Sonja Erikainen
Biographic Data
| ID | 196283 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sonja Erikainen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sonja |
| FAMILY NAME | Erikainen |
| SIGNATURE | ERIKAINEN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1442-3050 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 81 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
From discredited to prohibited
This article provides a historical examination of the re-emergence of genetic sex testing in international athletics, focusing on the legal prohibition of this type of testing. While previous scholarship has primarily addressed scientific and ethical critiques of genetic sex testing, the fact that such testing has also been legally prohibited, most notably through Norway’s Biotechnology Act but also through other national and international legal …
Hormonal stories
Hormones are complex biosocial objects that provoke myriad cultural narratives through their association with social activities and identities, and these narratives have the power to shape people’s lived realities and bodies. While hormones were historically conceptualised as ‘master molecules’ capable of controlling various life processes, their explanatory potential has now been overshadowed by technoscientific developments like omics- and gene…
Beyond the hype
AI and robotic technologies attract much hype, including utopian and dystopian future visions of technologically driven provision in the health and care sectors. Based on 30 interviews with scientists, clinicians and other stakeholders in the UK, Europe, USA, Australia, and New Zealand, this paper interrogates how those engaged in developing and using AI and robotic applications in health and care characterize their future promise, potential and …
How and why to use ‘vulnerability’
In recent years, ‘vulnerability’ has been getting more traction in theoretical, professional and popular spaces as an alternative or complement to the concept of risk. As a group of science and technology studies scholars with different disciplinary orientations yet a shared concern with biomedicine, self and society, we investigate how vulnerability has become a salient and even dominant idiom for discussing disease and disease risk. We argue th…
The Promissory Visions of DIYbio
Recent years have seen a proliferation of do-it-yourself biology (DIYbio) initiatives, consisting of people undertaking a range of bioscience activities outside traditional research environments. DIYbio initiatives, while diverse, exist at the fringes of institutionalised science, which enables them to advance different promissory visions about what science, especially bioscience, could or should become in the future, including how it should be g…
Specific Detriment
While non-binary gender identities have become increasingly visible in recent years, little research currently exists on the experiences that non-binary people have in sport, where most opportunities to participate are limited to two, mutually exclusive female and male categories. This article provides a starting point for addressing this gap, by reporting findings from a participatory scoping study that explored the barriers that non-binary peop…
Public involvement in the governance of population-level biomedical research
Population-level biomedical research offers new opportunities to improve population health, but also raises new challenges to traditional systems of research governance and ethical oversight. Partly in response to these challenges, various models of public involvement in research are being introduced. Yet, the ways in which public involvement should meet governance challenges are not well understood. We conducted a qualitative study with 36 exper…
What makes AI 'intelligent' and 'caring'? Exploring affect and relationality across three sites of intelligence and care
Gender, love, and sex
This article uses a duoethnographic approach to explore the intersection of lesbian and queer sexualities and transgender identities in intimate relationships. By comparing experiences of gender and sexual identity negotiation within transgender relationships, the authors document how sexual identity borders are traversed, and how gender is negotiated and interrogated in and through these relationships. We argue that our differential experiences …
Credibility Contests
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe and North America, news outlets ran a series of stories reporting on "do-it-yourself" (DIY) coronavirus responses that were created and implemented by citizens. This news discourse exemplifies and can illuminate wider shifts in the roles of citizens in science, as individuals outside professional science institutions are becoming more actively involved in scientific knowledge production t…
The Story of Mark Weston
This paper examines the story of Mark Weston, a formerly successful competitor in women's athletics who in 1936 underwent a so-called 'sex change' or 'metamorphosis' to manhood
Afterword
Terf wars
Gender Verification and the Making of the Female Body in Sport
