Yliniva, Kirsi

Kirsi Yliniva is a PhD researcher and university teacher working within a Foucauldian tradition. Her research interests centre on contemporary educational and childhood discourses, policies and biopolitics, and how they shape children, education and future. In her PhD she investigates the possibilities and limitations of children’s political agency in the Anthropocene: the era in which human agency is increasingly recognised as a threat to life itself. Drawing on Foucauldian traditions of problematisation and biopolitics, my work examines contemporary Anthropocene-related discourses in educational policy and research, including crisis narratives, neuroliberalism, the bio-affective turn, and posthumanist and new materialist approaches. Her dissertation examines how different discursive constructions of the ’Anthropocene child’ shape children's political agency and subjectivity, and what their combined effects may be.