Dr Niina Vuolajärvi celebrated in LSE Impact Prize 2026
Congratulations to our Assistant Professor in International Migration, Dr Niina Vuolajärvi, on being recognised in LSE's second annual Impact Prize this September, as a Runner Up in the "Rising Star: For impact achieved by an early career researcher" award category.
LSE's annual Impact Prize recognises excellent engagement, impact, and impact culture across the School. The 2026 Impact Prizes were presented at an event on Wednesday, 30 September 2026.
Dr Niina Vuolajärvi's interdisciplinary research is situated in the fields of migration, feminist and socio-legal studies and she teaches on our MSc in International Migration and Public Policy programme. Her projects have investigated migrant sex work, prostitution and migration policies, post-deportation experiences, and race and colonial legacies in Europe.
Currently, she is working on her first book, Sex Work, Migration and the ‘Nordic Model’, which examines a feminist-inspired prostitution and anti-trafficking policy approach and its intersections with immigration controls from the perspective of sex workers and people in the sex trade. This work is based on a vast three-country ethnographic research including 210 interviews in the Nordic region (Sweden, Norway, Finland) where the policy approach originates. The policy-relevant findings of this study are published in a policy brief titled Criminalising the sex buyer: experiences from the Nordic region as part of LSE Centre for Women Peace and Security series, and celebrated in the LSE Impact Prize 2026.
Recent publications:
- “Everybody loves to hate methodological nationalism”: methodological reflections on moving beyond the nation-state in research design and practice in Ethnic and Racial Studies
- Toward respectable masculinities? Sex buyers’ collective negotiations with stigma, criminality, and masculinity in the Nordic context in International Review of Sociology
