Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Finland
fellow
Elina Oinas
Home institution
University of Helsinki
Country of origin (home institution)
Finland
Discipline(s)
Sociology
Theme(s)
Gender, Family & Youth
Health
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Elina Oinas is Professor in Sociology at the Swedish School of Social Science at the University of Helsinki since 2015. She has also worked in Global Development Studies and Gender Studies departments. She has been visiting scholar in Addis Ababa, Cambridge, Witwatersrand, Berkeley, Western Cape; and as staff member in University of Turku, Åbo Akademi, and the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala. She is currently serving as Vice President of the International Sociological Association 2023–2027. Her long-term research interests are gender, the body, health, feminist science studies, global sociology, development and critical studies of the Nordic.
Research Project
Will to Relevance – Ideals in Finland-Africa Collaborations in Medicine and Gender Studies
Elina Oinas’ research in HCAS will complete her long-term project on expectations, and implicit and explicit ideals, for how scientific knowledge should and could matter in society, among academics, university students, activists, government officials and the general public, in Finnish research collaborations that relate to Africa. Such collaborations usually have explicitly pronounced hopes for relevance regarding knowledge production and development, especially in the fields of health and gender. The project focuses on the fields of biomedicine and Gender Studies, two fields with highly different epistemic and ontological discussions and aspired societal roles. Epistemic questions are often regarded as internal debates of quality; here the questions are about future oriented affective desires for how knowledge should matter in the world. The overall book project includes sub-studies, authored in collaboration with colleagues, on a vaccine trial set in Benin 2017–2020 by a team of Finnish biomedical researchers; a study on the experienced relevance of an increased emphasis and visibility of questions regarding race, racialization and global LGBTIQ rights and processes of knowledge production among gender studies scholars and students that deal with imagined or real “Africa”, and a study on policy-academia collaborations in the field of development.
Research Interests:
Gender; health; science