Niina
Oisalo
Areas of expertise
Biography
I work as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Audiovisual Baltic Sea research project (Kone Foundation, 2026-2029, PI: Ilona Hongisto, Helsinki University). The project develops understanding of how the scientific interest of knowledge and the artistic expression intertwine in the audiovisual material touching the Baltic Sea.
I defended my thesis in December 2024 at the University of Turku (Media studies) on the aesthetics and politics of remembering "difficult pasts", such as war and colonialism, in contemporary Nordic documentary films. I also hold a Master of Arts degree in Documentary Practice from the Brunel University London (2010), and a Master in Social Sciences from the University of Tampere (2005), where I majored in International Relations and Journalism.
I have extensive experience from domestic, mostly scientific publications having worked as the Head of board at Eetos publishing from 2022, Member of the editorial board at Lähikuva journal from 2015 and Duty editor at Media & viestintä (2022-2023) and Ulkopolitiikka (2006-2009).
I have also worked as a freelance journalist, copy editor and creative writing instructor, as well as published audiovisual essays, video poetry and a poem collection (Valaan silmä, pilvien hai 2017).
Teaching
University of Turku:
- course: Writing art critique, Autumn 2024
- course: Perspectives to film aesthetics, Autumn 2019
- SELMA writing circle: Dimensions of humanistic writing, Autumn 2018
- course: Poetics and politics of contemporary Nordic documentary +
practice-based workshop on documentary filmmaking, Autumn 2017
- lectures on various topics in film studies (2014-)
Turku Arts Academy:
- course on documentary film history, 2012-2013
Research
My current interests at the Audiovisual Baltic Sea -project are focused on the oceanic imagination in the audiovisual and the practices of ecocritical listening.
In my article-based PhD, titled Traces, Gaps and Constellations: Acts of Remembering in the Contemporary Nordic Documentary Film (2024), I explored how films create relationships with pasts in the present while making use of temporal imagination as a non-linear mode of remembering. I investigated the aesthetics and politics involved in acts of remembering in five Nordic documentaries produced in the 2000s where documentary remembering emerges as an evocative and generative process that forms connections between people, places and different temporalities. In the research, documentary film was explored as a site for encounters, translations and transformations, where aesthetic and ethical potential of the documentary film as an act of remembering can be examined closer. The transdisciplinary research was situated in the crossroads between documentary film studies and memory studies, with important branches reaching to indigenous studies and film aesthetics.