Postdoctoral Fellow (Utacas)
1.8.2010-31.7.2011
Office: Pinni B, room 3103
Phone: +358 40 190 9711
Email: leena.autonen-vaaraniemi@uta.fi
My research work has focused on men’s family relationships and home from the perspectives of gender, space and life course. My overall research interests include contested and conflicting family situations, the solution of which is a part of social work as an institutional practice. I am interested in controversial custody and access decisions related to divorces concerned over the quality of parenthood, especially post-divorce fatherhood. Lately, I have examined post-divorce fatherhood from the viewpoint of moral reasoning in the accounts of fathers themselves and promoted by men’s activism.
During the course of my Utacas year (2010-2011) the focus of research lies at the views and opinions concerning post-divorce fatherhood of the family professionals who deal with divorce in their work. I will analyse what kind of attitudes on post-divorce fatherhood the practitioners express and how they argue for and justify their views. The data consist of interviews with social workers, child psychiatrists and lawyers and the data will be obtained from municipal Family Affairs Units. The methodological approach is qualitative.