Terhi Nokkala appointed research professor of higher education research at the Finnish Institute for Educational Research (FIER)
Higher education research broadly examines higher education as a social institution formed by organisations and professions. Nokkala’s research interest is related particularly to higher education policy and universities as organisations as well as to issues concerning academic careers and research cooperation. Through her recent international research projects, she has also addressed the themes of ecologically and socially sustainable education. Methodologically, the emphasis in Nokkala’s research is on discourse analysis and international comparative studies. She is especially interested in the methodological and conceptual development of qualitative comparative research on higher education.
Nokkala is an internationally recognised researcher with extensive networks. She is a board member of the international Consortium of Higher Education Researchers (CHER) and one of the coordinating editors of the journal Higher Education. She also has significant international responsibilities related to quality assurance in higher education and the strategic development of higher education institutes. Nokkala has, for example, long experience as an international evaluator in the EUA’s Institutional Evaluation Programme (IEP) and is also a member of the ENQA pool of evaluators, tasked with periodical evaluation of European higher education evaluation councils. At present, Nokkala is also a member of the external review board of the 4EU+ European University Alliance.
Before joining the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥ in 2010, Nokkala worked, for example, at the University of Tampere and the University of Surrey, UK, and also as a visiting researcher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and the University of Bristol in the UK. In autumn 2012, she was a visiting researcher at the Austrian Institute of Technology in Vienna. Nokkala completed her doctoral degree in administrative sciences at the University of Tampere in 2007. Her dissertation explored the discourses of the internationalisation of higher education. She holds a docentship in administrative sciences, especially on higher education administration, from the same university. She completed her master’s degree in 2000 in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki, majoring in political history.
Further information:
Terhi Nokkala, terhi.p.nokkala@jyu.fi, +358408054270
