Dear all,
Our new article was just published. We have published from the same data before in Finnish, but this is the first publication in English. It tackles social work education from LGBTQI+ perspectives and social work students' attitudes and knowledge gaps in Finland:
Clarke, K., Söderström, I., Sullivan, C. B., & Rossi, L. M. (2026). LGBTQI+ inclusion in Finnish social work education: reality or empty talk? Social Work Education, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2026.2639040
Abstract:
This article explores how homogenising views of equality and the lack of academic research on LGBTQI+ issues in Finnish social work contributes to the invisibility of gender and sexuality topics in social work education. It discusses the Finnish historical context of LGBTQI+ legislation and the struggle for legal equality. The article considers Finnish social work research on LGBTQI+ issues highlighting the shortcomings of social work practice knowledge with these communities. Through a multidimensional survey of master’s-level social work students across five Finnish universities, the study explores students’ attitudes, knowledge, and perceived readiness to work with LGBTQI+ service users. The findings show that students report positive attitudes toward LGBTQI+ people, but they also indicate significant gaps in knowledge, especially regarding structural discrimination and the specific needs of gender and sexual minorities. These gaps were more pronounced among heterosexual students, suggesting that personal identity may play a greater role than formal education in shaping awareness of LGBTQI+ issues. The findings of the limited survey imply the need for more explicit inclusion of LGBTQI+ perspectives in social work curricula, which require further research and pedagogical strategies that promote critical reflection, intersectional analysis, and LGBTQI+ affirmative practice.
Best regards, Ilo Söderström
Ilo Söderström
DSocSci, Postdoctoral researcher
Social Work
Tampere University
Hankkeet / Projects:
Sijaishuollon arjen utopiat: monivähemmistöiset nuoret kuvittelemassa ja tekemässä parempaa tulevaisuutta - Koneen Säätiö<https://koneensaatio.fi/apurahat-ja-residenssipaikat/sijaishuollon-arjen-ut…>
AFFIRM-ED —Affirmative education in social and healthcare for sexual and gender diversity – Nordic collaboration project 2025-2027<https://blogs.helsinki.fi/affirmed-nordic-lgbtqia/>
TUNI Luottamuksellinen - Confidential (3Y)
Hi all - this may be of interest to scholars in the network who research with space/place/geography? And possibly of further interest if you research in Finland or with Finns? Submissions in Finnish, Swedish or English!
Joe 🙂
THEME: Queer Spaces and Cartographies
Full call also Suomeksi: https://sqsseura.fi/cfp-queer-spaces-and-cartographies/
Deadline for 300-word abstracts: 4th May, 2026
Full call and submission information in English:
Call for Papers (CFP): Queer Spaces and Cartographies
SQS – Special Issue of the Journal of the Finnish Society for Queer Studies
Queer life has always been spatial. It has been formed along routes, in places, rooms, parks,
beaches, bars, homes, post offices, letters, maps, and memories. At the same time, queer
spaces have often been temporary, concealed, networked, and difficult to archive. They have
emerged through movement, encounters, circulations, and affective attachments that do not
always leave behind permanent material traces.
This special issue invites contributors to examine queerness from the perspectives of space,
emplacement, and cartography. We understand cartography not merely as a geographical
mode of representation, but more broadly as a way of structuring, perceiving, and producing
spatial relations: routes, networks, sites of memory, archival blind spots, passages, hiding
places, meeting points, and affective landscapes.
Queer cartographies may refer, for example, to the appropriation of urban space, cruising
cultures, queer life in rural and peripheral areas, diasporic networks, correspondence and
postal infrastructures, digital platforms, sites of remembrance, or the material and
immaterial remains of archives. Spaces may be as much concrete as they are constituted
through memory, narratives, and sensory experience.
The special issue encourages reflection on how queer spaces come into being, how they are
used, remembered, mapped, and how they disappear. How is it possible to trace queerness
spatially even when no direct traces remain? What kinds of alternative cartographies does
queer life call for?
