Margunn Bjørnholt facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Professor Margunn Bjørnholt
Margunn Bjørnholt in 2014
Born	9 October 1958 (1958-10-09) (age 65) Bø, Telemark, Norway
Awards	Article of the Year (2021) Rights Prize (2023)
Scientific career
Fields	Sociology, economics
Institutions	Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies, University of Oslo, University of Bergen

Margunn Bjørnholt (born 9 October 1958 in Bø, Telemark) is a Norwegian sociologist and economist. She is a research professor at the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies (NKVTS) and a professor of sociology at the University of Bergen. Her research has focused on financial institutions, management and working life and later on gender equality, migration and violence. She has also worked as a consultant, a civil servant, served as an expert to the European Commission and been president of the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights.

Background and career

She studied economics, regional planning, politics and contemporary history; she holds a cand.mag. degree from the University of Tromsø (1981), an MA in European economic studies from the College of Europe (1982), a mag.art. (PhD) in economic sociology from the University of Oslo (1995), with a dissertation on microfinance, ethical and interest-free banking, and a PhD in the field of men's studies from Örebro University (2014), with the dissertation Modern Men. The dissertation, influenced and advised by psychologist Margot Bengtsson, employs social psychological and sociological perspectives on intergenerational transmission and social change. She was awarded full professor competence in 2015.

In the 1980s and early 1990s she worked at the Regional Development Fund, the National Institute of Technology, and as a partner in a consultancy, promoting regional development and women's entrepreneurship and leadership. From 1993 she was affiliated with the Project for an Alternative Future, a research program at what is now the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo. Since 1997 she has worked as a researcher and professor at a number of research institutions including the Work Research Institute, the University of Oslo and the University of Bergen. In 2016 she became a Research Professor at the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies (NKVTS) at the University of Oslo. In 2021 she also became a professor of sociology at the University of Bergen.

She has served as an independent expert on gender equality to the European Commission, and has been a visiting scholar at the Feminism and Legal Theory Project (led by Martha Albertson Fineman) at Emory Law, the GEXcel Center of Gender Excellence and the Centre for Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds. She was a member of Anne Hellum's research group Rights, Individuals, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo Faculty of Law and is a member of the expert committee of Rethinking Economics in Norway. She is a global affiliate of Fineman's research group, the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative at Emory Law, and of the WiSE Centre for Economic Justice at the Glasgow School for Business and Society. She has taught students in sociology and psychology at the University of Oslo, and students in peace and conflict studies, governance, criminology, health policy and family therapy at other universities.

Research

Most of her work lies within sociology, but she has also worked on economic, legal and political science topics. The focus of her research has changed over time from financial institutions, management, and working life, to gender equality, migration, and violence. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers, three books, and several reports.

Her research in the 1990s focused on ethical banking, money and monetary systems. From the late 1990s she researched management and organisational change in the public sector, with a focus on organisational and spatial flexibility. Her research on working life led her to work–family issues and men's studies, with a focus on men's changing work-family practices and gender relations. She has also researched the cultural adaptations and transnational practices of Polish migrants to Norway, and has been involved in several projects in Central and Eastern Europe.

In 2015 she was commissioned by the Ministry of Justice and Public Security to establish a research program on the gendered dimensions of violence at NKVTS, and she has led several projects on violence against refugees and migrants, and violence and abuse in indigenous Sámi communities and immigrant communities. From 2019 she headed an EU-funded project on violence against women migrants and refugees, which formed the basis of policy recommendations for reducing women's vulnerability to gender-based violence, in collaboration with Jane Freedman (CNRS) and others. Her books on violence are Vold i nære relasjoner (Universitetsforlaget, 2019) and Men, Masculinities and Intimate Partner Violence (Routledge, 2021).

She has also worked on theories of justice and feminist economics, and she has collaborated with the American legal theorist Martha Albertson Fineman and the feminist economist Marilyn Waring for several years. In 2014 she co-edited a book on recent advances in feminist economics with Scottish economist Ailsa McKay. She has also published works on qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Civic and political activities

In the early 1980s she was a journalist for the feminist radio station radiOrakel. She was president of the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights (2013–2016), President of the Norwegian Women's Lobby (2014–2016) and a board member of the International Alliance of Women (2013–2017). She was appointed by the Norwegian government as a member of the Norwegian delegation to the 59th and 60th sessions of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). She was a candidate for the Green Party in the 2015 elections.

Honours

• Article of the Year – Scandinavian University Press Academic Journal Prize (2021).
• Rights Prize [no] (2023)