Photo: Maija Saviniemi
Minna Sääskilahti tells us about her research on Kalle Päätalo’s Iijoki series. With the help of the Korp tool, locating relevant text passages has been straightforward, especially when working with the entire 26-volume series.
I am Minna Sääskilahti and I work as a university lecturer of Finnish language and literature education at the University of Oulu. I graduated as teacher of Finnish language and literature in 2000 and earned my PhD in 2006 from the University of Oulu. My doctoral dissertation examined the genre of alcohol education and its changes between the years 1755 and 2001.
In my current position, my research focuses on Finnish language and literature education. I have examined, for example, students’ views on the importance of literacy skills, as well as media discussions on young people’s literacy. Questions related to literacy have also been central to my research on the Iijoki series by Kalle Päätalo, in which I have primarily employed discourse analysis. In my first research article on the Iijoki series (2022), I examine discourses of writing. In a subsequent co-authored article (2023), we analyze discourses of reading. My most recent article focuses on discourses and representations of skiing in the Iijoki series.
The Language Bank of Finland has been involved in my research on the Iijoki series, as I have made use of the Iijoki corpus from the University of Oulu Päätalo Collection. The corpus contains all 26 novels in the Iijoki series, which has made it an essential tool for my research. As I use discourse analysis as my research method, it has been important to read and analyze the research data very thoroughly. The corpus has helped me identify relevant passages across the entire series. This has been useful in all of my articles, but especially in my most recent one on the discourses of skiing, where my data consisted of the entire Iijoki series.
I have used the search functions and carefully selected keywords to investigate how extensively Päätalo adresses themes such as writing, reading, and skiing in the series. The search results have helped me identify passages in which the phenomenona under study are described in sufficient depth. For example, although skiing is mentioned in all the novels in the series, not every novel contains detailed descriptions or extended narratives of skiing. In the works I selected as my research data, descriptions of skiing can extend to dozens of pages. Even though I have used the printed novels as my primary research data, I would not have been able to conduct my research without the Iijoki corpus from the University of Oulu Päätalo Collection.
I will likely continue to use this corpus in my future research. Päätalo provides highly nuanced descriptions of the physical and social milieu of the Iijoki series, which makes his work a rich source for a wide range of research topics. As a teacher educator, I am particularly interested in the series’ representations of social inequality related to schooling.
Sääskilahti, Minna 2026: Elämänpiiri laajenee hiihtämällä. Hiihtämisen diskurssit Kalle Päätalon Iijoki-sarjassa. – Maija Saviniemi (toim.), Päättymätön savotta. Analyyseja Kalle Päätalon tuotannosta. 276—298. Helsinki: SKS. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21435/tl.305
Sääskilahti, Minna, Mantila, Harri & Saviniemi, Maija 2023: Lukemisen diskurssit Kalle Päätalon Iijoki-sarjassa. – Pirjo Hiidenmaa, Ilona Lindh, Sara Sintonen & Roosa Suomalainen (toim.), Lukemisen kulttuurit. 238—251. Helsinki: Gaudeamus.
Sääskilahti, Minna 2022: ”Ja eikähän sulle tuu minkäällaista käsiallaa” – kirjoittamiskäsitykset Kalle Päätalon Iijoki-sarjassa. – Maija Saviniemi (toim.), Kalle Päätalo tutkijoiden silmin. 131—152. Helsinki: SKS. https://doi.org/10.21435/tl.271
The FIN-CLARIN consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers of Social Sciences and Humanities to use, refine, preserve and share their language resources. The Language Bank of Finland is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.
All previously published Language Bank researcher interviews are stored in the Researcher of the Month archive. This article is also published on the website of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Helsinki.
