Venla Oikkonen

Tampere University | UTA · Faculty of Social Sciences

The COVID-19 pandemic has opened up futures for debate in an unprecedented manner and on an unforeseen scale. This article explores how ideas of immunity structured debates about pandemic management strategies as a means of securing a post-pandemic future during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. Building on queer theorization of temporality,...

This introduction to the Special Section “Self-Tracking, Embodied Differences, and the Politics and Ethics of Health” situates self-tracking technologies and practices within the contexts of neoliberalism, gendered and racialized health inequalities, and questions of social justice. It argues that intersectional STS analyses are needed to address t...

This article explores the conceptual and cultural implications of using pathogen ancient DNA (aDNA) collected in archaeological contexts to understand the past. More specifically, it examines ancient pathogen genomics as a way of conceptualizing multispecies entanglements. The analysis focuses on the 2018 sequencing of Borrelia recurrentis bacteria...

Ethology is a field of biology that studies animal behavior across species, including humans. Understood in a broad sense, ethology also covers approaches such as sociobiology, which emerged from ethology. Gender and sexuality have a central role in the ethological literature, which often links evolutionarily adaptive behaviors to mating strategies...

Therapies and prophylactics using biologically derived materials such as cells, microbes or tissues are often portrayed as key to increased future health. This article investigates the material preconditions of such visions. Building on feminist new materialist approaches, it explores the embodied material encounters between biologicals administere...

The article traces the emergence of a new type of vaccine injury—vaccine-associated narcolepsy—following immunization with Pandemrix vaccine during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic in Europe. The article highlights the processual nature of vaccine injury: it shows how vaccine-associated narcolepsy emerges gradually as a recognized object through epidemiologi...

Published at: https://ilmiomedia.fi/artikkelit/koronapandemia-ja-arjen-ristiriidat/ Koronapandemian myötä julkisuudessa on käyty vilkasta keskustelua siitä, kuinka kaikkien meidän arki muuttuu. Esiin on noussut esimerkiksi valtioiden ja kuntien asettamien rajoitusten ja kehotusten vaikutus siihen, mitä korona-arjessa saa tai on sopivaa tehdä. Eri...

Keräämme aineistoa yhteiskuntatieteelliseen tutkimukseen, joka tarkastelee koronaviruspandemian vaikutuksia arjen elämän ehtoihin ja kokemuksiin. Tutkimuksen tekevät akatemiatutkija Venla Oikkonen (Tampereen yliopisto) ja akatemiatutkija Elina Hartikainen (Helsingin yliopisto) sekä heidän hankkeissaan mahdollisesti työskentelevät tutkijat. Venla Oi...

We are collecting material for a research project that examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on everyday life and experiences. The researchers responsible for the project are Venla Oikkonen (Academy Research Fellow, Tampere University) and Elina Hartikainen (Academy Research Fellow, University of Helsinki). Venla Oikkonen is a cultural studi...

The chapter explores tensions between national, regional and personal belonging through the case of Ötzi the Iceman and ancient DNA.

The study of ancient DNA (aDNA) has gained increasing attention in science and society as a tool for tracing hominin evolution. While aDNA research overlaps with the history of population genetics, it embodies a specific configuration of technology, temporality, temperature, and place that, this article suggests, cannot be fully unpacked with exist...

Call for Papers for Catalyst journal Special Section "Self-Tracking, Embodied Differences, and the Ethics and Politics of Health", edited by Venla Oikkonen (Tampere University, Finland) and Luna Dolezal (University of Exeter, UK)

The article explores the concept of partial immunities – our past infections providing partial protection against new related epidemics – in order to develop feminist tools for rethinking communities and belonging as situated and inherently multiple. Partial immunities challenge the idea of immunity as defence/defeat and absence/presence, allowing...

The chapter explores how studies comparing modern DNA to DNA retrieved from ancient human remains engender a molecularized temporal trajectory that connects the bodies of modern humans to a fantasized point of origins in the prehistoric past. The chapter focuses on the cultural debates surrounding the DNA of two 9000-year-old human remains, the so-...

