Tuija Huuki

Tuija Huuki is a Finnish and Indigenous Inari Sámi scholar and Professor of Social Scientific Youth Research at the University of Oulu. Her research focuses on harassment, violence, and bullying, and their eradication in children and young people’s educational environments. She also investigates the affordances of creative methods and activism in building safe school cultures, as well as the intergenerational transmission of affect in settler-colonial and Indigenous Sámi contexts.

She leads research projects in these fields (track record ~€3M), publishes actively, supervises doctoral dissertations, develops pedagogical tools for educators, and regularly trains professionals and students in education and teaching. She also has extensive experience working as a primary school teacher and special education teacher. Her work advances new materialist, posthumanist, and affective methodological, theoretical, and practical approaches to studying sensitive areas of experience embedded in children and young people’s social worlds.

At the research unit of Teacher Education, School and Society, Tuija leads the research group of Youth Research, Sociology and Gender Studies Education, an interdisciplinary cluster of around 20 researchers bridging education with other faculties. The group’s work creatively engages the intersections of education, sociology, gender studies, cultural anthropology, literature, the arts, history, and child and youth studies, examining the societal contexts and connections of education.

Together with schools, pupils, NGOs, artists, and media producers, Tuija and her team carry out activist campaigns and art exhibitions. These initiatives aim to raise awareness among educators, NGOs, policymakers, and the wider public about injustices linked to education and schooling, and to foster safer educational environments. For more detail, see https://www.fire-collective.com/en