Dr Essi Jouhki is an Academy Research Fellow in the Department of History and Ethnology at the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥. She is currently the principal investigator of the project Re-Imagining Childhood: Imagination as a Transdisciplinary Approach to Exploring Past Childhoods (REIMAG), funded by the Research Council of Finland.
Jouhki specialises in the history of childhood, youth and education in the late 20th century, with a particular focus on oral histories. Her work pays special attention to the methodological challenges of combining historical research with oral history, especially in relation to childhood and youth memories.
Her doctoral dissertation (University of Oulu, 2020) examined the oral history of school student associations in Finnish upper secondary schools from the 1950s to the 1970s. As a continuation of her PhD work, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in a Kone Foundation funded project (2020–2023), which delved deeper into the history of youth activism and the emotional and experiential history of the Finnish pupil organisation Suomen Teiniliitto. Between 2021 and 2025, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher within the multidisciplinary profiling area Social Sustainability for Children and Families (SOSUS) at the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥, funded by the Academy of Finland. Her research focused on the history of public playgrounds and their significance for the well-being of children and families. In 2022, she was a visiting researcher at UmeÃ¥ University, Sweden.
She has contributed to editorial work as an Editorial Secretary (2014–2021) and Editor-in-Chief (2022–2023) of Kasvatus & Aika, Finnish peer-reviewed journal in History of Education. She was one of the editors for a Finnish methodological handbook for the history of childhood, Matkaopas lapsuuden historian. Monitieteisiä näkökulmia ja menetelmiä (2023). She has also contributed as visiting editor-in-chief for thematical issues.
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