My engagement with gender, care, coloniality, and epistemology, has resulted in several research projects: In my project on the international division of reproductive labor, I specifically focused on men’s positions and practices as part of households that pay migrant women in the informal market. In my position at Monash, I was part of an Australian Research Council-funded study in collaboration with Steven Roberts and Karla Elliott ‘Addressing the deficit in men’s participation in paid care work’, which included empirical work with marginalized men working in front line roles in the Australian health care and social assistance sector. Having worked both empirically and theoretically on men doing (and not doing) domestic and care work, my project at UiB will extend this work to look at ecological care. This project examines the intersection of gender, care, and ecological activism in Norway. Starting from the concept of caring masculinities – understood as masculine practice that embraces care and rejects domination – the project seeks to broaden the scope of critical studies of men and masculinities on men and care by investigating caring masculinities in the context of youth climate activism.

Prior to joining the University of Bergen, I have worked at Monash University, and at Duke University, where I am a founding member of the Revaluing Care in the Global Economy network.

Prattes, Riikka. Beyond privilege: Narrating diverse stories of caring masculinities’ Blog post in Nancy Folbre’s Care Talk

Prattes, Riikka, Roberts, Steven and Elliott, Karla. ‘In the face of disparity, do we need a “NDIS for aged care”?’ Monash lens

Peer-reviewed articles

Prattes, Riikka (2025). Life. Time. Journal of Philosophical Investigations, special issue: Caring and Time (open access)

Prattes, Riikka and Myong, Lene (2025). Colonial care in the Nordics: Child removal and the politics of disappearance, NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, special issue: Race, racialization, and reproduction in the Nordic context (open access)

Prattes, Riikka, Roberts, Steven and Elliott, Karla (2025). 'like in every other facet of life, I am privileged to be a man': Political subjectivities of young men working in the Australian care sector, YOUNG: Nordic Journal of Youth Research, special issue: Young masculinities and political subjectivities (open access)

Prattes, Riikka (2024). Knowing to care/caring to know: Attentiveness and responsiveness in privileged men’s practices of social reproduction, Azimuth: Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age, special issue: Critical care

Roberts, Steven and Prattes, Riikka (2023). Caring masculinities in theory and practice: Reiterating the relevance and clarifying the capaciousness of the concept, Sociological Research Online (open access)

Prattes, Riikka (2023). Colonial care: Care in the service of whiteness, Essays in Philosophy 24(1-2): 41-57, special issue: Care ethics otherwise 

Prattes, Riikka (2022). Caring masculinities and race: On racialized workers and 'new fathers', Men and Masculinities 25(5): 721–742 

Prattes, Riikka (2020). 'I don’t clean up after myself': Epistemic ignorance, responsibility, and the politics of the outsourcing of domestic cleaning, Feminist Theory 21(1): 25-45 

Book chapters

Prattes, Riikka (2024). Learning through care: Decentering an epistemology of domination to theorize caring men at the 'center'. In Sophie Bourgault, Maggie FitzGerald and Fiona Robinson (eds). Decentering epistemologies and challenging privilege: Critical care ethics perspectives. Rutgers University Press 

Prattes, Riikka (2018). Der migrantische Hausarbeiter als 'Individuum': Männliche Migranten in haushaltsnahen Dienstleistungsberufen. (Engl: Male domestic workers and the 'individual': Migrant men and paid domestic work). In Susanne Hochreiter and Silvia Stoller (eds.) Mann, Männer, Männlichkeiten. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven. Vienna: Praesens Verlag 

Books

Prattes, Riikka. Bodies of knowledge: Masculinities, epistemologies, and domestic work (in preparation)

Prattes, Riikka (2011). 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). Wiesbaden: VS Publishing