Senior Lecturer (University of Jyväskylä), Honorary Associate Professor (University College London), Dr. Petteri Eerola is a social scientist and education researcher with broad experience in research and teaching on fatherhood, families and parenting practices, family and childcare policies, everyday family life, family diversity, early childhood education, (in)equality, gender, men and masculinities, and qualitative methods. In his recent research, Dr. Eerola has studied, e.g., the consequences of fathers’ parental leave take-up, fathers’ motivations and barriers to parental leave, couples’ negotiations on the parental division of labor, institutional family discourses in early childhood education, imprisoned men’s narratives of fatherhood, and interviewing men on sensitive topics. Dr Eerola is currently leading the research project The Parental Night Shift: Gendered Inequalities in Night-time Care (2022–2027), funded by the Kone Foundation.
Dr. Eerola gained his PhD in 2015 at the University of Jyväskylä, where he is currently teaching research methods, family studies and education. He is a docent (adjunct professor) in social policy (especially family studies) at Tampere University and in the sociology of education and gender at the University of Oulu. Dr. Eerola has previously worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Tampere University, Finland, visiting postdoctoral researcher at the Thomas Coram Research Unit of the University of London, and visiting PhD candidate at Université Laval, Canada. Dr. Eerola was awarded the Young Scientist Prize 2014 by the European Society on Family Relations.
During his career, Dr. Eerola has held several scientific and societal positions of trust, including chair of the Finnish Association for Men’s Studies, member of the Finnish Ethics Committee on Youth and Childhood Studies, and member of the Subcommittee on Men and Gender Equality of the Finnish Council for Gender Equality. Currently, he serves as the chair of the Finnish Society for Research on Families and Personal Relationships and as a vice board member of the Mannerheim League for Child Welfare, the largest child welfare organization in Finland.
Recent edited volumes
Current projects
