Margunn Bjørnholt


Margunn Bjørnholt is a Norwegian sociologist and economist. She is a Research Professor at the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies.
Her research focuses on gender-based violence, migration, gender equality, men and masculinities, policy studies, and several other topics. Her most recent research explores questions of gender, violence and power, including sexual and gender-based violence against women migrants and refugees. She has previously focused on ethical banking, money and monetary systems, and on management and organisational change in the public sector. She is a former President of the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights and the Norwegian Women's Lobby.

Background and career

She studied politics, contemporary history, regional planning and economics; she holds a cand.mag. degree from the University of Tromsø, an MA in European economic studies from the College of Europe, a mag.art. in economic sociology from the University of Oslo, with a dissertation on microfinance, ethical and interest-free banking, and a PhD in gender studies from Örebro University, 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 gender studies in 2015.
She previously worked at the Regional Development Fund, the National Institute of Technology, and as a partner in a consultancy, promoting regional development and female entrepreneurship. 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 at a number of research institutions including the Work Research Institute and the University of Oslo; from 2016 she is a Research Professor at the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies.
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 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 has taught students in sociology and psychology at the University of Oslo.

Research

Her research interests include gender-based violence, migration, gender equality, men and masculinities, organisation, policy studies and several other topics. She has published papers in The Sociological Review, the Journal of European Social Policy, Qualitative Research, Retfærd, the Nordic Journal of Criminology, the Journal of Gender-Based Violence, Norma, Fathering, Central and Eastern European Migration Review, and other journals.
Her research in the 1990s focused on ethical banking, money and monetary systems. From the late 1990s she focused on management and organisational change in the public sector, particularly organisational and spatial flexibility. Her research on working life led her to work–family issues and men's studies, and from the 2000s she has published widely on changes over time and generations in men's work–family practices and gender relations, employing social psychological and sociological perspectives on intergenerational transmission and social change. She has also studied the cultural adaptations and transnational practices of Polish migrants to Norway, and has been involved in several projects in Central and Eastern Europe.
Since the 2010s her research has focused on questions of gender, violence and power. She has led several research projects at NKVTS funded by the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, including a project on intimate partner violence. She currently heads the Norwegian part of an EU-funded research project on sexual and gender-based violence against women migrants and refugees, in cooperation with Jane Freedman, Ruth Halperin-Kaddari and researchers in six other countries in Europe, the Middle East and Canada. The aim of the project is to make policy recommendations for reducing women's vulnerability to sexual and gender-based violence. She is co-editor of a book on Men, Masculinities and Intimate Partner Violence with Lucas Gottzén and Floretta Boonzaier, and of a book on violence in close relations with Kristin Skjørten and others.
Other research fields include theories of social justice, the welfare state, human rights, and feminist economics. She has cooperated with the American legal theorist Martha Albertson Fineman for a number of years and edited an issue of the journal Retfærd on Fineman's vulnerability theory in 2013. She was co-editor, with the Scottish economist Ailsa McKay, of the 2014 book Counting on Marilyn Waring: New Advances in Feminist Economics. She has also published works on the contemporary use of intangible cultural heritage, the relationship between learning and architecture, and research methods.

Civic and political activities

She was involved in the ethical banking movement in the early 1990s as chair of a working group attempting to start a bank in Norway modelled after, and in cooperation with, JAK Members Bank in Sweden. She has been President of the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights and the Norwegian Women's Lobby. She was a journalist for the feminist radio station radiOrakel in the early 1980s, and she was a candidate for the Green Party in the 2015 elections.