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Kirsti Hannele NiskanenProfessor emeritus

Om mig

 

Jag anställdes som professor i historia vid Stockholms universitet 2010. Innan dess arbetade jag som forskningsledare vid Nordiska ministerrådets könsforskningsenhet NIKK (Nordiska institutet för kunskap om kön) vid Universitetet i Oslo och som st.f. professor, docent och forskarassistent på Tema Genus vid Linköpings universitet. På 1990-talet arbetade jag som forskare och vik. lektor på Ekonomisk-historiska institutionen vid Stockholms universitet, där jag även disputerade 1995.

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1984-6252

 

Undervisning

 

Jag har främst undervisat på kurser på master- och forskarutbildningsnivå i historia. Jag har handlett flera doktorander till disputation och är f.n. huvudhandledare för två. Jag har en lång erfarenhet av forskarhandledningsfrågor och har bland annat varit studierektor för forskarutbildning i historia. Jag leder även kurser i forskarhandledning på Centrum för universitetslärarutbildning, med fokus på inlärning och undervisning på  forskarnivå, juridiska aspekter av forskarutbildning, etik, samt genus och mångfald i forskarutbildning.

 

Forskning

 

Mina nuvarande forskningsintressen ryms inom det breda området vetenskapshistoria och universitetshistoria, i ett feministiskt perspektiv. Jag har sedan 2014 arbetat med ett internationellt forskningsprogram SPICE, "Scientific Persona in Cultural Encounters", med kollegor från Nederländerna och Belgien. Jag har ett brett intresse i genushistoria, i modern social- och ekonomisk historia och nordisk jämställdhetspolitik och har lett flera forsknigsprojekt på dessa områden.  Jag har också intresserat mig för pedagogisk forskning och undervisning  i forskarhandledning.

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1984-6252

SPICE, se http://spice-project.wixsite.com/spice

Publikationer

I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas

  • Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona

    2021. Kirsti Niskanen, Michael J. Barany.

    Bok (red)

    This book investigates the historical construction of scholarly personae by integrating a spectrum of recent perspectives from the history and cultural studies of knowledge and institutions. Focusing on gender and embodiment, the contributors analyse the situated performance of scholarly identity and its social and intellectual contexts and consequences. Disciplinary cultures, scholarly practices, personal habits, and a range of social, economic, and political circumstances shape the people and formations of modern scholarship. Featuring a foreword by Ludmilla Jordanova, Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona: Incarnations and Contestations is of interest to historians, sociologists, media and culture scholars, and all those with a stake in the personal dimensions of scholarship. An international group of scholars present original examinations of travel, globalisation, exchange, training, evaluation, self-representation, institution-building, norm-setting, virtue-defining, myth-making, and other gendered and embodied modes and mechanisms of scholarly persona-work. These accounts nuance and challenge existing understandings of the relationship between knowledge and identity.

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  • The Scholarly Persona Embodied

    2021. Kirsti Niskanen. Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona, 315

    Kapitel

    This article uses the career of an individual scholar as a platform to explore the complex relationship between knowledge and the persona of the knower. During his career between the 1920s and the 1940s, the Swedish philosopher Einar Tegen (1884–1965) shifted the trajectory of his academic life from a solitary thinker, focused on seclusion, introspection, and detachment from the outer world, to a pioneer in interdisciplinary scholarship and an academic public intellectual. The article analyses the masculinity constructions that were associated to these knowledge positions, how the gendered relationships of private life modified Tegen’s scholarly persona, and the role of travel and international exchanges in the shaping of scholarly self-conceptions.

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  • Möjlighetsstrukturer och excellens

    2018. Kirsti Niskanen. Lychnos, 199-213

    Kapitel

    American private foundations played a special role in the internationalization of European social science research during the inter-war years. Especially the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) brought forward its reform-oriented vision of the social sciences by awarding large grants to centers of excellence in Europe, among them Socialforskningsinstitutet in Stockholm. This article studies a specific, in-academic aspect of this form of internationalization, namely the foundation’s evaluative culture and how the funding helped to create opportunities for academic advancement. Excellence and impersonality were the key features in the foundation’s cultural script in the selection of fellows. The assessment criteria were pragmatic: researchers would have a good position to return to after the scholarship stays, be able to present recommendations from leading senior researchers and commit to returning to their home departments. The evaluation process had some resemblance of peer review, although evaluations were made internally, without collegial assessment by external experts. By long-standing and close contacts with trusted scholars, the aim was to create a basis for informed assessments of the quality of the various research environments and the researchers involved in them. The funding helped to open and widen the contact surfaces with international research and to the creation of transnational research communities where stays abroad, international contacts and networks served as an academic qualification. The funding thus contributed to the homogenization of social science research. The foundation’s outwardly friendly but practically dismissive attitude to women as scholars, based on a traditional view of the relationship between women and men, strengthened the already skewed gender structures in academia.

