Minna Nikunen

The ‘entrepreneurial university’, family and gender: changes and demands faced by fixed-term workers

Managerialism and neoliberal changes and demands influence the work and family lives of academics differently in different positions and contexts. In this article, I explore how Finnish academics on short fixed-term contracts have been treated, and how they interpret recent changes and their effects on their work and private lives. I ask how the demands and changes are gendered and what consequences they have for work–family balance and gender equality, as well as whether the changes have been internalised or resisted. Managerialism seems to create new ways to govern oneself and to approach academic work, home, children and gender. I argue that these profound changes are veiled by more visible reforms that seem to threaten academic autonomy, such as time surveillance.

Murder-suicide in the news: Doing the routine and the drama

In this article I use Finnish newspaper reports on murder-suicide to explore how the moral orders of gender, heterosexual relationships and family are used in constructing newsworthiness or routine. The two main contexts of murder-suicide, a homicide followed by the perpetrator’s suicide, were the family and the heterosexual relationship. I concentrate on femicide-suicides because it is the largest group of murder-suicides, and it is the group that is characteristically routine or mundane and only occasionally breaks into news visibility. The study is ethnomethodological: I inspect how members of society — as journalists are seen here — make sense of extraordinary events by relying on conventional ideas about gender, the relations between different people and family in their practical daily task of sorting out routine from the newsworthy. The data was gathered from four of the most widely read newspapers and local papers in a five-year period from 1996—2000.

Young people, future hopes and concerns in Finland and the European Union: classed and gendered expectations in policy documents

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine the ways in which governing bodies at the Finnish national and also European Union levels talk about young people and our shared future in Finland. I use their youth policy documents as material for critical discourse analysis. My argument is that, besides presenting visions of a desired future, these papers also produce and reproduce divisions between young people that reflect gender and class positions. Young people are divided into those who have potential, those who will take care of others’ needs, and those who are at risk of marginalisation. I also argue that the Nordic policy tendency to conceive of youth as a resource rather than as a problem is not consistent. Finnish youth policy has changed, firstly because of the changing economic environment – the politics of austerity – and secondly because of Europeanisation.

Separated by common methods? Researchers and journalists doing expertise

In this article, we address emerging tensions between researchers and journalists in our research project on formations of new divisions among young adults in Finland. We focus on interviewing as a method of data gathering, and on framing as a method of presenting research results. Writing from the point of view of academic researchers, our analysis shows that journalists’ and researchers’ ways of doing expertise, such as techniques for asking questions, reflections on interview sensitivities, anticipated end products or the conceptual framing of the collected data, differ from each other. At the conclusion of our analysis, we reflect on the affectivity of expert work and cooperation, and on the role of affects in bringing the moral orders of different forms of expertise to the surface.

Gendered strategies of mobility and academic career

ABSTRACT In universities, being mobile and international has become ever more important for academics’ career prospects. This article explores junior and other insecurely employed researchers’ experiences of geographical mobility in relation to their personal life, career, employability and value as scholars. The aim is to discover the gendered strategies researchers use to combine mobility with intimate relations and personal life. Furthermore, what gendered ideas of mobility, employability and career success do researchers themselves construct? These aspects of mobility, particularly focused on gender, are analysed in three cases: Finland, Italy and the United Kingdom. These states are all (currently) members of the European Union and have implemented its internationalisation policies. The data consists of qualitative interviews gathered in 2009 and 2010. We suggest that the value and capital of academic labour are evaluated differently in the three different locations. Additionally, gender, age, academic age and life situation motivate different mobility strategies.