Biography
I am working as a Doctoral Researcher in "Sustainable Rural Futures: A Qualitative longitudinal study of rural young people in the 21st century" (SURF) research project at the Department of History and Ethnology JYU. In my doctoral research, I examine young people’s (current and former) relationship with the Finnish countryside as a place of youth. I am particularly interested in the meanings that young people from different generations attach to place, as well as in the intergenerational continuities and changes in the lived experience of rural youth. At the same time, I examine changes in the built environment of the countryside in the recent past, roughly from the 1970s to the 2020s.
The research project and my doctoral thesis are interdisciplinary in character. The most important theoretical approaces in my thesis are oral history, youth studies and humanistic geography.