Jan-Eerik Leppänen

Jan-Eerik Leppänen trained in East Asian studies and political science, he  joined the department of anthropology at the ASSR in September 2005 where he is now working on a Ph.D. project entitled, Biobanking of ethnic Chinese minorities and genetic sampling programmes: production of new genetic knowledge, exchange process and the response. This research project is part of the "socio-genetic marginalisation in Asia Programme"(SMAP), which is based at International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS) and ASSR. The funding for the research programme comes from NWO.

Jan-Eerik holds an MA from East Asian Studies from the University of Helsinki. He has a second major from political science and minors from development studies and from comparative religion. Jan-Eerik has attended to the East and Southeast Asian studies graduate school at the University of Turku. He has also studied an academic term at the National University of Singapore, Department of Chinese Studies.

Jan-Eerik has been active in development work as a professional as well as a civilian since volunteering for six months in a "rural development" oriented NGO (Dakshinayan) in the Gujarat state of India, in 1996. He has managed health care capacity building projects in China while working as a field representative for an international NGO. Jan-Eerik's field of expertise includes project appraisals, evaluations and participatory approaches in health training. 

Jan-Eerik's PhD is ethnographic and it looks at social identities in genomic knowledge production; it explores the differences between Southwest China’s medical and social scientific experts, their worldviews and professional narratives of ethnicity. Local, contesting, and dissident voices are also considered. The PhD looks at healthcare needs in contrast to biotechnological policies and scientific interests of the academia in the development-needy Southwestern province, inhabited by ethnic populations. Jan-Eerik's research calls attention to discursive categories and institutional practices that confine the nationalities, who maneuver abiding socialist guidelines with pressing medical-scientific authority and state development priorities.