Synnøve Økland Jahnsen

Title: PhD Candidate

Phone: +47 55 58 89 89

E-mail: Synnove.Jahnsen@skok.uib.no

Visiting address: Allegt. 34

• Sociology

• Gender Research

Synnøve is a PhD candidate in sociology, at the Centre for Women and Gender studies.

 

Publications in Cristin

The increased attention on organized crime and the exploitation of migrants in the sex industry have caused several countries to re-examine their existing legal frameworks and prostitution policy.  In my ongoing PhD-project I aim to investigating the spaces and relations where policy texts and their discourses enter and study the social activities it generates and becomes part of. The project has an interest in not only the policy of the Norwegian law, as in what it aims to do and why. It is particularly interested in the question of how, looking at local as well as national practices. My material includes ethnographic fieldwork with organized crime units in Norway, parole officers and social outreach workers. I have conducted interviews, gathered policy documents, researched media reports and analyzed public debates.

Thought as Action: Gender, Democracy, Freedom

The main goal of the project is to produce new knowledge on the question of democracy and freedom in a technological, globalized world, with the aim of approaching these questions from a gender perspective. The project participants will pursue theoretical and interdisciplinary inquiries, working from the vantage point of their respective disciplines. An overarching hypothesis for the whole project is that there is a crucial interrelationship between thought and action and that we need to understand and rethink the conceptions of possibility for freedom and democracy from a gender perspective. This knowledge may again be of use to the international research community and policy makers alike.

The project participants' shared interest in theoretical questioning has led us towards a more rigorous interrogation of the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of some of the concepts that are currently being marshaled in the name of democracy and freedom, among them "citizenship", "human rights", "subject", "sexed bodies", etc. But above all we wish to explore the possibility of developing and discovering new modes of thinking that are compatible not only with the present, but that will allow us to think future configurations of gender democracy and freedom.

Prostitusjon i Norden
The research project “Prostitution in the Nordic Countries”, was conducted by the Nordic Gender Institute – NIKK and commissioned by the Nordic Council of Ministers for Gender Equality. The aim of the project was to present and discuss research on prostitution and human trafficking for sexual purposes in the Nordic countries and the autonomous territories of the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland. The project has compiled data on the extent of prostitution, as well as on both the legal and the social treatment of these issues. The report also presents results from quantitative and qualitative studies on attitudes to prostitution and human trafficking for sexual purposes. The project comprised eleven Nordic researchers from various disciplines and from all the Nordic countries.