I am working as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lapland.
My research is concerned with social relations – such as kin, gender, race, sexuality and class –, knowledge production, (affective) governance, and inequalities in both Nordic welfare state institutions and commercial establishments. I have particularly explored the (bio)technological practices and processes of healthcare and family services, such as publicly provided maternity healthcare and private fertility treatments, industry and markets. I have studied knowledge production and governance (through risk e/valuation metrics and health data management, among other things) also in both the public provision and market settings: I have looked at state knowledge production of migrant populations and population change more generally, as well as clinical biomedical and therapeutic knowledge production in the context of biomedical and pharmaceutical industry. Mobilities and marketisation have been prevalent themes across my studies. For instance, I have explored migration and medical tourism.
More recently my research interests have shifted toward even more transnational medical markets, economies and industry. I have particularly looked at the fertility markets that involve a multimillion-euro donor reproductive tissue industry and multilevel chains of reproductive outsourcing. I am interested especially in the gendered (understood intersectionally) ethical, political and embodied work involved in maintaining, altering, advancing and participating in such a market and industry in the context of late (bio)capitalism. This is the topic of my ongoing Finnish Research Council funded project Gendered Ethics of Reproductive Time: Science, Technology, and the Market (ReproTime) (2024-2028), which focuses on Finland and, especially, the Nordic-Baltic region more broadly. My work is ethnographic and firmly grounded in gender studies, sociology and feminist science and technology studies.
My recently ended projects, include my Finnish Research Council funded Academy Fellow project The Everyday Ethics of Reproductive Outsourcing: Making Good Life in the Era of Biocapitalism (EEROS) (2019-2024) and Kone Foundation funded project Technology, Ethics and Reproduction: Controversy in the Era of Normalisation (2019-2024). These interdisciplinary and international projects also took as their focus the ethics of reproductive technologies, bringing together methods, perspectives, and scholars from social science and the academic field of bioethics in order to examine ethics. They explored a wide variety of cases of technological practice that have, or may in the future, become normalised as uncontroversial in some (delimited) cultural contexts.
I am also the co-founder and leader of the Finnish Reproductive Studies Network (FiResNet) together with Professor Mianna Meskus. In the network we were awarded a Finnish Cultural Foundation Argumenta funding for Reproductive futures project that aims to increase research on and diversify public discussion about reproduction and the paradoxes of reproductive futures. One such discussion is how climate change and ecological sustainability configure in our understandings of reproductive justice.
Previously I have worked at University of Helsinki and Tampere University as a senior research fellow, a postdoctoral researcher, an Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher and an Research Fellow. I have been a visiting research fellow at University of Cambridge, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of California Berkeley, Lancaster University, City University of New York, De Montfort University and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
I am interested in supervising PhD and master’s thesis studying gender, health, medicine, medical technologies and reproduction through qualitative methods.