Suvi Pihkala
PhD
Postdoctoral Researcher
Gender studies and feminist research, feminist new materialisms and creative methodologies
Teacher education, school and society
Faculty of Education and Psychology
Dr Suvi Pihkala is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oulu, Finland and co-leader of the creative and activist FIRE research collective, a transdisciplinary team of researchers that collaborates closely with artists and creative professionals, NGOs, educators, and children to explore and address gendered and sexual injustices in and around education.
Pihkala’s research is inspired by feminist posthuman, new materialist and post-qualitative approaches and the re-thinking of ethics and responsibility they have prompted in and for social research theory and praxis. She conducted her PhD titled Touchable Matters: Reconfiguring Sustainable Change through Participatory Design, Education, and Everyday Engagement for Non-Violence in Gender Studies at the University of Oulu in 2018. In her research she has focused on investigating how new materialisms can be made to matter in the diverse context of participatory, collaborative, socially engaged, arts-based and creative research, design and praxis. Close to her heart is ethics that she approaches by inquiring into what the ethical conditions of creative praxis are like and how they could be theorised and designed.
Pihkala's most recent work has engaged with these questions in creative research with children and young people on gender, sexuality and power in research supported by the Research Council of Finland and University of Oulu spearhead funding in Human Sciences.
Pihkala has worked as Co-Editor-in-Chief for Sukupuolentutkimus-Genusforskning [Finnish Journal of Gender Studies] and has published actively in key journals of her field of expertise, including International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodologies and Journal of Gender Studies. She is co-editor of an edited volume New Materialist Affirmations: Creative Research Interventions in Methods and Practice (Hickey-Moody et al.) forthcoming by Edinburg University Press in 2025 and Creative research on gender and sexuality with children and young people (Renold et al.) forthcoming by Routledge in 2026.
Research interests
- Feminist new materialisms
- Participatory design
- Ethical sustainability
- Response-ability
- Creative methodologies
- Non-violence
Researcher information
Research groups
Researcher profiles
Contact information
Phone number
