Sardadvar, Karin | Austria

Karin Sardadvar, born 1977, studied Sociology and languages at the University of Vienna, the University of Surrey Roehampton, UK, and the University of Stockholm, Sweden. She is currently enrolled in a Postgraduate Programme in Comparative Sociology at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS) in Vienna, and as a PhD student at the University of Vienna. She also teaches Gender Studies, Family Sociology and Interpretative Theories at the University of Vienna. Her main topics of research are the social construction of gender in the field of families and the sociology of knowledge.

Project at IAS-STS: Resetting the biological clock? The discursive construction of 'late motherhood'

In my PhD project, social discourses about late motherhood, late fatherhood and late pregnancy are being explored. It is a qualitative study aiming to track the discourses about late parenthood in the media as well as in individuals’ narrations. The project includes aspects such as: presentation of and dealing with medical risks and prenatal testing, demographic change towards late parenthood, public discourses about new reproductive technologies, the social construction of late mothers’ characteristics and problems, discourses on late motherhood compared to late fatherhood, etc. With regard to the methods, several sources of data are combined. This includes a discourse analysis of selected media contents, analysis of an interview forum on late pregnancy, qualitative interviews with ‘late mothers’ and interpretation of demographic data.