The chapter traces the emergence of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome analyses of human ancestry. It focuses on the scientific and cultural debate that surrounded the figures of “Mitochondrial Eve” (the most recent matrilineal ancestor of currently living humans) and “Y-chromosome Adam” (the most recent patrilineal ancestor of currently living men) fr...

The chapter elaborates on the book’s empirical, methodological, and theoretical contribution. The chapter highlights the larger patterns of continuity and transformation underlying the cases studied in the previous chapters. The chapter also evaluates and discusses the usefulness of the methodological approach in the study of processes of biotechno...

The chapter opens with the research questions that the book sets out to answer. The chapter describes the book’s approach, which draws on science and technology studies and cultural studies. The chapter describes the book’s methodological contribution and introduces its argument. It also discusses key concepts, including narrative, cultural imagina...

The chapter asks what kinds of communities emerge from the temporal dynamics of population genetic belonging. The chapter theorizes and problematizes the connection between population and community. It examines the different ways in which the ambiguous connection between population and community is mobilized in commercial genetic ancestry tests, Eu...

The chapter theorizes the temporal dynamic that underlies population genetic belonging through two novels: Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear’s popular prehistoric romance People of the Raven, which imagines the life of Kennewick Man, and Margaret Drabble’s novel The Peppered Moth, which is centered on the mitochondrial analysis of ancient hu...

This article asks how to study evasive and seemingly immaterial transdisciplinary phenomena such as affective formations that organize our technoscientific societies and cultures. I argue that understanding such phenomena requires developing methodologies that engage fields of knowledge production that appear unrelated. The article uses the dynamic...

This book explores how human population genetics has emerged as a means of imagining and enacting belonging in contemporary society. Venla Oikkonen approaches population genetics as an evolving set of technological, material, narrative and affective practices, arguing that these practices are engaged in multiple forms of belonging that are often mu...

Science and Technology Studies has become increasingly interested in the roles of affect and emotions in science and technology. Researchers have examined, for example, emotions in the production of scientific knowledge, patients’ or users’ affective experiences of technologies, and emotionally charged cultural representations of science. However,...

Recent ‘new materialist’ readings of evolution by such feminists as Elizabeth Grosz, Claire Colebrook, Luciana Parisi, Susan Oyama and Myra Hird have provided important insights on the openness of evolutionary processes and the emergence of difference by focusing on evolution as a temporal dynamic. Building on Darwin's observations on geographical...

This article explores a scientific technology—mitochondrial analysis—that underlies contemporary technoscientific phenomena such as genetic ancestry tests, ethnic diversity projects, and national genome projects. The article focuses on the figure of “Mitochondrial Eve,” the most recent common matrilineal ancestor of modern humans, who lived in Afri...

This article addresses the recent attempts to integrate evolutionary history in the US national narrative. Focussing on the cultural, legal, and scientific controversy over Kennewick Man, the ancient human remains discovered in Washington state in 1996, the article explores the narrative politics of American national belonging. Through a popular hi...

The article examines the rhetorical strategies through which popular science books written by scientists participate in epistemic controversies. The analysis focuses on two books, Niles Eldredge’s Why We Do It and Nancy Etcoff’s Survival of the Prettiest, which address the debate about the evolution of human nature and sexuality. Although the books...

This article contributes to discussions of methodology in gender studies by examining narrative analysis as a feminist method. Using direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry services as a case study, the author discusses the potential of narrative analysis in interrogating complex cultural phenomena. The analysis focuses on the commercial website of the...

Since the early 1990s, evolutionary psychology has produced widely popular visions of modern men and women as driven by their prehistoric genes. In Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives, Venla Oikkonen explores the rhetorical appeal of evolutionary psychology by viewing it as part of the Darwinian narrative tradition. Refusi...

This dissertation traces a set of historical transformations the Darwinian evolutionary narrative has undergone toward the end of the twentieth century, especially as reflected in Anglo-American popular science books and novels. The study has three objectives. First, it seeks to understand the organizing logic of evolutionary narratives and the rol...

This article examines a narrative dilemma that popular texts on evolution face. On the one hand, popular science tends to privilege linear and culturally familiar narrative structures, as previous studies of popularization have often emphasized. On the other hand, however, the Darwinian idea of natural selection resists linear narration, as narrati...