her primary focus is on master’s level instruction. Her main teaching areas include sociology theories, sociology of consumption, sustainable consumption and production, as well as quantitative and qualitative research methods.