Academic interests
- Institutional responses to (mass) violence
- Sexual, political, and/or collective violence
- Torture and rehabilitation
- Supranational criminology and international criminal justice
- Sociology of knowledge and juridification
- Research ethics
Houge’s research centres in on issues to do with gendered, political and/or collective violence, and the promises, pitfalls, functions, and meanings of institutional responses to such harms at local, national, and international levels.
From 2025, Houge is co-lead for a work package in ReDemOS: The Unintended Undemocratic Consequences of Open Science practices. In the collaborative project, the researchers address the unintended but serious effects that Open Science requirements can have on qualitative research, with particular emphasis on research that deals with people in vulnerable life situations. ReDemOS is funded by UiO:Democracy.
Houge also works on the project From medical facts to legal evidence, part of UiO:Life Science Convergence environment Evidently rape. Here, Houge looks at how medical and forensic experts in Norway translate findings from sexual assault examinations for legal processing purposes. The project examines how different knowledge regimes in the criminal justice process are catered to when facts are communicated cross-disciplinary.
Houge also works on projects addressing the legal processing and juridification of hate crime, (dis)trust in the welfare state, and the rehabilitation rights and opportunities of refugees exposed to torture after resettlement.
Background
Anette Bringedal Houge holds a master's degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from 2008, and a doctorate in Criminology from 2017, both from the University of Oslo. The title of her PhD thesis was "Thugs" on trial: Narrating Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in and for International Criminal Justice. Thematically and empirically addressing conflict-related sex crimes, she focused on the legal, social and political narratives about complex problems that international criminal justice produces and contributes to, and the societal and political penetration of judicial ways of thinking.
After completing her PhD, Houge was the Head of Analysis at the Norwegian Red Cross before she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Interdisciplinary Health Sciences at the Faculty of Medicine, also at the University of Oslo.
Houge was hired as an associate professor in sociology of law at the Institute of Criminology and Sociology of Law in 2024, and became a full professor at the department in 2025.