User:Kemunto2018

Name

Sirpa Tenhunen

Background

Sirpa Tenhunen is an established Finnish anthropologist who currently serves as a Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Dr. Tenhunen earned her doctoral degree in anthropology from the University of Helsinki in 1997. He doctoral dissertation explored women’s wage work and agency in Calcutta, India. Even though her doctoral dissertation explored women’s work and agency in urban India, her post doctoral research is focused on women’s political participation, the symbolic construction of power and politics of reconstructions and gift-giving and the market in rural India.

She joined the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki in 2017. Prior to beginning her position at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki, Professor Tenhunen served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Finland and taught anthropology at the University of Jyvaskyla. She has also served as a visiting scholar at Brown University, USA, and the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She has also been a visiting scholar in several other institutions in North America and Asia.

Professor Tenhunen currently teaches anthropology courses at the University of Helsinki. Her courses include foundational and advanced courses on anthropological theories, research methods, kinship, anthropology of technology and ethnography of South Asia. She also leads doctoral and Master’s level seminars at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology.

Current Research

Dr. Tenhunen’s research revolves around the anthropological study of technology, innovations and new media. She also researches development, politics, economy, gender, and kinship. Her ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in rural and urban India based on which she recently published the book “A Village Goes Mobile” Telephony, Mediation and Social Change in rural India”. The latest book was published in 2018 by the Oxford University Press. The book is based on a year’s residence in an Indian village in West Bengal doing research on women’s political participation. Ethnographic fieldwork that resulted in the book was from 1999 to 2013. Among other developments, the book provides an account of the social transformation that the village of Janta underwent as technology gradually penetrated to this remote West Bengal town.

Publications

Dr. Tenhunen has published eight books overall and several articles in peer review journals. Her scholarly work includes publication in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Ethnos, Modern Asian Studies, and Contemporary South Asia. Her other major books are Introduction to Changing India: Culture, Politics, and Development (Anthem Press 2012) and Muuttuva Intia (in Finnish, Edita 2007) which she wrote with Minna Säävälä. Muuttuva Intia provides a general overview of contemporary India. Her most recent book, A Village Goes Mobile: Telephony, Mediation, and Social Change in Rural India (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Professor Tenhunen’s work provides the multifaceted use of mobile telephony and analyzes how it has influenced the economic, political and social relationships. In this particular text, she develops an understanding of how new media mediates social processes within interrelated social spheres. She delves deeper into how mobile telephony influences people’s lives and who benefits from these technologies. For instance, while farmers learned to use mobile phones, poverty remained in these villages.

Social anthropology explores the diversity of human cultures and social formations through ethnographic research that takes a comparative approach. In her work, she looks at a micro-level social life and global-level phenomena from a comparative approach. In her most recent work, she takes a look at mobile telephone and analyzes how they are transforming the lives of rural Janta families, not through the conventional use of these phones to the internet, but rather as tools for social status. This provides the researcher with the requisite competence

References Tenhunen, S. 2018. A village goes mobile: Telephony, mediation, and social changes in rural India. New York: Oxford University Press

Etnografia, innovaatiot ja kehitys: matkapuhelinten käyttöönotto Intian maaseudulla Tenhunen, S. L., 2018, Soveltava kulttuurintutkimus. Hämeenaho, P., Suopajärvi, T. & Ylipulli, J. (eds.). Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, p. 298-218 81 p. (Tietolipas; no. 259).

Intersectionalities and Smartphone Use in Rural India Tenhunen, S. L., 2017, Research on India in Finland: Past, Present, Future. Zeiler, X. (ed.). Helsinki: Embassy of India, Helsinki, p. 74-84 11 p.