Term of office expires 1 July 2024
Member since 2 July 2014
Vice-Chair from 1 January to 31 December 2018
Bureau member since 1 January 2021
Reetta Toivanen is full professor in Sustainability Science (indigenous sustainabilities) at the Helsinki Institute for Sustainability Sccience (HELSUS) and a docent in social and cultural anthropology at the University of Helsinki (Finland).
She is the vice-director of the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives (EuroStrorie) funded by the Academy of Finland (2018-2025) and PI of the research consortium ALL-YOUTH funded by the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland (2018-2023). She is also a non-resident senior research fellow at the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI) in Flensburg (Germany).
Since 2008, she has been Board member and since 2014 President of the Finnish League for Human Rights.
From 2009-2012 she was the national expert for Finland in the European Commission’s network of socio-economic experts in the anti-discrimination field. She has participated as an expert and senior researcher in several projects of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights She took part in the EU 7th Framework research project ELDIA (European Language Diversity for All), which ran from 2010-2013, as sociology expert and co-authored the report of the project.
She successfully completed her Master’s and Licentiate studies in Helsinki in 1994 and 1995 and was awarded a doctoral degree at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2000. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University (Cambridge, USA) in 2000-2001, after which she worked as a senior researcher at the Institute for Human Rights at Åbo Akademi (Turku, Finland). In 2003-2007, she led a large research project on human rights education and minorities at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 2007-2009, she was a senior researcher in the research project Challenging Power: Equality, Diversity and the Integration of Ethnic and National Minorities in Finland and since 2006 has worked as a senior researcher at the Centre of Excellence in Global Governance Research at the University of Helsinki. 2010-2016 she was a Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the Erik Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights and 2016-2017 University Lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki.
Dr Toivanen's major areas of research and expertise are field research, ethnographic methods, anthropology of law, human rights, ethnic and national minorities, anti-discrimination in Europe, Arctic research, human rights teaching, multilingualism and language policy, and critical feminist theory.
