Joseph Jukes

I joined Tampere University in October 2025 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Academy of Finland-funded project: Picture Me. Presenting queer visual history. 

The Picture Me project is developing new, visual and affective (feeling-oriented) methodologies for historical research into gender and sexuality. My subprobject, Queer Rural Exposures, researches four notable figures, who lived in different parts of the Finnish hinterlands during the 20th and 21st Centuries incl. a gay landworker and lesbian photographer. I am also researching two 'ITE' (or DIY) artists, who each lived hermitic lives in the forests of South and East Finland.

As a cultural geographer and queer theorist, I am interested in the rural spaces that appear across these photo records and attend to these with a view to understand the formation of historic "queer rurals" and their continuation into the present. I mix psychogeographic methods with close readings of these visual texts, paying attention to how space and place affect us, even and including through the archive.

Prior to joining Tampere University, I worked as a Research Fellow at Leeds Beckett University conducting participatory action research and collaborating with graphic artists to produce visual project outputs. I taught Geography and Social Theory at the University of Bristol, where I also served as a Researcher on a participatory filmmaking project exploring embodied forms of trauma and the UK Criminal Justice System.

My doctoral research produced new understandings of queer rural life, through an ethnography of LGBTQ+ communities in South West England. In this research I utilised walking interviews and developed a novel creative method: video portraiture. I am currently working this project into a monograph.