This article studies the history of playgrounds in Finland and focuses on the emergence and implementation of the objectives of the international playground movement in the early twentieth century. Specifically, it examines the relations between supervised playgrounds, women's emancipation, child welfare policies, and political discussion on…

This article explores affective alignment and epistemic polarization in the field of feminist research, resulting from the neoliberalization of the universities and a performance-oriented research economy. Previous research has described and analysed the 'epistemic splitting' that feminist scholars engage in to live up to standardized performance…

The focus of this article is on the history and current trends of feminist ethnography in Finland. It highlights the impact of feminist ethnography in Finnish educational research and illustrates how feminist ethnography has succeeded in asking novel questions and developing methodologies by drawing on multiple feminist theories. The article is…

Based on the identification of the discourse of choice in debates on neoliberalism, meritocracy and post-feminism, this article analyses how highly educated mothers position themselves within the discourse of choice and use "choice" as their discursive resource when reflecting on how their demanding careers combine with motherhood. The…

Purpose: This study considers the pedagogical dimensions of an event concept ]that combined participatory theatre and social scientific research to approach questions relating to ethnic relations and racism. The article aims to establish, with the help of a practical case example, the notion of public social pedagogy. Approach: Ethnographic…

Finland has repeatedly been presented as a "success story" of equality and education, promoter of human rights and included equality and human rights as part of national curricula. However, research has shown the slow progress of integrating topics of equality and human rights in teacher education despite hundreds of project-based…

Previous Nordic migration and minority studies focus little on who produces research about migration and migrant education and in what ways. In contrast, by inquiring into how migrants and researchers themselves as knowing subjects are constituted through research and educational practices, this article seeks to destabilize established modes of…

Purpose: This theoretical article argues that the inclusion of education in the prevention of radicalization creates space to address long-standing concerns about the racialized and gendered problems created by traditional security approaches. Design/methodology/approach: The article uses intersectional feminism as a theoretical basis to discuss…

This article focuses on a study in which feminist new materialist and arts-based methodologies were employed to explore how three girls address their experiences of sexual harassment as part of 'crushes' with boys in fourth and fifth grade. The study stems from longitudinal research on how Finnish children from pre-school to pre-teen years are…

Young white women are presented as winners in neoliberal governmental discourses, but despite the assumption that they are in a privileged position, not all young women reach the top. This paradox, elaborated here from different angles in research inspired by post-feminism and neoliberalism, calls for a focus on class-based differences among young…

A considerable scholarship now describes the increasing neoliberalization of universities and the accompanying impacts on academic research and researchers. However, less attention has been devoted to issues of research project leadership, especially for academics with feminist commitments. This article reports results of a qualitative study of 12…

The article examines if and how gender diversity and queer are present in the policies guiding Finnish art education and how these documents might influence praxis. The authors explore relations between policy and practice through a close study and analysis of the Finnish national core curriculum for basic education as it relates to the broader…

In this article, we research and revisit our own experiences of gender equality work to determine the societal and discursive power relations that have shaped gender equality. We conducted our study in Finland, a 'Nordic model of gender equality', but we argue that these results have worldwide relevance, especially since Nordic models of gender…

This lecture asks: How can education research address the big questions of our time, and what has politics got to do with it? It will trace moments and movements of researcher-(un)becoming to explore the (micro)politics of a lifetime of educational research. Politics is understood as both intimate and immense, as the intertwined politics of global…

This article analyses university pedagogy by contrasting mainstream pedagogy and feminist pedagogical thought. The data consist of two textbooks, and we investigate what kinds of teaching, learning and knowledge the textbooks construct and what kinds of student and teacher positions they suggest. The inquiry shows that learning in the textbooks is…