This book critically explores the history of gender verification in international sport, to show how culture, politics, and science come together to produce "femaleness" and, consequently, the female body as we know it. Tracing gender verification policies and practices in sport since the 1930s till the present, the book shows how and why medical "sex tests" have been used to "verify" women athletes’ femaleness, in ways that both reflect and have…
Contested futures
In recent years, discourses around "personalized," "stratified," and "precision" medicine have proliferated. These concepts broadly refer to the translational potential carried by new data-intensive biomedical research modes. Each describes expectations about the future of medicine and healthcare that data-intensive innovation promises to bring forth. The definitions and uses of the concepts are, however, plural, contested and characterized by di…
Marketing Experimental Stem Cell Therapies in the UK
Stem cell research has attracted much public and biomedical anticipation centred on the possibility of using stem cells to treat various diseases and conditions, but the number of evidence-based therapies is currently limited. Numerous commercial direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses are nonetheless marketing experimental stem cell therapies online for myriad medical conditions and aesthetic ailments, which has attracted critique due to safety and …
Hybrids, Hermaphrodites, and Sex Metamorphoses
Purpose: This chapter provides a contextualized understanding of the gendered anxieties expressed by elite sport regulators that motivated the formulation of sex testing policies in sport between 1937 and 1968. The focus is on complicating the claim that sex testing was first instituted to prevent explicit male bodies from fraudulently masquerading as women in sport. Rather, the chapter argues that sex testing policies were formulated in response…
Gut feminism Elizabeth Wilson
Terf wars
What makes AI 'intelligent' and 'caring'? Exploring affect and relationality across three sites of intelligence and care
Specific Detriment
While non-binary gender identities have become increasingly visible in recent years, little research currently exists on the experiences that non-binary people have in sport, where most opportunities to participate are limited to two, mutually exclusive female and male categories. This article provides a starting point for addressing this gap, by reporting findings from a participatory scoping study that explored the barriers that non-binary peop…
Afterword
The Promissory Visions of DIYbio
Recent years have seen a proliferation of do-it-yourself biology (DIYbio) initiatives, consisting of people undertaking a range of bioscience activities outside traditional research environments. DIYbio initiatives, while diverse, exist at the fringes of institutionalised science, which enables them to advance different promissory visions about what science, especially bioscience, could or should become in the future, including how it should be g…
Credibility Contests
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe and North America, news outlets ran a series of stories reporting on "do-it-yourself" (DIY) coronavirus responses that were created and implemented by citizens. This news discourse exemplifies and can illuminate wider shifts in the roles of citizens in science, as individuals outside professional science institutions are becoming more actively involved in scientific knowledge production t…
The Story of Mark Weston
This paper examines the story of Mark Weston, a formerly successful competitor in women's athletics who in 1936 underwent a so-called 'sex change' or 'metamorphosis' to manhood
Hybrids, Hermaphrodites, and Sex Metamorphoses
Purpose: This chapter provides a contextualized understanding of the gendered anxieties expressed by elite sport regulators that motivated the formulation of sex testing policies in sport between 1937 and 1968. The focus is on complicating the claim that sex testing was first instituted to prevent explicit male bodies from fraudulently masquerading as women in sport. Rather, the chapter argues that sex testing policies were formulated in response…
Gut feminism Elizabeth Wilson
Gender Verification and the Making of the Female Body in Sport
This book critically explores the history of gender verification in international sport, to show how culture, politics, and science come together to produce "femaleness" and, consequently, the female body as we know it. Tracing gender verification policies and practices in sport since the 1930s till the present, the book shows how and why medical "sex tests" have been used to "verify" women athletes’ femaleness, in ways that both reflect and have…
Contested futures
In recent years, discourses around "personalized," "stratified," and "precision" medicine have proliferated. These concepts broadly refer to the translational potential carried by new data-intensive biomedical research modes. Each describes expectations about the future of medicine and healthcare that data-intensive innovation promises to bring forth. The definitions and uses of the concepts are, however, plural, contested and characterized by di…
Marketing Experimental Stem Cell Therapies in the UK
