Senior Research Fellow
1 August 2011-31 July 2013

Office: Atalpa 221
Tel. +358 (0)40 190 9711
Email: maarit.alasuutari@uta.fi

 

Maarit Alasuutari (PhD, Psych.) is Adjunct Professor and Senior Assistant at the University of Jyväskylä, and currently Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of Tampere, Finland. Her research has focused on encounters between families and professionals in different childhood institutions and on the work of early childhood professionals from various perspectives. She has studied these topics from the viewpoint of interaction, as an arena for constructing conceptions of the child, childhood, parenting and the family, and from the perspectives of professionalism and governmentality. She is specialized in qualitative research and especially in constructionist and discursive approaches.

Maarit Alasuutari’s current research projects deal with the implementation of individual educational plans in early childhood education and with the functions of documentation in ECE. Theoretically the projects are framed by the social study of childhood, by the approaches of governance and documentality. Maarit Alasuutari has published widely in international journals and is currently preparing an international monograph on documentation and assessment in ECEC with two Swedish scholars.

Current research projects and recent publications