Terhi Nokkala
What is your area of expertise?
Higher education research, specifically questions related to the higher education system level, universities as organisations and academic careers.
What are the most interesting topic within this research area at the moment?
The changing spatial configurations of the higher education systems’ and institutions’ embeddedness in different fields of action, and the intended and unintended consequences of these on how higher education institutions work.
Are you currently running your own research projects? What kind of?
I am involved in an Academy of Finland project Exiting Academics in a Networked Knowledge Society.
Some of my time is also occupied by personal research interests related to, for example, peer mentoring of PhD students. Other projects are being planned.
In which area do you want to provide mentoring to doctoral researchers?
My background is multidisciplinary, but with an emphasis on administrative sciences, so I tend to look at higher education from a systemic or organizational perspective. Methodologically, my strengths lie in qualitative methods, especially discourse analysis, and in comparative research.
What was the topic of your own doctoral dissertation? What method did you use in it?
My dissertation Constructing the Ideal University – The internationalisation of higher education in the competitive knowledge society focused on the discourses of Internationalisation of Higher Education in the context of a competitive knowledge society. My research framework combined Foucaultian governmentality with critical discourse analysis.
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