Tara Asgarilaleh obtained a Bachelor of Science in Sociology from the University of Tehran, Iran in 2014 and graduated from the Research Master Social Sciences (RMSS), funded by Amsterdam Merit Scholarship at the University of Amsterdam in 2017. For the RMSS, she wrote her thesis on organ transplantation and unrelated kidney donors in Iran, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Tehran.
Tara was a part of the Muslim Marriages project (funded by the European Research Council) at the Anthropology Department of the University of Amsterdam. She studied (in)fertility, assisted reproductive technologies (ART), gamete donation and sigheh [temporary marriage] in Iran. Focusing on the experiences of involuntarily childless couples, her research investigates the changing meanings of sigheh from a religiously acceptable way of cross-gender sexual relationships to a religious solution for treating (in)fertility in the case of gamete donation.
Her PhD project is a part of the programme of the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc) at Cambridge and is funded by the Wellcome Trust. With her PhD project, under the supervision of Prof Sarah Franklin and Dr. Marcin Smietana, she aims to examine how involuntarily childless couples, men in particular, can access and do actually use assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in the socio-cultural, legal, religious and medical context of contemporary Iran. Through her ethnographic study she hopes to bring new insights into (in)fertility and men’s perceptions of fertility and reproductive precarity in the use of ARTs in Iran and how this relates to dominant notions of masculinity.
