Engagements
News & Announcements
11/2026
Our research group is organising a working group “Vaihdevuosien uusi tuleminen|Reconfiguring menopause” within The 2026 Finnish Gender Studies Conference – “Rights, Wrongs & Resistance” (19-20 November) held in Joensuu. We invite presentation proposals by 20th May 2026.
Menopause has long been approached primarily as a gendered medical phenomenon, with attention centred on biological processes and the management of symptoms. In recent years, menopause has gained increased public visibility, where it has often been framed as a life stage of middle-aged white women, frequently through discourses of active ageing. Dominant narratives range from the naturalization to the medicalization of menopause, narrowing its social, cultural, and political dimensions. At the same time, new forms of resistance and activism have emerged, challenging established understandings, demanding rights for those who experience menopause—some of whom reconceptualize it as menopausing—and foregrounding the diversity of menopausal experiences across bodies, identities, and social positions.
This working group invites contributions that engage critically with menopause as a social, cultural, political, and embodied phenomenon. We aim to provide an open, interdisciplinary, and intersectionally informed space for examining menopause beyond biomedical framings and for exploring its contested meanings, representations, and futures.
We welcome paper presentations, performative contributions, and experimental formats from a wide range of disciplines, as well as from artistic and activist practices. Contributions may be theoretical, methodological, empirical, or practice based.
Possible themes and questions include, but are not limited to:
- Whose experiences of menopause have been heard, and how have they been represented or discussed?
- Which menopausal experiences are marginalized, silenced, or resisted, and why?
- How does menopause manifest differently across identities and social positions?
- How do racialization, class, disability, bodily norms, age, language, and other intersecting factors shape experiences, conceptualizations, and visibility of menopause?
- What kinds of new forms of agency, knowledge production, or political action can menopause activism generate?
- What remains unknown or inadequately addressed about menopause?
- What might menopausal futures look like, and how are they being imagined, invoked, and debated?
The working group is organized by researchers involved in the Academy of Finland–funded project Menopausing: Exploring Diversity, Awareness and Activism.
Deadline for papers: 20.5.2026. The working group will be organised in Finnish / Finnish and English as needed.
Contact: katja.laakkonen[at]uef.fi; pauliina.lukinmaa[at]uef.fi and/or meeri.ott[at]uef.fi.
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12/2025
Congratulations to Postdoctoral Researcher Nadine Hassouneh and the working group for getting grant from Kone Foundation for their research project “No Time for Despair: The Geopolitics of (Peri)Menopause”! Were thrilled to see this necessary and fantastic research driving forward the much-needed geographic and interdisciplinary research of menopause!
Our wonderful Aija Lulle is happy to serve on the advisory board of this project.
Events Attended & Our Presentations
Events Attended & Our Presentations – coming soon!
Media Coverage
Interview with Aija Lulle about menopausing and middle-aged lives (in Latvian) in Latvijas Radio 1
Politiikasta.fi – Häpeästä kohti moninaisia vaihdevuosia
Flash ethnographies and research insights
Collection of the important, powerful and interesting insights and voices that we’ve encountered and collected during our research, fieldwork and interviews.