Suvi Pihkala
PhD
University lecturer
Gender studies and feminist research, feminist new materialisms and creative methodologies
Teacher education, school and society
Faculty of Education and Psychology
My research is inspired by feminist posthuman, new materialist and post-qualitative approaches and the re-thinking of ethics and responsibility they have prompted in and for social research theory and praxis. I conducted my PhD titled Touchable Matters: Reconfiguring Sustainable Change through Participatory Design, Education, and Everyday Engagement for Non-Violence in Gender Studies in the University of Oulu in 2018. My research focuses on investigating how new materialisms can be made to matter in the diverse context of participatory, collaborative, socially engaged, arts-based and creative research, design and praxis. Close to my heart is ethics that I approach by inquiring into what the ethical conditions of creative praxis are like and how they could be theorized and designed. My most recent work has engaged with these questions in creative research with children and young people on gender, sexuality and power in research supported by the Research Council of Finland and University of Oulu spearhead funding in Human Sciences.
I am the co-leader of the creative and activist FIRE research collective, a transdisciplinary team of researchers that collaborates closely with artists and creative professionals, NGOs, educators, and children to explore and address gendered and sexual injustices in and around education. I am also co-leading FIRE Research Group.
I worked as Co-Editor-in-Chief for Sukupuolentutkimus-Genusforskning [Finnish Journal of Gender Studies] and have published actively in key journals of her field of expertise, including International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodologies and Journal of Gender Studies. I am the co-editor of New Materialist Affirmations: Creative Research Interventions in Methods and Practice (Hickey-Moody et al. 2025) by Edinburg University Press and Creative research on gender and sexuality with children and young people (Renold et al.) forthcoming by Routledge in 2026.
Research interests
- Feminist new materialisms
- Feminist methodologies
- Creative methodologies
- Postqualitative inquiry
- Response-ability
- Ethical sustainability
- Participatory design
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