We invite proposals addressing, for instance, the following themes:
• Queer spaces and urban geography
• Cruising, movement, and spatial encounter
• Queer memory, place, and sensory biography
• Cartography as a research method in queer studies
• Post, correspondence, networks, and spatial infrastructures
• Archival blind spots and queer provenance
• Digital queer spaces and networks
• Periphery, rurality, and non-metropolitan queer space
• Queer spaces in art, literature, and visual culture
• Historical formations of queer spaces
We welcome peer-reviewed articles as well as other research-based texts, such as essays,
interventions, reviews, interviews, and artistic writings. Methodologically experimental and
spatially innovative approaches are particularly encouraged.
Abstracts (maximum 300 words) should be sent in a Word document to joseph.jukes(a)tuni.fi
by the 4th May 2026. We will notify the authors of accepted abstracts by 25th May, 2026.
Manuscripts are due by 30th October, 2026, and revised versions will be finalized during the
beginning of 2027. All submissions will be edited in collaboration with the authors. Submissions may be in Finnish, Swedish, or English.
SQS is an open-access scholarly online journal. Previous issues are available at:
https://journal.fi/sqs/issue/archive
For further information, please contact the special issue editors: Joe Jukes (@tuni.fi), Emilia
Brusila (@ulapland.fi), Leena-Maija Rossi, Kari Silvola
Joe Jukes (they/them)
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Project: Picture Me: presenting queer visual history
@joejukes.bsky.social<https://bsky.app/profile/joejukes.bsky.social>
Read more about my research here.<https://researchportal.tuni.fi/en/persons/joseph-jukes/#:~:text=I%20joined%….>
[cid:75b4d720-6d06-4f7d-a34f-ed84bcbadc36]
[cid:807514cd-6825-476e-b0b6-ddc5dee9bc27]
Recent publications:
Jukes, J. (2025) LGBTQ+ friendship and spatial commitments: Queer socialities in the making of a new rural. In Bain, AL., Podmore, JA. and Arun-Pina, C. (Eds.) Queer Geographies: Key Debates and Contending Perspectives. Access here<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398152089_LGBTQ_friendship_and_spa…>.
Garcia Lopez, M., Brownhill, S., Gaggiotti, M. and Jukes, J. (2025) The Process (2023): Non-Professional Film Performance and Representing Embodied Trauma through Documentary. Open Screens, 7(3): pp. 1–17. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/os.18695
Sorry for cross-posting
One week left to submit your abstract!
The call for proposals for our conference “LGBTQ+ Refugees in the Welfare State: Research, Policy and Practitioners in Dialogue” closes on 25 March.
The conference, hosted by the Department of Human Geography at Uppsala University, is built around a simple but important idea: research and practice need to be in genuine conversation. Not parallel monologues, real dialogue.
We have confirmed participation from the UNHCR and migration authorities from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Our three keynote speakers, Eleonora Azzurra Mantovani (EUAA), S. Chelvan (33 Bedford Row), and Moira Dustin (University of Sussex), bring together (contesting) perspectives from policy, law, and research that rarely sit in the same room.
If you are working on questions around LGBTQ+ refugees, asylum procedures, welfare state integration, or queer migration more broadly: this is your space. We welcome submissions from researchers at all career stages, as well as practitioners and policy professionals with research to share.
Abstracts of up to 250 words for presentations or posters. Extended abstracts of up to 1,500 words for those interested in contributing to a policy brief anthology.
The conference takes place 21–22 May 2026 in Uppsala, in person.
