Soile Veijola

Soile Veijola is Professor of Cultural Studies of Tourism at University of Lapland, in Rovaniemi, Finland. Her Phd in sociology at the University of Helsinki, back in the 90s, dealt with mobile subjects and situated knowledges, drawing attention to masculinist sociological narration of theories of tourism as well to as the production of modal, relational, gendered, and embodied subjectivities in social worlds with a history as an all-male sphere, for example mixed team play.

Her merits are forty years of engagement in Finnish, Nordic and international Tourism Academia. In addition to doing field-work on Finnish charter trips in the 80s and analyzing embodiment and gender in theory-making and formation of social space, she has explored themes such as the tourist experience, amenity landscapes, new work in “The Hostessing Society”, sleep in tourism, the tourist dwelling, silence in undressed places, ethical and mobile neighboring, slow methods of co-writing non-fiction, coding gender in a coding society, ethical epistemologies of tourism knowledge, and the limits and possibilities of measuring multiple and parallel tourism impacts in cultural, ecological and socioeconomic environments.

She has used memory work, modal semiotics, critical textual analysis, conversation analysis, narrative analysis, and various mixtures of these, in her endeavors to develop theoretical concepts and to analyze social production of values, agencies and social relations.  Her current research focuses on responsible planning in urban environments that can enhance coexistence of engaged and sustainable dwelling, leisure, recreation, and also tourist visitation.

She enjoys team play also in thinking and publishing. Her co-authored publications include Oman elämänsä turistit (Tourists of Their Own Lives, a book in 1990), The Body in Tourism (an article in 1994), Sleep in Tourism (article in 2011), Disruptive Tourism and Its Untidy Guests. Alternative Ontologies for Future Hospitalities (a book in 2014), Mobile Neighboring (an article in 2016), The Conference Reimagined. Postcards, Letters, and Camping Together in Undressed Places (an article in 2019) and Matkailunkestävä Suomi? Vastuullinen suunnittelu kulttuuri- ja luontoympäristössä (Tourism-Sustaining Finland? Responsible Planning in culture and nature environments) (a book written in Finnish to reach both academic and professional and wider audience in 2023).