Juha Suoranta

Juha Suoranta (born 24 February 1966 in Tampere, Finland) is a Finnish social scientist, and public intellectual. He is currently professor in adult education at the University of Tampere. Previously he worked as professor of education at the University of Lapland (1997–2004), and Professor of Adult Education at the University of Joensuu (2004–2006). He is also adjunct professor in music education at the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, and in media education at the University of Tampere. In sum he has published 38 books and umpteen scientific articles.^[1]

Suoranta has been a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996-1997, and at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003-2004. Suoranta has served as the Government of Finland/David and Nancy Speer Visiting Professor in Finnish Studies and Sociology at the University of Minnesota in 2005-2006.^[2]

In 2003 he acted as senior scientist in the Academy of Finland. He has also served as a short-term educational expert in Tanzania, and a consultant and author for the United Nations' World Youth Report 2003.^[3]

Suoranta has published extensively in the fields of education, political sociology of education, radical adult education, critical media education, and critical pedagogy belonging to the new, or second, generation of critical pedagogy scholars.^[4] In the latter area he has collaborated with Peter McLaren. In his writing Suoranta has been interested in bringing together ideas and material from various disciplines, including media and cultural studies, sociology, educational studies, literature studies and literature.

Suoranta is a member of Editorial Boards of several scientific journals, including Journal of Critical Educational Policy Studies. He has been the President of the Finnish Educational Association Citizen's Forum (SKAF), a major adult education organization in Finland, from 2007 on.^[5] Besides English and Finnish, his texts have been published in Estonian, Greek, Norwegian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

In 2007, Suoranta helped found the Paulo Freire Center–Finland,^[6] the first Paulo Freire Center in the Nordic countries.^[7]

In the Spring 2009 Suoranta provided a hiding place for an Afghan-born underaged asylum seeker, who was about to be deported from Finland to the streets of Athens in Greece without safety. These events are documented in his book Piilottajan päiväkirja (Hidden in Plain Sight).^[8]