Outi Hakola

Outi Hakola, PhD, works as an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Eastern Finland. She is also a docent in societal media studies at the University of Turku and docent in area and cultural studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests focus on media and audiovisual communication/culture, with a particular emphasis on representations of death and dying, deepfakes, and political comedy.

Hakola defended her doctoral thesis in media studies at the University of Turku in 2011. Since completing her dissertation, Hakola has worked on the Human Mortality Project at the University of Helsinki Research Collegium (2011–2013), as a visiting researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, USA (2013–2014), as a university lecturer in area and cultural studies (2014–2017), as an Academy Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki (2017–2022), and most recently as a university lecturer in qualitative methods at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies at the University of Eastern Finland.