Speaker Bios:

Dr. Ophra Leyser-Whalen

Dr. Ophra Leyser-Whalen is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso. As a medical sociologist she focuses on reproductive justice, studying issues related to abortion, infertility, contraception, and sterilization. She has published extensively in social science, interdisciplinary, and clinical journals, with much of this work done collaboratively with colleagues across the country, undergraduate and graduate students, and people working in abortion funds.

Minna Pye

Minna Pye is a journalist and documentary filmmaker with the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE. Currently, she works for YLE`s long-running Ulkolinja-series. She has made documentaries about the rise of populism in Europe, the corona pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. She was also a screenwriter and director of two episodes of the Raha-Suomi documentary series. Before her current post, she worked as a Foreign News Correspondent for YLE News covering for example terrorist attacks, the Brexit referendum, and European politics. She also produced and presented the radio show, Maailmanpolitiikan arkipäivää, for several years. Ms. Pye has a Master´s degree from the University of Tampere, where she studied Journalism and International Politics.

Documentary: The American Abortion War

Dr. Michael Hansen

Hansen will design a nationally representative quasi–experimental survey, which will investigate how levels of support for abortion policies and women’s reproductive health are conditional on the concepts used to represent these topics in survey questions.

Dr. Benita Heiskanen

Heiskanen will study the ways in which the Reproduction Wars are constructed, performed, and visualized for strategic purposes. Building on her prior project (Heiskanen 2022) on the Texas Campus Carry legislation, she will analyze the performative practices of verbal-sonic-visual materials used by anti-abortion activists and the transborder abortion networks. As the principal investigator, she will supervise the fieldwork period and conduct an ethics review on the project.

Dr. Niko Heikkilä

Heikkilä examines anti–abortion policing of women’s reproduction to explain how anti–abortion organizations mobilize people to surveil abortion seekers and providers. He will study the ways in which Dobbs and Senate Bill 8 together produced a momentum shift in favor of the anti–abortion movement in Texas and analyze how anti-abortion groups in Texas responded to the new laws both in terms of assisting in and going beyond conventional policing of abortions. Heikkilä will also design the project’s primary source and document archive.

Dr. Pekka Kolehmainen

Kolehmainen examines the weaponization of imaginaries in the Reproduction Wars. To complicate the common view of how abortion fits into the Culture Wars, Kolehmainen maps out a range of different rhetorical registries used in promoting anti–abortion views. He will also be in charge of the project’s rhetorical laboratory.

PhD. Cand. Nadia Nava Contreras

Nava maps the transborder responses to the legislative shift in Texas. On the Mexican side of the border, Nava focuses on abortion accompaniment organizations and pro-life organizations. By focusing on embodied experiences of abortion mobilities, both on the practical and discursive levels, she will design the online archive’s collection of lived experiences in Spanish, containing anonymous first-hand experiences and interviews.

Dr. Outi Hakola

Dr. Outi Hakola is a university lecturer in the Department of Health and Social Management at the University of Eastern Finland, a docent in area and cultural studies at the University of Helsinki, and a docent in media studies at the University of Turku. Her background is in media studies, and her research concentrates on questions of health communication, mortality, and health in audiovisual culture. She is also active in the field of North American research. Her most recent book, “Filming Death: End-of-Life Documentary Cinema”, was published by Edinburgh University Press in the spring of 2024.

Dr. Anu Koivunen

Anu Koivunen is a media scholar and professor of Gender Studies at University of Turku, Finland. She has written about feminist and queer film theory, Finnish cinema and television history, cultural memory and affective historiography, political journalism and platformed everyday lives. She is the co-editor of The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilizing Affect in Feminist, Queer and Anti-racist Media Cultures, (Manchester UP, 2018), the special issue of Lambda Nordica on Nordic Queer Cinema (2020) and The Nordic Economic, Social and Political Model: Challenges in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2021). Most recently she has led research projects on television history of the 1970s–1980s (Kone Foundation (2018–2022), media and power (FLOPO, 2019–2022), on the cultural programming of Finnish public service broadcasting company (YLE 2022–2024) and platformed intimacies and vulnerabilities (IDA, SRC 2019–2025). Recent articles published in Nordicom Review, Media Theory, Convergence, Television & New Media, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Journalism, European Journal of Communication as well as Politiikka and Yhteiskuntapolitiikka.

Dr. Leena-Maija Rossi

Leena-Maija Rossi is the professor of Gender Studies at the University of Lapland. She has also taught gender studies and art history at the University of Helsinki. In 2011-16 she served as the Executive Director of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York. Furthermore, she has worked as freelance journalist and freelance curator, collaborating with the major art museums in Finland and galleries abroad. Professor Rossi holds a PhD in art history and women’s studies, and the title of Docent at the Universities of Helsinki and Turku. Her research interests include visual culture at large, feminist and queer theory, intersectionality, and critical studies of whiteness. Her publications include the books Heterotehdas (Gaudeamus, 2003) and Muuttuva sukupuoli (Gaudeamus, 2015), and her most recent article is “The Helsinki School: Gendered Image Shaping and Gender-Based Violence in a Photography Branding Project” (2025, with Sari Karttunen).

Dr. Susanne Uusitalo

Susanne Uusitalo is Docent in applied philosophy and applied ethics. She currently works as Senior Researcher in AI Ethics at the University of Oulu and a university teacher of research ethics at the University of Turku. She has been a member in the National Medical Research Ethics Committee since 2018 and a member of the ethical committee that reviews health care related noninvasive research at the University of Turku since 2019. In a further wider health care context, she facilitates ethical aspects in health technology assessments for public health care in the Council for Choice in Health Care in Finland. She is also a member of the National Advisory Board on Social Welfare and Health Care Ethics ETENE (Finland) that gives statements on current topical issues in health care and social welfare in Finland. She is interested in the relationship between public health and individual health.

The conference is organized jointly by the John Morton Center for North American Studies (JMC) at the University of Turku and the Finnish American Studies Association (FASA). We designed the theme of the conference—ASPIRATIONS—with multiple goals in mind:

• to encourage non-traditional and alternative approaches to our work, including workshops and creative sessions, alongside the traditional paper format
• to frame the conference discussion around one or more thematic clusters, rather than around standard disciplinary starting points
• to forge collaborations between colleagues from various institutional and geographic contexts
• to offer a platform to reinvent the ways we discuss and practice American Studies.

Date: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, June 4-6
Place: Publicum Building, University of Turku

Read more about the conference here.