Team

Annukka Lahti is an Academy of Finland postdoctoral fellow at the University of Eastern Finland. She has studied the interrelations of intimacy, power, sexuality, gender and affect for several years from posthumanist, affect theoretical and queer theoretical perspectives. She has published studies on affective inequalities and intimacies, queer and heterosexual relationship contexts and LGBTIQ+ breakups. In her PhD research, she developed a queer psychosocial approach to the study of bisexuality in relationships. Thereafter, she worked as the principal investigator on a project studying sexual harassment in Finnish competitive sports. In 2020, she began her postdoctoral project on Finnish LGBTIQ+ separations, funded by the Kone Foundation. Currently, she is examining LGBTIQ+ separations in two different cultural locations.

Lahti has authored publications in several prestigious journals, such as Sociology, NORA—Nordic Journal of Gender and Feminist Research, Subjectivity and Feminism & Psychology, among others. She is a co-editor of the edited volume Affective Intimacies, published by Manchester University Press (2022), and of a special issue on affective intimacies published in NORA (2021). Her co-edited book Family and Personal Relationships Under the Rainbow (in Finnish) was published in 2020. Currently, she is co-editing a special issue titled ‘Queering intimacies, families and companionships’ for lambda nordica (to be published in 2024/25).

Lahti has worked as a university teacher in both psychology and social sciences, teaching gender studies, queer studies, violence studies and qualitative methods.

Postdoctoral researcher Maiju Parviainen

https://uefconnect.uef.fi/en/person/maiju.parviainen/

Maiju Parviainen is a Kone Foundation postdoctoral researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. In the project she examines professional help aimed at separated LGBTIQ+ people. She seeks to find out how LGBTIAQ+ people’s breakups are present in relationship experts’ work. Are there specific issues related to LGBTIAQ+ breakups that have arisen in expert’s work? Do the separated LGBTIAQ+ people have particular needs? Are there some specific professional skills needed when working with separated LGBTIAQ+ people (e.g. sensitivity to minority stress)?

In her PhD research, Parviainen studied the interpretations and perceptions that Finnish sexological relationship professionals have regarding sexuality and sex in heterosexual relationships. Sexological relationship work refers to professional guidance, counselling and therapy work that focuses on the sexuality and sex-related problems in the relationship. Dissertation (in Finnish) online: https://erepo.uef.fi/handle/123456789/30884.

Postdoctoral researcher Anna Heinonen

Anna Heinonen is a Kone Foundation postdoctoral researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. In the project, she studies LGBTIQ+ people’s separation experiences from a communal perspective. The perspective allows to investigate how the separations are produced in the seminar participants’ speech as a product of various experiences, changing situations, societal positions, and the mutual action of the seminar group.

Heinonen’s doctoral dissertation ‘Queering intimacies at home: Friendship and roommate relations in Finnish small-scale communes’ (to be defended in summer 2024) examines intimacy in friendship and roommate relations in Finnish communal living. In the dissertation, Heinonen analyzes how intimacies are forged in a complex manner through intimate contacts, meanings given to the relationships and spatial and temporal contexts. The dissertation consists of articles published in Gender, Place and Culture, Time & Society, and Families, Relationships and Societies.