If you would like to join us and add your bio to the page, please feel free to send us an email at henni.alava[at]tuni.fi or anna.ovaska[at]tuni.fi.
People
Henni Alava is an Academy Research fellow in Anthropology at Tampere University. Her on-going research takes place in homes and hospitals caring for children living with persistent pain in Finland. It follows patients, parents and clinicians through the rapidly evolving field of pediatric pain care to show how negotiations over individual families’ care are shaped by broader political, social and cultural dynamics.
Anna Ovaska is a senior researcher at Tampere University and a docent in Finnish Literature at University of Helsinki. Her research centers on narratives of pain, disability and illness.
Tiina Rosenqvist is a philosopher working on perception and medicine and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College (New Hampshire, US). She is currently thinking about how conceptions of pain shape clinical practice and testimonial encounters involving pain reports, as well as the forms of epistemic expertise that patients bring to the diagnostic process.
Tuuli Turja (PhD, Docent) works as a senior researcher at Tampere University. Her research interests lie in the social psychology of acute pain and trauma.
Eva Tordera Nuño is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Art and Media at Aalto University (Finland). She holds a degree in Photography and a Master’s degree in Humanities: Art, Literature and Contemporary Culture. Currently, her research examines regimes of (in)visibility that, through technologies, institutions, and epistemic frameworks, shape the recognition, legitimisation, and management of chronic non-cancer pain. She is an active member of the Digital Technology and Pain Working Group at the Sociedad Española del Dolor (Spanish Pain Society), contributing to innovation in digital health and pain management.
Ahalya Ganesh (they/them) is a doctoral researcher in Gender Studies at Tampere University. They study how a nebulous chronic condition like fibromyalgia becomes enacted as gendered in the Finnish healthcare context and in medical research, more broadly. Their research integrates cripistemic patchwork ethnography and multi-stakeholder interviews and seeks to nuance the connections between gender and contestation as it relates to chronicity and health. They love thinking otherwise, being in community and diving deep into things that are usually brushed off as obvious or self-evident.
Teijo Saari (MD, PhD) is Professor of Anaesthesiology with a research focus on clinical pharmacology and perioperative medicine. His work centres on understanding variability in drug response using quantitative approaches, including population pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamic modelling, primarily in surgical patients. He has been involved in a wide range of research, from clinical trials in anaesthesia to studies on opioid pharmacology and drug–drug interactions. While much of his work is grounded in adult perioperative care, he has also contributed to research in vulnerable patient populations. In Painreaders, he has been particularly interested in the conceptual foundations of pain research, reflecting on the gap between biomedical and humanistic perspectives, and exploring ways to bridge these traditions.
Elina Niinivaara is an anthropologist, ethnographer and pain bearer. She works as a part-time researcher in the project Realm of the Sick– Exploring Agency and Participation of People Living with Chronic Illnessat the University of Helsinki. Niinivaara’s PhD research concerned mundane political agency of refugee background young men, and her research interests have always included embodiment, power and everyday politics, as well as materiality. As partly disabled due to chronic pain and illness, these form a central field of interest for her as well.