Suvi Salmenniemi

About me

I am Professor of Sociology at the University of Turku. Before coming to Turku in 2012, I worked at the University of Helsinki and University of Tampere. I gained a doctoral degree in Sociology from the University of Helsinki in 2007. I have been awarded a title of docent in Sociology at the University of Tampere.

I have been a visiting scholar in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge (UK), Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology, University of Edinburgh (UK), University of Birmingham (UK), University of Florence (Italy) and Tver’ State University (Russia).

I am one of the editors-in-chief of the Journal of Political Power.

During 2015-2018, I was the editor-in-chief of Acta Sociologica, the journal of the Nordic Sociological Association. I am currently a member of the editorial board of Acta Sociologica. During 2019-2022 I was a member of the associate editorial board of the journal Sociology.

My areas of expertise include:

• Political sociology, particularly utopias, political imagination and social movements
• Therapeutic culture
• Cultural studies
• Feminist research
• Socialism and post-socialism
• Ethnography
• Social theory

I began my career by studying the Soviet Union and social change in post-Soviet Russia. I have studied gender relations, political activism and the women’s movement in Russia during the 2000s, neoliberalism and postfeminism in the post-socialist context, and the consumption of self-help literature and the formation of therapeutic culture in Russia.

My recent research has focused on two areas: therapeutic culture and political imagination.

My research on therapeutic culture has focused on exploring the lived experience of engagement with complementary and alternative medicine, new spiritualities and self-help culture in Finland. This project resulted in a book titled “Affect, Alienation, and Politics in Therapeutic Culture: Capitalism on the skin” published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022. Drawing on on longstanding ethnographic fieldwork, the book suggests that the therapeutic field serves as a key site in which a number of contradictions of capitalism are confronted and lived out. It shows that therapeutic engagements are inherently ambivalent and contradictory, as they can be articulated and engaged with in many different ways and harnessed for diverse, and often contradictory, political projects. The book takes issue with the interpretation of therapeutic culture as merely individualising, depoliticizing and working in congruence with neoliberalism, and shows that therapeutic engagements may also open up a space for contestation and critique of neoliberal capitalism, animate collective action for social change and articulate alternative forms of life and subjectivities.

My current research deals with utopias, political imagination and alternative futures. I am PI of the project Political imagination and Alternative Futures (POLIMA), funded by the Academy of Finland (2020-2024), in which we study practices and spaces of utopia and political imagination.

We combine sociological and artistic research. Our objective is to identify conceptual and empirical elements for alternative social formations and revitalise political imagination as a way to advance more socially and ecologically sustainable futures. The project seeks to make three contributions. First, it wishes to advance theoretical understanding of political imagination and its role for transformative politics and social change. Second, it seeks to increase our knowledge about the ways in which people imagine, articulate, live out and pursue social change in the here and now. Third, it maps elements for alternative social formations that are being developed, experimented with and acted out in different contexts. Our ethnographic work has addressed everyday utopian communities (ecological and anarchist communities), arts and pedagogical experimentation with arts-based exercises.

I am also PI of the project Towards post-fossil working life: Ecologically and socially sustainable work in an era of sustainability disruption.The project combines sociological research, management and organisational research and futures studies to examine the conditions for an ecologically and socially sustainable working life in an era of sustainability transformation. This transformation requires rethinking the concept of work and reorganising work structures and work processes.