I am Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social Research at the University of Turku. Before coming to Turku in 2012, I worked at the University of Helsinki and University of Tampere. I gained a doctoral degree in Sociology from the University of Helsinki in 2007. I have been awarded a title of docent in Sociology at the University of Tampere.

I have been a visiting scholar in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge (UK), Centre for Women's and Gender studies at the University of York (UK), Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology, University of Edinburgh (UK), University of Birmingham (UK), University of Florence (Italy) and Tver' State University (Russia).

I am a co-editor of the Journal of Political Power and a member of editorial board of Acta Sociologica. I am a member of the Turku University board and the board of the Faculty of Social Sciences. I am a board member of the Finnish sociological association (Westermarck society) and a member of the British Sociological Association. 

I began my career by doing research on the Soviet Union and Russia's social transformation. I have studied gender relations and everyday life in the Soviet Union, political activism and the women's movement in Russia during the 2000s, neoliberalism and postfeminism in the postsocialist context and self-help literature and therapeutic culture in Russia.

In recent years, my research has focused on three broad topics. First, I have conducted ethnographic research on the lived experience of therapeutic culture in Finland. This study was part of a broader project Tracking the Therapeutic: Ethnographies of Wellbeing, Politics and Inequality (2015-2019) of which I was principal investigator. The project was funded by the Research Council of Finland. My research resulted in a monograph titled Affect, Alienation and Politics in Therapeutic Culture: Capitalism on the Skin (Palgrave Macmillan 2022) and an edited collection Assembling Therapeutics: Cultures, Politics and Materiality (Routledge, 2020, together with Harley Bergroth, Johanna Nurmi and Inna Perheentupa).

Second, my current research focuses on political imagination and utopian thought. I was PI of the project "Political Imagination and Alternative Futures" funded by the Research Council fof Finland (2020-2024). Combining sociological and artistic research, this project has studied the ways in which people imagine, live out and pursue social change in the here and now. It has sought to identify conceptual and empirical elements for alternative social formations and advance theoretical understanding of political imagination and its role for transformative politics. We have published our work, e.g. in Current Sociology, Critical Arts, Sociological Research Online and Tiede&Edistys. 

Third, my research also addresses changing patterns of work in sustainability transformation. We have recently finished a research project “Toward Post-Fossil Working Life: Ecologically and Socially Sustainable Work in the Age of Ecological Transformation”, funded by the Finnish Work Environment Fund, and looking at whether and how process and practices of work are transforming towards ecological sustainability in Finnish companies committed to climate change mitigation. This research has been published e.g. in Environmental Sociology. 

You can read more about my research here: https://suvisalmenniemi.com/

My teaching includes the following modules during 2025-2027:

* Disciplinary approaches to social sciences: Introduction to Sociology (lecture course)

* Social Change (lecture course), together with Kaisa Kuurne

* Topical questions in Sociology (lecture course)

* Research seminar in Sociology