The Research Team

Eyja Margrét Jóhönnu Brynjarsdóttir

Eyja Margrét Jóhönnu Brynjarsdóttir is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Centre for Ethics at the University of Iceland. Her research focuses on various issues in social ontology, social epistemology, feminist philosophy, and applied ethics. Eyja is interested in a variety of topics, including the ontology as well as moral implications of money, the fate of women and minorities in philosophy, and varieties of silencing such as gaslighting and backlash reactions to justice movements. Within this project, she is exploring the interplay of moral accountability with various groups associated with the MeToo movement. Eyja is the author of two books: The Reality of Money: The Metaphysics of Financial Value (Rowman & Littlefield 2018) and Frumgerðir og eftirmyndir (Heimspekistofnun 2019). She is currently co-editor of NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research.

Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir

Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir is a research specialist in philosophy at the Centre for Ethics. She completed her PhD at the University of Iceland in 2018 with the dissertation Vulnerable in a Job Interview: Butler’s Relational Ontology of Vulnerability as a Response to (Neo)liberalism. Nanna has written widely on #MeToo, vulnerability and feminist philosophy but she also studies fatigue, disability and chronic illnesses such as ME/CFS. Nanna is the principal investigator of the EMFEM project along with Eyja M.J. Brynjarsdóttir. As a part of this project, Nanna will examine changes in ideas of responsibility between the two #MeToo movements happening in Iceland in 2018 and 2021 in addition to examining the feminist ethics stemming from the works of Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero amongst others.

Nanna is a disabled philosopher living with chronic illnesses and has participated in activism concerning disability, feminism, the situation of early career researchers in academia as well as matters of refugees in Iceland.

Elín Pjetursdóttir

Elín Pjetursdóttir is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Iceland and holds a master’s degree from the University of Copenhagen. Her research is on forgiveness in relation to sexual violence, focusing specifically on the social pressure to forgive. She works with questions such as: Are victims of sexual violence pressured to forgive? What are the moral implications of victims of sexual violence being subject to a pressure to forgive? Has this pressure changed since the beginning of the #MeToo movement? To answer these questions, Elín uses both classical and feminist theories on forgiveness, as well as analyzing popular discourse in relation to forgiveness and sexual violence.

Katrín Pálmad. Þorgerðardóttir

Katrín Pálmad. Þorgerðardóttir is a PhD student in philosophy. Her project focuses on young people and their negotiations with feminist discourses and values in their personal lives and political views, especially in a “post” MeToo era in Iceland. Katrín is interested in what feminist consciousness-raising involves in neoliberal, popular, and post-feminist times. Topics of interest include generational differences within feminist activism, postfeminism, popular feminism, ethics of love, ethics of sex, ethics of intimacy, neoliberal feminism, feminist phenomenology, and feminist epistemology.

Sigurrós Alice Svöfudóttir

Sigurrós Alice Svöfudóttir is a doctoral student in applied ethics at the University of Iceland. She is working on a dissertation that focuses on moral understandings, responsibility and lived experiences of forcibly displaced persons within the framework of feminist relational ethics and global justice. The project aim is to investigate what kind of morality is relevant in a world that is faced with a threefold threat of climate change, rapidly growing numbers of forcibly displaced persons and increasingly unjust distribution of moral goods on a global scale. Of particular interest to Sigurrós is the work of political theorist Iris Marion Young and her “Social Connection Model of Responsibility”, and questions regarding moral knowledge, membership in moral communities and the scope of justice. Sigurrós did her graduate studies in ethics at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Emma RIvard Henriot

Emma Rivard Henriot is a PhD student at the University of Iceland. She holds a master’s degree from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her PhD project focuses on the lived experience of endometriosis (Endo) for teenagers. She is exploring how the onset of Endo during the transformative period of the teenage years — which involves puberty —affects teenagers’ experiences and identities. She aims to explore this question through qualitative phenomenological interviews with young adults, framed within a feminist epistemological perspective. The research findings will highlight the lived experiences of teenagers with Endo and provide insights into how to improve their lives amidst knowledge gaps, ageism, and medical misogyny.