Dr I.D.A. Sportel (Iris)

Iris Sportel is assistant professor at the Institute for Sociology of Law and the Centre for Migration Law of Radboud University Nijmegen. She studied Cultural Anthropology and Arabic Language and culture and holds a PhD from Radboud University Nijmegen (2014). Her dissertation was an interdisciplinary study of divorce in transnational Dutch-Moroccan and Dutch-Egyptian families in Morocco, Egypt and the Netherlands.

Her research concentrates on how individual actors –families, legal professionals, and parties in court procedures- deal with and experience law and legal institutions. Most of her research focusses on the state regulation of intimate relationships, with a particular interest for migration, gender, and minorities. In 2017 she obtained an NWO Veni grant for a research project on the role of religion, culture, and ethnicity in court procedures on children from minority families (2017-2021).

She has also participated in a range of policy research projects, including alternative conflict resolution by judges in administrative courts; forced marriages, abandonment abroad, and “marital imprisonment”; the comprehensibility and public acceptance of court verdicts; media reporting on court verdicts; reception centres for rejected asylum seekers; and high-conflict divorces.