Description of research and teaching

I am currently working as a research director at Gender Studies, Faculty of Arts,  leading the Research Council of Finland funded project Anti-Gender Trouble (2024-2028). I have retired from the position of  Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki, which I held from 2008 to 2024.  In  2011-2015 I was an Academy Professor of the Academy of Finland, leading the Academy Professor project Philosophy and Politics in Feminist Theory. Previously, in 2003-2007, I was Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Jyväskylä where I also held a permanent position as  Professor of Political Theory. 

 For the past twenty years I have been actively involved in leading intergenerational generational research teams: I was the deputy director of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change (2006-2011), and the Politics of Philosophy and Gender (PPhiG) team within it, where we explored various topics of feminist thought, always with a political accent.

 My areas of specialization include

* feminist theory and philosophy

* political thought

* history of concepts

 I am a multidisciplinary scholar, originally trained in the areas of philosophy, history, and politics, with feminist and queer interests. I began as a scholar of Hegel and of political theory (Valtio ja vapaus [The State and Freedom/Liberty], 1989), and have since studied closely many other thinkers and texts, including Jean-Francois Lyotard, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida. Early in my career I worked on the icon of 19^thcentury Finnish nationalist thought, the Hegelian philosopher J.V. Snellman. Since then I have been interested in the patterns of political thought and democratic theory. I have also studied the history of political concepts, such as the concept valtio (the State) in Finnish. 

In Finland, I was among those who took early interest in the 20^thcentury French philosophy (Derrida, Foucault), and in developing postmodern anti-foundational thought. Internationally, I was among the first to take serious interest in Judith Butler’s work, publishing on it in the early 1990s and later co-translating her Gender Trouble into Finnish. 

The current project, Anti—Gender Trouble focuses on democratic theory, and in particular on the use of the concepts of ‘majority,’ ‘minority’ and ‘the people’ in the texts, in the context of contemporary anti-gender mobility and the academic and political responses to it. Together with the colleagues in the project we aim to clarify why gender has become such a key concept in contemporary struggles about the meaning and value of democracy. (Link to the website.)

My ongoing research also continues and develops the work I started in my academy professor project Philosophy and Politics in Feminist Theory (2011-2015) on contemporary feminist theory. In my work I study the main figures of current feminist theory, such as Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, and Adriana Cavarero with an approach that I call ‘politics of philosophy.’ I pay attention to the scholars’ attachments to different philosophical traditions, the resulting conceptual conflicts, and how these conflicts are played out textually. I have also maintained my longstanding interest in German Idealism, and having previously co-edited Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought with Kimberly Hutchings (2010), I have recently published the Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist thought (2023), which I editedwith Susanne Lettow.

I value international contacts in my field of study. In the early 1990s I spent four years at the University of Santa Cruz California working on my book The Postmodern and Political Agency (1996). I then worked for a year at the Philosophy Department of the University of Greifswald, Germany in 1998-1999, visited Minnesota AFS in 2002, and spent two years at the University of Manchester, CRESC, in 2007-2009.  I also spent half a year in 2012 at the University of Paris 8 in Gender Studies. I am regularly invited to lecture abroad and have close links with many institutions, including Paris 8 (Gender Studies), Freie Universität in Berlin, and Kingston University (CRMEP) in London. 

I have supervised 17 doctoral students to graduation in several different disciplines and universities, and I currently supervise four doctoral students in Helsinki. I have been the director of the national Doctoral Programme of Gender Studies (2012-2015), and the founding director of the Doctoral programme in Gender, Culture and Society (SKY) within the University of Helsinki (2014 - 2024). Leading and developing SKY has been one of my main interests for a decade, and in connection with SKY I have also run a regular advanced research seminar, the Christina Research Seminar, with high-level guest speakers for fifteen years.

 I am the editor-in-chief of the journal Redescriptions – Political Thought, Conceptual Change and Feminist Theory, which we started in Finland in the mid 1990s and which has steadily gained in international weight, passing through a number of international publishers and becoming a fully open access journal published by Helsinki University Press (HUP) in 2019. With its unique profile, this journal is close to my heart, and I am currently happy to devote my time to its management, as it has gained significantly in global readership.   

I was a board member of International Association of Women in Philosophy (IAPh) in 2010-2018, and the president of the Finnish Gender Studies Association (SUNS) in 2010-2017. I am also a member of Finnish Academy of Science and Letters since 2011, and Officier dans L’Ordre des Palmes Academiques since 2016.