Suvi
Karila
Links
Areas of expertise
Biography
I work as a project coordinator at the Department of Computing. Currently, I coordinate AI Academy, a center of University of Turku for multidisciplinary artificial intelligence education and HAIF, Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Future, a doctoral training project. In addition, I support researchers managing EU-funded projects and organize various technology-related events such as DemoDay.
I’m also a PhD candidate of cultural history. I study the cultural history of nonreligion under title "Your God is no longer mine" - Lived Nonreligion of Four Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States.
Research
My PhD project focuses on the cultural history of nonreligion: I study the lived unbelief of women in the context of the 19th century United States. Female unbelief in the 19th century is especially important to explore since unbelief was particularly problematic for women, as a significant part of “true womanhood,” the cultural construction of an ideal woman, was piety. I ask what kinds of spaces of agency the identity of an unbeliever opened and closed for women who questioned the very nature of woman as the more religious sex. How did women manage to combine womanhood and unbelief in their everyday life in this challenging context, how did they live unbelief? My research builds upon the texts written by women as well as the various freethinker periodicals, including the most long-lived publications The Boston Investigator and The Truth Seeker.