Submit here https://www.uu.se/institution/kulturgeografiska/samverkan/lgbtq--refugees-i…
Best,
Thomas
Thomas Wimark, Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Human Geography
Pronouns: he, him, his
Department of Human Geography
Uppsala University
Box 513
SE-75120 Uppsala
+46 18 4717377 (office)
https://www.uu.se/en/contact-and-organisation/staff?query=N20-646
När du har kontakt med oss på Uppsala universitet med e-post så innebär det att vi behandlar dina personuppgifter. För att läsa mer om hur vi gör det kan du läsa här: http://www.uu.se/om-uu/dataskydd-personuppgifter/
E-mailing Uppsala University means that we will process your personal data. For more information on how this is performed, please read here: http://www.uu.se/en/about-uu/data-protection-policy
TUNI Luottamuksellinen - Confidential (3Y)
Hi all,
I wanted to make you aware of the upcoming deadline to submit a paper to the European Geographies of Sexualities Conference, which will be held at the end of August in Maribor, Slovenia.
Deadline: 16 March!
Theme: Discussing from Queer Peripheries: (Un)Desiring the Centre
If you research LGBTQ+ spaces, places or located communities, this may be of interest to you. The deadline for organised panels has passed, but if colleagues wanted to propose a Nordic specific panel, consider reaching out to the organisers (I am not an organiser, just an enthusiastic participant). Call for Papers is below and the conference website is here: EGS Conference 2026<https://sites.google.com/view/egsconference2026/home>
Best wishes,
Joe
"Critical human geography, queer geography, and other related social sciences and humanities have been experiencing a peripheral turn. However, a plethora of social relations, including those related to sexuality and gender, are still discussed from global metropolitan (queer) centres. Processes such as the gentrification of queer neighbourhoods, queer artistic production, memorialisation, cruising, and queer mobilities are often associated with Toronto, New York, Copenhagen, and other big cities, despite the fact that most of us live, work, love, consume, and produce in ordinary and small cities, towns, and villages. These are queer, too.
Increasingly, queer peripheries are finding their way into edited collections, special issues, and independent journal articles. However, they are still mainly taught and discussed from metropolitan centres, risking the fetishisation of the periphery as a text that can be safely consumed from the centre, maintaining a cognitive, emotional, and sensory distance from the material spaces of the peripheries. Conferences are one such occasion where we can get closer to the materialities of the places that host them. Conferences are spaces of temporary disciplinary centre-making. New papers are discussed, new special issues planned, new contracts formed, and friendships and relationships made.
At the conference in Maribor, we ask what happens when we not only empiricise and theorise, but also discuss and academically do queer periphery from the periphery itself. Are we, by organising this conference in a city (or town?) with fewer than 100,000 people and no official gay or lesbian bar, placing it at the centre of queer geographies? We invite contributions on, from, and about metropolitan centres and peripheries, as well as broader geographies of sexualities, to think broadly about what happens when academic work (which does not have to be about the periphery) is placed in the materiality of the queer periphery. What kind of potential does the text gain in the spatio-temporalities of the conference?"
Submit here: EGS Conference 2026 - Submissions<https://sites.google.com/view/egsconference2026/submissions>
Joe Jukes (they/them)
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Project: Picture Me: presenting queer visual history
@joejukes.bsky.social<https://bsky.app/profile/joejukes.bsky.social>
Read more about my research here.<https://researchportal.tuni.fi/en/persons/joseph-jukes/#:~:text=I%20joined%….>
[cid:40e1cfd4-07e5-4c7d-bfcd-f108d88e4d11]
[cid:b9577e8f-95da-467b-90b9-b2e1b9d13e03]
Recent publications:
Jukes, J. (2025) LGBTQ+ friendship and spatial commitments: Queer socialities in the making of a new rural. In Bain, AL., Podmore, JA. and Arun-Pina, C. (Eds.) Queer Geographies: Key Debates and Contending Perspectives. Access here<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398152089_LGBTQ_friendship_and_spa…>.
Garcia Lopez, M., Brownhill, S., Gaggiotti, M. and Jukes, J. (2025) The Process (2023): Non-Professional Film Performance and Representing Embodied Trauma through Documentary. Open Screens, 7(3): pp. 1–17. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/os.18695
