Timo Jokela: Scholarly career

Timo Jokela’s scholarly career has been characterised by a long-term commitment to developing research, methodological, and conceptual tools for art education and artistic practice that emerge from their own disciplinary foundations. The continual intertwining of practice and theory, together with a northern perspective understood as a worldview, cultural framework, and field of action, gives his research its distinctive character. The research paradigm developed by Timo Jokela and Mirja Hiltunen, both long-serving professors at the Faculty of Art and Design of the University of Lapland, has guided research and development in art education since the 1990s. Under their leadership, place-based art education research has been conducted through Art-Based Action Research. In these studies, art is understood simultaneously as a means of knowledge production, pedagogy, community participation, and societal engagement.

Jokela’s research career unfolded during a period of transition when both art education research and artistic research were seeking their place within the Finnish university system. Art education was becoming established as an independent field of inquiry at the same time that the first doctoral dissertations in the discipline were being completed and the methodological foundations of artistic research were being defined within Finnish universities. The Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Lapland was among the environments where scholars reflected on the kinds of knowledge artistic practice can generate and on how the distinctive nature of art could be taken into account in research methodologies. At the same time, publication forums dedicated specifically to art education research were relatively few, creating pressure to conduct interdisciplinary research and communicate findings to readers in educational sciences, social sciences, cultural studies, and the arts.