Stem cell research has attracted much public and biomedical anticipation centred on the possibility of using stem cells to treat various diseases and conditions, but the number of evidence-based therapies is currently limited. Numerous commercial direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses are nonetheless marketing experimental stem cell therapies online for myriad medical conditions and aesthetic ailments, which has attracted critique due to safety and …
Gender, love, and sex
This article uses a duoethnographic approach to explore the intersection of lesbian and queer sexualities and transgender identities in intimate relationships. By comparing experiences of gender and sexual identity negotiation within transgender relationships, the authors document how sexual identity borders are traversed, and how gender is negotiated and interrogated in and through these relationships. We argue that our differential experiences …
Credibility Contests
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe and North America, news outlets ran a series of stories reporting on "do-it-yourself" (DIY) coronavirus responses that were created and implemented by citizens. This news discourse exemplifies and can illuminate wider shifts in the roles of citizens in science, as individuals outside professional science institutions are becoming more actively involved in scientific knowledge production t…
The Story of Mark Weston
This paper examines the story of Mark Weston, a formerly successful competitor in women's athletics who in 1936 underwent a so-called 'sex change' or 'metamorphosis' to manhood
Afterword
Terf wars
Public involvement in the governance of population-level biomedical research
Population-level biomedical research offers new opportunities to improve population health, but also raises new challenges to traditional systems of research governance and ethical oversight. Partly in response to these challenges, various models of public involvement in research are being introduced. Yet, the ways in which public involvement should meet governance challenges are not well understood. We conducted a qualitative study with 36 exper…
What makes AI 'intelligent' and 'caring'? Exploring affect and relationality across three sites of intelligence and care
The Promissory Visions of DIYbio
Recent years have seen a proliferation of do-it-yourself biology (DIYbio) initiatives, consisting of people undertaking a range of bioscience activities outside traditional research environments. DIYbio initiatives, while diverse, exist at the fringes of institutionalised science, which enables them to advance different promissory visions about what science, especially bioscience, could or should become in the future, including how it should be g…
Specific Detriment
While non-binary gender identities have become increasingly visible in recent years, little research currently exists on the experiences that non-binary people have in sport, where most opportunities to participate are limited to two, mutually exclusive female and male categories. This article provides a starting point for addressing this gap, by reporting findings from a participatory scoping study that explored the barriers that non-binary peop…
Beyond the hype
AI and robotic technologies attract much hype, including utopian and dystopian future visions of technologically driven provision in the health and care sectors. Based on 30 interviews with scientists, clinicians and other stakeholders in the UK, Europe, USA, Australia, and New Zealand, this paper interrogates how those engaged in developing and using AI and robotic applications in health and care characterize their future promise, potential and …
How and why to use ‘vulnerability’
In recent years, ‘vulnerability’ has been getting more traction in theoretical, professional and popular spaces as an alternative or complement to the concept of risk. As a group of science and technology studies scholars with different disciplinary orientations yet a shared concern with biomedicine, self and society, we investigate how vulnerability has become a salient and even dominant idiom for discussing disease and disease risk. We argue th…
Hormonal stories
Hormones are complex biosocial objects that provoke myriad cultural narratives through their association with social activities and identities, and these narratives have the power to shape people’s lived realities and bodies. While hormones were historically conceptualised as ‘master molecules’ capable of controlling various life processes, their explanatory potential has now been overshadowed by technoscientific developments like omics- and gene…
From discredited to prohibited
This article provides a historical examination of the re-emergence of genetic sex testing in international athletics, focusing on the legal prohibition of this type of testing. While previous scholarship has primarily addressed scientific and ethical critiques of genetic sex testing, the fact that such testing has also been legally prohibited, most notably through Norway’s Biotechnology Act but also through other national and international legal …
Sociology (14 works) · Political science (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Medicine (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Context (archaeology (5 works) · Public relations (5 works) · Business (4 works)