Laura Stark
Contact search available for JYU staff members. ORCID link: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3342-1712 |
General description
I am a professor of ethnology and my current research interests are gender, sexuality and poverty in urban Africa. My current research project is ACACIA - LGBTQI+ and Street-level bureaucrats: Assessing Motives, Violence and Possibilities for Collective Advocacy in East Africa. It will study these issues in Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda.
Active JYU affiliations
- Department of History and Ethnology, Professor
Research interests
Using 230 interviews with mostly Muslim women, I study poverty and gender in urban Tanzania, focusing on transactional sex, child marriage and forced marriage, and how the labour of the poor is reproduced in the neoliberal city. Marriage under 18 is common in most of Africa. Many girls themselves want to marry young. Why? Social, economic and cultural pressures together provide an explanation.
Fields of science
Follow-up groups
Projects as Principal investigator
- LGBTQI+ and Street-level bureaucrats: Assessing Motives, Violence and
Possibilities for Collective Advocacy in East Africa- Ministry for Foreign Affairs
- Ethnologia Europaea
- The Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and the Social Sciences (NOS-HS)
- Urban Renewal and Income-Generating Spaces for Youth and Women in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
- Research Council of Finland
Publications and other outputs
