Tuuli Innola

I am a doctoral researcher in Gender Studies, at the Faculty of Social Sciences. My research topic is non-normative companionships: how companionships become lived and experienced when they do not fit into the norms of couple relationships and existing family models? My study widens the understanding of companionship by considering such companionships that have previously been excluded from the social scientifical study on intimate relations, such as human–non-human relations. I also develop a theoretical understanding of the concept of companionship. I contribute to feminist theoretical discussions of materiality and intimacy and draw from new materialist and posthuman theories. I study the co-becomings of companionships as an affective process that takes shape in social and material practices and human–non-human entanglements. Furthermore, I consider the enabling and restricting potentialities that unfold in the process, and how they become connected to wider societal, cultural, and political surroundings and power relations. The aim of my study is also to pay attention to the rights of non-normative companionships to become seen as valuable and important modes of sharing lives.

I will conduct my research at Tampere University, and within the is supportive and internationally recognised Gender Studies community, where both my supervisors Marja Vehviläinen and Marjo Kolehmainen are affiliated. I am an active participant in a Naturecultures reading group on feminist posthumanism coordinated by Vehviläinen, and a member of the international Research Network of Singlehood Studies coordinated by Kolehmainen. I have worked as a research assistant and as an intern at my faculty and organized international academic events. In summer 2020 I co-organized an international online academic seminar Singlehood and Companionship: Challenges and Opportunities for New Frameworks, which was funded by the Nordic Summer University, and which handled the issues connected to my PhD research. My Master’s thesis (2019) was recognized with the Master’s Thesis award by both the Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University, and the Association for Gender Studies in Finland.