Satu Ranta-Tyrkkö

Areas of interest: Ecosocial work (particularly sustainability transition, climate action, crisis preparedness, future and global ethics, and the resources question); transnational and international social work, postcolonial theory in social work, social work in India, popular/activist/voluntary social work, interfaces of social work and the arts, ethnography

I have worked as University Lecturer in the University of Jyväskylä since September 2017, and before that for nearly two decades in various teaching and research positions in the University of Tampere. Besides educating future social workers, much of my work deals in a way or another with ecosocial work and transnational social work. I am currently involved in editing two books, Teaching and learning Ecosocial Work (edited by Forde, Ranta-Tyrkkö, Lievens, Rambaree & Rocha, forthcoming 2024), and Decolonising Social Work in Finland: Racialisation and Practices of Care (edited by Clarke, LeeOliver & Ranta-Tyrkkö, forthcoming 2024 from Policy Press.)

Throughout my research career, I have been interested in transnational phenomena and different context specific understandings of social work and had a highly interdisciplinary orientation while driven with social work specific questions. Much of my research deals with social work in India, where I headed first time as a young student in 1990s, including my PhD, which I received in 2010 from the University of Tampere with a Doctoral Thesis At the Intersection of Theatre and Social Work in Orissa, India: Natya Chetana and Its Theatre (Tampere University Press (http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-951-44-8003-4), which both an ethnography of the east India (Odisha) based theatre group Natya Chetana (Theatre for Awareness), and a postcolonial reading of the academic discussion on international social work. My postdoctoral research (Academy of Finland 2014-2017) focused on the connection between social and environmental disadvantage in two mining regions, one in eastern India, another in northern Finland.