Dr. Sonja Moghaddari

Sonja Moghaddari is an anthropologist and in autumn 2016, she finished her doctoral studies at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva (Switzerland). Before, she was trained at Hamburg, and at Aix-Marseille University (France). Sonja is interested in transnational migration, post-colonialism and the creation of social inequalities. So far, she has explored Iranian migration in its multiple dimensions, with her main ethnographic fields being in Germany and Iran. In her doctoral thesis, she explains the interrelation between social boundary-making among Hamburg-based people identifying as Iranians and the conditions to their capital accumulation in local and transnational social fields. Another center of interest are transnational kinship relations and she published a monograph with the title Migrations et modernités Iraniennes: Les familles transnationales (2015).

At MPI-MMG, Sonja has been studying the negotiation of diversity within and through migrant-pro-migrant activism in the post-2015 German society.

Research project:

Engaging inequalities: how interactions between recent ‘refugees’ with established Iranians reflect social changes in Germany (completed)