Kirsi Cheas

Postdoc, University of Turku, Finland

Kirsi Cheas received her Ph.D. from the University of Helsinki, Finland in 2018. Her research has focused on cross-national comparisons of ways in and extent to which journalists incorporate diverse voices and views in the news. Methodologically and theoretically, her work is inspired by frame analysis as well as Pierre Bourdieu’s field analysis and the concept of symbolic violence. With a long background in Latin American Studies, she has developed these methods for analyzing whether and how the news media in different parts of the Global North can capture complex realities of diverse regions in the Global South. During 2019, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku in a project which examined news coverage of school shootings and young activists’ possibilities to shape and transform legacy media’s coverage of the shootings. She is particularly interested in how different technological developments and digital tools can enhance marginal people’s possibilities to have an impact in society. Her new postdoctoral project analyzes investigative journalism concerning abuses against asylum seekers in the U.S.-Mexico border region, produced and published in collaboration between U.S. and Central American journalists, activists, and academics. She is the founder and president of Finterdis – the Finnish Interdisciplinary Society, an organization aiming to increase early-career scholars’ and students’ possibilities for innovative and creative thought. She is also an at-large board member of the international Association for Interdisciplinary Studies. During the academic year 2013-14, she was a visiting Fulbright scholar at New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. She has also promoted Finnish-American interdisciplinary collaboration as the president of the Finnish Fulbright Alumni Association between 2018-2020.