Henni Alava

My research explores health, medicine, and social life through ethnographic approaches informed by anthropology and science and technology studies. My current work focuses on pediatric persistent pain and its care in Finland. I am interested in how medical knowledge, cultural values, healthcare systems, and everyday experiences are reshaped as young people and their families live with persistent pain.
Across my research, I examine how people navigate uncertainty, suffering, care, and social change in their everyday lives. I am especially interested in the relationships between personal experiences and wider social, political, and institutional processes, including the role of welfare state services in shaping wellbeing and experiences of care.
Before turning my focus to health and medicine, I conducted long-term ethnographic research in Uganda on religion, politics, citizenship, and the legacies of conflict. This work continues to inform my broader interest in questions of belonging, morality, power, and social transformation.
Through my research, I aim to contribute both to academic debates and to public conversations about wellbeing and the diverse bodily, cultural, and societal conditions that shape people's lives.

Akatemiatutkijana ensisijainen tehtäväni on tehdä tutkimusta, minkä ohessa ohjaan väitöskirjoja ja pro gradu-tutkielmia, opetan, vertaisarvioin ja toimitan tieteellistä Suomen antropologi-lehteä. Olen järjestänyt koulutuksia monille julkishallinnon aloilla, mm. poliisille, ulkoasiainministeriölle, ja terveydenhuollon ammattilaisille.

I am a medical anthropologist and Academy Research Fellow at Tampere University. Since 2021, my ethnographic research has followed children and adolescents living with persistent pain, and the parents and clinicians caring for them, through homes, hospitals, and clinical training events in Finland. I have extensive knowledge of both social science and medical research ethics (Härkönen et al. 2024), and I have developed novel methods for ensuring processual consent with young interlocutors. My recent publications analyse pediatric pain care (Alava forthcoming & Alava forthcoming); the growing dependence on charity in Finnish pediatric healthcare (Alava et al. 2025); how clinicians make sense of gender and pain (Alava & Oikkonen 2026); and how chronic illness shapes mothering (Rokkonen & Alava 2025).

I was given the title of Docent (Associate Professor) in Social Anthropology by Tampere University in 2026.

My monograph, based on earlier research in post-conflict northern Uganda, received honorable mention for the Clifford Geertz Award in the Anthropology of Religion in 2023.

I am co-editor-in-chief of Suomen antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society.

Anthropology, science and technology studies, gender studies, global development studies