Sara Karimzadeh

About Sara Karimzadeh

About Sara Karimzadeh

Sara Karimzadeh is an Associate Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Örebro University (ORU). She obtained her PhD in Sociology from the University of Tabriz, Iran, in 2018. She began her affiliation with Örebro University in 2021 as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow and has been actively engaged in both research and education within the department since 2023.

Research

Dr. Karimzadeh’s research lies at the intersection of environmental sociology and the sociology of consumption. Her work focuses on (un)sustainable consumption practices, consumption-production dynamics, international waste trade, resilience and resistance, ethical and political consumption, and the paradigms of sufficiency and care. Methodologically, she employs both qualitative and quantitative approaches, utilizing cross-national comparative analysis to uncover the socio-cultural, political, and economic mechanisms that shape consumption across diverse global contexts.

In her current research, she examines international waste trade, specifically investigating the structural and behavioral dynamics required to decouple transboundary waste movements and address waste delinking. This builds upon her recent project, "Social (im)possibilities of the formation of ethical consumption: A comparative study of Sweden and Iran," which was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. This project offered a deep-dive comparative analysis into how ethical consumption is conceptualized and practiced across distinct cultural and economic landscapes.

Prior to her work in Sweden, Dr. Karimzadeh’s doctoral research explored the sociological determinants of unsustainable consumption practices in Iran, during which she spent time as a guest researcher at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. Following her PhD, she received funding from the Iran National Science Foundation (INSF) for a postdoctoral project investigating the social acceptance of energy transitions—specifically focusing on the adoption of solar technology in rural northern Iran. She has also served as a visiting researcher at the University of Trento’s Department of Sociology in Italy (2019–2020).

Teaching

Dr. Karimzadeh is the Program Director responsible for the International Master’s Program in Social Analysis at Örebro University. She has been actively involved in higher education for over a decade, teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Her primary teaching areas include core sociological theories, the philosophy of science, research design and analysis, the sociology of consumption, and advanced quantitative and qualitative research methods.