Riikka Prattes

Riikka Prattes is a Research Fellow at the School of Education, Culture, and Society at Monash University in Melbourne. She holds a Mag.a phil. (MA equivalent) in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Vienna and a Ph.D. in Social and Political Thought from the Institute for Social Justice at ACU Sydney. Before joining Monash, Riikka held postdoctoral positions at the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies program at Duke and was a visiting research fellow at Paris Lodron University Salzburg.

Riikka’s scholarship engages with gender (including men and masculinities), care work and care ethics, and decolonial theory. Her work has been published in top journals such as Feminist Theory and Men and Masculinities. Her German-language publications include the book Junge Männer und Feminismus. Ein sozialanthropologischer Blick auf Männlichkeitskonstruktionen im Kontext Österreichs. (Engl: Young Men and Feminism. A Social Anthropological View on the Construction of Masculinities in the Austrian Context). She is a recipient of the Gabriele-Possanner advancement prize, awarded by the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research for outstanding research promoting gender equality. The excellence of Riikka’s teaching has also received praise, and she was recognized among the top 5% for course quality and instructor quality at Trinity College (Duke University).

Currently, Riikka works on the Australian Research Council-funded project “Addressing the Deficit in Men’s Participation in Paid Care Work” with colleagues Karla Elliott and Steven Roberts. She also works on a book manuscript tentatively titled Bodies of Knowledge: Masculinities, Embodiment and Domestic Work.