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Riikka Homanen

vieraileva tutkija
Tampereen yliopisto
Sähköpostiosoiteriikka.homanen [at] tuni.fi
puhelinnumero+358503182528

Oma esittely

My research explores social relations, such as kin, class, gender, sexuality and race/ethnicity, in (assisted) reproduction. More recently, I have inquired into the marketization of reproduction and reproductive healthcare in particular. The fertility markets have grown transnational and involve a multimillion euro donor reproductive tissue industry and multilevel chains of reproductive outsourcing. I am interested especially in the ethical and political work involved in maintaining, altering, advancing and participating in such a market. This is the topic of my Academy Fellow project The Everyday Ethics of Reproductive Outsourcing: Making Good Life in the Era of Biocapitalism (EEROS) (Academy of Finland, 2019-2024). My work is ethnographic and firmly grounded in gender studies, sociology and feminist science and technology studies.

I am the Principal Investigator for the Kone Foundation funded project Technology, Ethics and Reproduction: Controversy in the Era of Normalisation (2019-2023). This interdisciplinary and international project takes as its focus the ethics of reproductive technologies. It brings together methods, perspectives, and scholars from social science and the academic field of bioethics in order to examine ethics. It explores 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 Dr 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. This issue is the subject of an ISRF funded collaborate project In/Fertile Environments: Making Kin in a Time of Crisis where I am a team member.

Previously I have worked at University of Helsinki and Tampere University as a senior research fellow, a postdoctoral researcher and an Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher. I have been a visiting research fellow at University of Cambridge, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of California Berkeley and Lancaster University.

I am interested in supervising PhD and master’s thesis studying gender, health, medicine, medical technologies and reproduction through qualitative methods.