Tara Merhabi

Background

2011 – Admitted to the Tema Genus, Posthumanities hub, Doctoral Program, Linköping University, Sweden.

2011 – Master's degree with a major in Science, Technology and Society (STS), Linköping University, Sweden.

2002 – Bachelor's degree with a major in English Translation, Allameh Tabatabaee University, Iran.

I have also taken courses in the master program Health and Society, Linköping University, Sweden.

Research Interests

• Posthumanist feminist studies
• Feminist materialisms
• Gender, Medicine and technology (particularly, Entanglements and enactments of sex/gender, bodies, medicine and technology)
• Medical anthropology
• Intersectionality
• Postdiciplinarity
• Feminist phenomenology
• Science and technology studies (STS)
• Actor-network theory (Particularly, post ANT)

Current project

In my project, I ask what is Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)?  How do scientists, within the realm of life sciences, approach, understand, perform and construct AD as multiple yet in relation to one another? What forms of AD embodiments, subject positionings and agential materialities emerge out of the everyday laboratory life? How can peculiar bodies of AD animal models displace and re-negotiate the permeable boundaries of what we regard as human, animal and technology? How do medical and humanist understandings of AD enact sexed bodies and sexual difference, humanness and animality? The project is an interdisciplinary project that draws on the posthumanist feminist studies, queer theories, new materialisms and feminist technoscience studies on the one hand and STS studies, particularly post-ANT scholarship on the other hand. I explore my ideas within the context of biochemistry and the pathology of AD, interviews and participant observation in the laboratory.

Conference Papers

“Visualizing Life/Death: Feminist materialism, Alzheimer's disease and the lab” (the title changed to Alzheimer’s Disease, laboratory life and the embodiment of otherness), Tara Mehrabi and Cecilia Åsberg at:

NeuroCultures-NeuroGenderings II, 13-15 September 2012, Vienna

4S Conference, 17-20 October 2012, Copenhagen

Thesis

Master thesis: What Egg Can(not) Do, A study of Assisted Reproductive Technologies, family structures and their mutual re-construction in Iranian Society, Tema t, Linköping University

Networks

The Posthumanities Hub

Services to the academic community

Member of the Tema Genus higher seminars organizing Committee

Student representative at Temanämnd

Student representative for the local tema genus advisory board for Gexcel International Collegium

Tutor for the BA program Introduction to Intersectional Gender Studies, Policy and Politics in a Globalized World, Tema Genus, Linköping University

Tutor for the Master Program Gender Studies - Intersectionality and Change, Tema Genus, Linköping University