Susanna Jussila

I am a doctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science. My empirically and theoretically grounded dissertation investigates how the somatic is political. The research emerged from a need to support social and climate justice activists’ resilience at a time when global challenges, such as the climate crisis and the erosion of the rule-based international system, require conscious effort to sustain political hope and agency. The work combines narrative analysis of expert interviews with a synthesizing theoretical discussion.

Empirically, my research is situated within an emerging paradigm of politicised healing that has grown within today’s global social justice movements. It challenges neoliberal, individualising self-help discourses and reductive understandings of the body as a mere object. Instead, it presents the body as an integral site of healing and liberation from oppression-induced collective trauma. By linking this timely, grassroots-based phenomenon with feminist political theorizing, my work contributes to feminist and political understandings of the body as a site of knowledge, resistance, and liberation. Interdisciplinary research areas covered in my dissertation include feminist political theory, critical phenomenology, and somatics.

Currently, I am involved in the project Reframing Restitution: Postcolonial Object Movement, Transnational History and Social Repair, led by Associate Professor Magdalena Zolkos. My role focuses on decolonising Western trauma discourse by linking trauma to systems of oppression and intergenerational harm, and by making visible the cultural lineages and wisdom traditions that underpin many contemporary trauma therapy modalities, particularly somatic-based approaches.

Before beginning my PhD studies, I co-wrote a popular science book on body consciousness (Jussila & Ohraniemi, 2021) and worked in social justice movements in Finland and abroad.