Tiina Seppälä

Tiina Seppälä holds a PhD in International Relations. Her PhD thesis (2010) dealt with the anti-war movement and theories of global resistance.

She works as a university lecturer in Qualitative Research. She has the title of a docent (adjunct professor) of International Development Studies at the University of Jyväskylä.

She is interested in social movements, activism, development, forced migration, displacement, post/decolonial studies, feminist theory, ethnography and engaged scholarship. Recently, she has focused on feminisation of resistance, decolonial feminist solidarity and arts-based research methods.

She has engaged with slum activists and women’s rights movements in Nepal and Bangladesh, anti-eviction movements in India, asylum seekers in Finland and anti-war activists in the UK. Her research project Governance, Resistance and Neoliberal Development: Struggles against Development-Induced Displacement and Forced Evictions in South Asia was funded by the Academy of Finland (2013–2016).

She has been a visiting scholar in India (Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, 2011–2012), Nepal (Nepal Institute of Peace, 2012, 2014, 2020), Bangladesh (Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit based at the University of Dhaka, 2015) and Australia (University of Newcastle, 2019).

She is the author of Globalizing Resistance against War? (Routledge 2012) and co-editor of Arts-Based Methods for Decolonising Participatory Research (Routledge 2021) and Civil Disobedience from Nepal to Norway (Routledge 2022).

She co-coordinates the Global Northern Communities and Societies research unit (with Leena Suopajärvi) and Migration Studies in the Global Arctic research network (with Nafisa Yeasmin) at the Faculty of Social Sciences. She is a member of Service Design Research Group CO-STARS at the Faculty of Art and Design.

Seppälä serves as the vice chair of the Finnish Society for Development Research, and is a council member of the Migration Institute of Finland.