Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Finland
fellow
Satu Venäläinen
Home institution
University of Helsinki
Country of origin (home institution)
Finland
Discipline(s)
Social Sciences
Theme(s)
Contemporary violence & Justice
Gender, Family & Youth
Information & media
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Satu Venäläinen is a university lecturer in social psychology, University of Helsinki. Her previous research has focused on violence and gender, which she has examined from the perspectives of online and offline discourses, affects and the construction of intersectional identities. Her research tends to blend a social-psychological orientation to subjectivities formed through social dynamics and critical insights from disciplines such as gender studies and media and cultural studies. Her recent postdoctoral project focused on young people’s perspectives and affective experiences of sexual harassment, in which she continued developing an affective-discursive approach to analysing the entwinement of meanings and embodied experiences.
Research Project
Social media conversations on violence and inequalities: Affects and intersections
Social media is a crucial platform for contemporary efforts to speak against various forms of violence and rights violations, including human gender-based violence as well as violence and harm-doing toward animals and the environment. Whereas social media activism focused on such topics can be effective and empowering, anti-violence social media activists face constant resistance and hate speech, which can pose limits to the sustenance of their activism. Satu Venäläinen’s project delves into the affective dynamics and experiences of participation in social media struggles focused on human and more-than-human violences. The research aims to develop an understanding of the particularities, continuities and interconnections of affects created in struggles over different forms of violence and harm-doing on social media, and of the ways in which anti-violence activists’ intersectional positionings and identifications get shaped in and shape their participation and possibilities to be heard in such struggles.
Research Interests:
Discourse and meaning-making, affect and emotions, violence, digital environments and dynamics, more-than-human ontologies, gender, sexualities and intersectionality