Sirpa Tenhunen
I am a senior university lecturer of Anthropology at the University of Jyväskylä. My current research deals with the sustainability transition of the Finnish forest sector as well as climate change and digital technologies. I lead a sub-project of the “Forests in systemic transition: Balancing efficiency with fairness and resilience” (ForTran) consortium, which aims to design and facilitate a green and just transition in how we perceive and use forests. In 2018-2023 I led a Finnish Academy-funded research project “Sustainable Livelihoods and Politics at the Margins: Environmental Displacement in South Asia”.
My long-term ethnographic fieldwork in rural India sought to understand how mobile phone use contributed to social changes. My latest research has explored the politics of climate change in India, including the role of digital media. My research interests also include development, gender, and kinship.
I worked as a researcher at the Academy of Finland and taught anthropology at the University of Helsinki before joining the University of Jyväskylä in 2021. My teaching includes courses on all levels: basic, subject, advanced, and postgraduate studies. The themes of my courses range from technology studies, anthropological theory, kinship, and gender to South Asian ethnography and climate change.
As the director of the Nordic Centre in lndia (2013-2014), I was responsible for developing South Asia-related curriculum and monitoring the teaching for Nordic students of the university consortium which included 16 Nordic universities.
My doctoral dissertation explored women’s wage work and agency in urban India. In addition to mobile telephony and climate change, my post-doctoral research has focused on women’s political participation, symbolic construction or power, and politics as well as reconstructions of gift-giving and the market in rural India.
My latest book “A Village Goes Mobile: Telephony, Mediation and Social Change in Rural India” was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. In addition to eight books, I have published articles in such peer review journals as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Ethnos, Modern Asian Studies, and Contemporary South Asia. My books Introduction to Changing India: Culture, Politics, and Development (Anthem Press 2012) and Muuttuva Intia (in Finnish, Edita 2007), which I wrote with Minna Säävälä, give a general idea of contemporary India as well as my research. I have been a visiting scholar at Brown University and at the University of Western Ontario.
My long-term ethnographic fieldwork in rural India sought to understand how mobile phone use contributed to social changes. My latest research has explored the politics of climate change in India, including the role of digital media. My research interests also include development, gender, and kinship.
I worked as a researcher at the Academy of Finland and taught anthropology at the University of Helsinki before joining the University of Jyväskylä in 2021. My teaching includes courses on all levels: basic, subject, advanced, and postgraduate studies. The themes of my courses range from technology studies, anthropological theory, kinship, and gender to South Asian ethnography and climate change.
As the director of the Nordic Centre in lndia (2013-2014), I was responsible for developing South Asia-related curriculum and monitoring the teaching for Nordic students of the university consortium which included 16 Nordic universities.
My doctoral dissertation explored women’s wage work and agency in urban India. In addition to mobile telephony and climate change, my post-doctoral research has focused on women’s political participation, symbolic construction or power, and politics as well as reconstructions of gift-giving and the market in rural India.
My latest book “A Village Goes Mobile: Telephony, Mediation and Social Change in Rural India” was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. In addition to eight books, I have published articles in such peer review journals as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Ethnos, Modern Asian Studies, and Contemporary South Asia. My books Introduction to Changing India: Culture, Politics, and Development (Anthem Press 2012) and Muuttuva Intia (in Finnish, Edita 2007), which I wrote with Minna Säävälä, give a general idea of contemporary India as well as my research. I have been a visiting scholar at Brown University and at the University of Western Ontario.
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Journal articles by Sirpa Tenhunen
examining how mobile phones mediate kinship and gender in rural India. I provide a
nuanced picture of the contested nature of kinship and gender in the village based on
long-term fieldwork in order to explore how mobile phones mediate relationships and
ongoing processes of social change. The article illustrates how the physical qualities
of phones help strengthen the multiplicity of discourses by mediating relationships
and contributing to the multiplicity of speech contexts. Mobile phone use has been
encouraged and motivated by kinship relationships and the use of mobile phones has,
in turn, transformed these relationships by helping to create new contexts for speech
and action. However, instead of the drastic improvements or changes, for instance in
economic power relationships, the positive impacts of women’s phone use appear
subtle and ambiguous: most calls are about the slight redefinition of the home
boundaries.
Book chapters by Sirpa Tenhunen
A wealth of studies have demonstrated how teens and children use digital media to construct identity and fine-tune social relationships, especially in Western countries. In Janta the generational divide is different from most Western countries since children and teens in rural India still rarely have a chance to use digital media autonomously. However, the younger generation as a broader concept consisting of people who are in junior positions in their families use phones to contest the family hierarchies and build networks outside the family and home. The identifications of different user groups of phones help reveal that it is groups whose structural position has undergone changes that use phones to negotiate local hierarchies: youth, high-caste women, the low-caste people. My data also shows that in rural India generational differences relate to class and caste.
examining how mobile phones mediate kinship and gender in rural India. I provide a
nuanced picture of the contested nature of kinship and gender in the village based on
long-term fieldwork in order to explore how mobile phones mediate relationships and
ongoing processes of social change. The article illustrates how the physical qualities
of phones help strengthen the multiplicity of discourses by mediating relationships
and contributing to the multiplicity of speech contexts. Mobile phone use has been
encouraged and motivated by kinship relationships and the use of mobile phones has,
in turn, transformed these relationships by helping to create new contexts for speech
and action. However, instead of the drastic improvements or changes, for instance in
economic power relationships, the positive impacts of women’s phone use appear
subtle and ambiguous: most calls are about the slight redefinition of the home
boundaries.
A wealth of studies have demonstrated how teens and children use digital media to construct identity and fine-tune social relationships, especially in Western countries. In Janta the generational divide is different from most Western countries since children and teens in rural India still rarely have a chance to use digital media autonomously. However, the younger generation as a broader concept consisting of people who are in junior positions in their families use phones to contest the family hierarchies and build networks outside the family and home. The identifications of different user groups of phones help reveal that it is groups whose structural position has undergone changes that use phones to negotiate local hierarchies: youth, high-caste women, the low-caste people. My data also shows that in rural India generational differences relate to class and caste.