Profile

Mari Korpela

Academy Research Fellow
Faculty of Social Sciences
| Sub unit: Social Sciences
University
Tampere University
Phone number
+358503186131
Campus
City Centre Campus

About me

Mari is a social anthropologist, currently working as an Academy Research Fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences in Tampere University, Finland. Her research project is titled "Expatriate Childhood: Children's Experiences of Temporary Migration. " The project is funded by the Academy of Finland (2019-2024).

Earlier, she has worked as a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences in the Tampere University. She has also worked as a researcher in the project "Governance and Grieving: Disappearing Migrants and Emergent Politics" in Tampere University.

Mari's PhD dissertation was an ethnographic research on Westerners in Varanasi, India. (More Vibes in India. Westerners in Search of a Better Life in Varanasi, 2009) In 2011-2013, Mari conducted a three-year-long post-doctoral research titled “Mobile Childhood. Children of Lifestyle Migrants in Goa, India”. (click here for a short presentation on the study) The research investigated the social and cultural environment in which the
Western children in Goa grow and it asked how the children experience their transnationally mobile lifestyle and how they define their identities and belonging. The study was funded by the Academy of Finland. During the project, Mari was a visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology in the University of Goa, India and a visiting research fellow in the Sussex Centre for Migration Research in the University of Sussex, UK. (for a short visual introduction to the project, click here)

In 2014-2016, Mari worked as a senior researcher in the project "Transnational Migration in Transition: Transformative Characteristics of Temporary Mobility of People" (EURA-NET) (EU Seventh Framework Programme) in the School or Education in the University of Tampere.

Mari is the president of the Finnish Anthropological Society and the director of the Lifestyle Migration Hub. She is also a member in t he Visual Studies Lab . In addition, Mari is a docent (adjunct professor) of social and cultural anthropology in the University of Helsinki. 

Fields of expertise

anthropology of childhood, 'third culture kids', expatriates, lifestyle migration, transnational communities, countercultures, gender and travel, temporary migration, missing tourists, ethnographic research methods