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  • Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice – Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities

    2018. Kirsti Niskanen, Mineke Bosch, Kaat Wils.

    Artikel

    The concept of scientific persona was developed by historians of science at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin fifteen years ago in order to understand how science works and how it can be conducted in a credible way. The Latin word persona means mask and the discussions of the term were elaborations of Marcel Mauss´s introduction of the concept in an article published in 1938 (Mauss 1938). In Mauss´s conceptualisation, persona was a feature that characterized societies in an evolutionary stage—a stage where members of the society had started to perceive themselves as individuals, but were still expected to fulfill certain, culturally defined roles. In such contexts, persona was not mask to cover the ‘real’ self of the performer, but a mask that enhanced certain features of the person. Transferring Mauss’s approach to the scientific world, Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum (2003) defined, in an often cited article in Science in Context, scientific persona as an intermediate between individual biography and social (scientific) institution: it is a cultural identity that forms the individual in body and mind, and creates a collective with a shared and recognizable physiognomy (ways to be and to behave). Daston and Sibum characterized scientific personas as templates that emerge and develop in historical contexts and used the concept to investigate the creation of certain types of scientists: when, how and why have distinct “scientific personae” emerged?

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  • Snille efterfrågas! Rockefeller Foundation, forskarpersona och kön vid Stockholms högskola under mellankrigstiden

    2017. Kirsti Niskanen. Scandia 83 (2), 11-40

    Artikel

    This article explores the relationship between research funding and the creation of scientific personae (or scientific identities) in the 1920s-1940s. The focus is on the Rockefeller Foundation and its contribution in terms of creating new research areas and disciplines in the social sciences at Stockholm University. The aim of this funding was to create academic leaders. Three questions are in focus: Which researchers, men and women, were appointed to the prestigious Rockefeller fellowships and research programs? Which notions concerning intellectual talent and expectations of academic performance are discernable in the funding policy? What were the implications of the funding practices in terms of scientific personae and gender? This article argues that institutions, and research funding bodies such as the Rockefeller Foundation, are important actors in the process of creating scientific personae. It shows that this funding created a self-reinforcing dynamic in which the Rockefeller Foundation paved the way for their researchers to successfully compete with regard to existing appointments at universities and institutions of higher education and also helped create new positions that only a few individuals - mostly men - were given access to. A deep-rooted idea of the scientist or scholar as a genius - a person with extraordinary mental skills, originality and creativity - was an underlying mental image of the research policy. The funding practices strengthened existing gender structures in the academia, and Rockefeller Foundation funding represented an important form of boundary work for the benefit of men in terms of research practices and family policy. The method used in this study is a thick description and analysis of sources, mainly in the archives of the Rockefeller Foundation.

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  • Gender and Politics in Auto/Biographies

    2016. Tiina Kinnunen (et al.).

    Bok (red)

    Politicians all over Europe used to write about their lives, and keep doing so. Like other well-known persons they are “unusual biographical subjects”, because the biographical activity concerning their lives often starts while they are still alive. (Frank 1999). On the one hand, classical autobiographies written by politicians themselves (and their co-authors or ghost-writers) are published widely and are not only an important part of the memory politics and the construction of national history, but also a contribution to the stabilization of gender conceptions.(Depkat 2014, p .247-265; Ulbrich, Jancke and Bosch 2013, p. 5). Often the (auto)biographers intend to contribute to political and historical analyses. On the other hand, life writing has changed and diversified rapidly during the 20th century. The widespread desire for authenticity and truth seems to be enormous, so we can see a process of democratization, including  a change of the concepts of private and public spheres. Nowadays everybody is entitled to present his or her life in public.(Ulbrich, Jancke and Bosch 2013, p.5). Life writing took place not only in hard copy, but in many different media, like radio, film, tv, blogs, facebook and other new social media. So it seems a good moment to look at the (auto)biographies and memoirs in the political area during the 20th and the beginning of the 21th century.

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  • Arbete & jämställdhet

    2013. Eva Blomberg, Kirsti Niskanen.

    Bok (red)

    Vid internationella jämförelser framstår Sverige som ett av världens mest jämställda länder. De flesta kvinnor förvärvsarbetar idag och har en egen inkomst. Särbeskattning, föräldraförsäkring, dagis och pappamånader gör att både kvinnor och män kan förena lönearbete och familjeliv. Hur har vi kommit så här långt? Vad återstår att göra? Antologin tar avstamp i 1960-talets jämställdhetsdiskussion då boken Kvinnors liv och arbete (SNS 1962) bidrog till att starta debatten om könsroller. Arbete och jämställdhet belyser vad som hänt i arbetslivet och i jämställdhetsdiskussionen under femtio år. Den innehåller såväl problematiserande kapitel som kapitel med kunskapsöversikter och vänder sig till alla som vill öka sina kunskaper om arbetsmarknadsfrågor och jämställdhet. Elva forskare från sex discipliner medverkar. Frågor som författarna behandlar är: förändring i teoretiska förståelser av kvinnor som lönearbetare, historien om invandrade kvinnors arbete, de mångfacetterade grunderna för diskriminering i arbetslivet, nya mönster av arbetskraftsmigration och arbetsgivar–arbetstagarrelationer i servicesektorn, genusmönster i kvinnors företagande, könsrollstänkandets utveckling samt pappapolitikens historia.

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