Katariina Harjunpää

I work as an associate professor of Finnish (tenure track) in the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at the University of Tampere. I also have a title of docent in Finnish language at the University of Helsinki.

I defended my PhD thesis in 2017, after which I worked as a researcher on various projects at the Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Helsinki (2017–2021, 2023–2025) and at the Tampere Peace Research Institute at the university of Tampere (2021–2023).

My research interests include language and grammar in interaction, the multimodality of language use, social action and participation, distributed agency, and in particular how participants act as “intermediaries.” I have examined e.g. multilingual interaction, non-professional interpreting, service encounters, teaching of embodied skills (in theater, dance and martial arts), and interactions between human and non-human animals. My primary research methods are conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. I am currently an Academy Research Fellow, leading the project “Unpacking Speakership in Mediation” (https://blogs.helsinki.fi/sovittelu/), which moved with me from the University of Helsinki to the University of Tampere in the fall of 2025. The project examines interaction in both Finnish-language and multilingual, interpreted mediation in criminal and civil cases.

I teach in my areas of specialization and other areas of Finnish linguistics and supervise theses ranging from bachelor’s to doctoral theses.