Team Members
Katja Kahlina
works at the University of Helsinki, Department of Cultures, where she leads a Kone Foundation funded project Sexuality and Democracy (SEXDEM).
Within SEXDEM, Katja explores the interplay of sexuality, populism, and nationalism in two contexts: she analyzes contemporary anti-gender mobilization in Europe and explores the possibilities of feminist re-appropriations of populism. Katja earned her PhD degree from Central European University (CEU). Before joining the University of Helsinki as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in 2016, she worked as a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Katja’s research commitments are to the study of sexual politics and political discourse, and the ways in which these two are culturally and geopolitically produced and entangled. In addition to her engagements in SEXDEM project, Katja serves as a Managing Editor of the journal Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory published by Helsinki University Press.
katja.kahlina@helsinki.fi
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/katja-kahlina
Heta Rundgren
Postdoctoral researcher in literature and gender studies at LEGS (Paris) and at the University of Helsinki (SEXDEM), lecturer at Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle.
Heta moves in between literary and gender studies, teaching feminist and queer literary theory. SEXDEM offers her a space in which she can engage with various kinds of texts interweaving sexuality, creativity and political agency. She looks at how these interconnections are put into words, whether in poetry or different academic and activist dialects. She could not work without her chosen family, Feminist Readings, a group dedicated to inventing less racist, less sexist practices for raising awareness of feminist and queer knowhow. She grew up in Peräpohjola and has been living mainly in Paris intercepted with short periods in Helsinki for the last fifteen years.
heta.rundgren@gmail.com
https://legs.cnrs.fr/lequipe/membres/heta-rundgren/
Riikka Taavetti
Postdoctoral researcher in political history at the University of Helsinki.
In SEXDEM project her work will focus on political debates concerning same-sex sexuality in Estonia and Sweden from the late 1980s to 2010s. She is currently involved also in another research project funded by the Kone Foundation where she studies the history of Finnish sex research. Her doctoral dissertation was titled Queer Politics of Memory: Undisciplined Sexualities as Glimpses and Fragments in Finnish and Estonian Pasts (Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2018). Taavetti’s research interests include Estonian and Finnish queer history, oral history, cultural memory studies, and the history of feminism.
riikka.taavetti@helsinki.fi
Twitter: @rtaavetti
http://riikkataavetti.fi/