Gerami, Shirin

Shirin Gerami is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research grapples with the problematization and management of marriage and divorce in Iran, focusing on how rising divorce and declining marriage rates have come to be framed as a crisis by state authorities, experts, and the media. Rather than assessing the validity of this crisis claim, her work attends to the mechanics, forms of knowledge, and expertise behind crisis production, approaching crisis itself as the context of anthropological inquiry. She investigates how the conceptual scaffolding of the divorce and marriage crisis determines possible forms of problematization, diagnosis, and intervention, as well as how this crisis gains potency and affective resonance through its entanglement within a larger web of crises in Iran. Shirin completed her PhD in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.