Joni Virkkunen

Joni Virkkunen (PhD, title of docent) works as a Research Manager at the Karelian Institute. He is also the Director of the VERA Centre for Russian and Border Studies, a member of the executive board of the UEF’s top-level research area Borders, Mobilities and Cultural Encounters (BOMOCULT) and of the cross-faculty Doctoral Programme in Social and Cultural Encounters. His research relates to borders, border governance, cross-border cooperation, EU-Russian relations, regional and cross-border cooperation and transnational migration in Russian and post-Soviet contexts. He has been recently studying, for example, the Northern Dimension policy and the regional impacts of EU-Russia relations, local meanings of the border and cross-border cooperation, the 2015-2016 Arctic migration route through/from Russia to Finland and, recently, temporary protection holders from Ukraine. The latter he has been studying through Finnish and Russian migration and border policies, publicity and public debates, migrants’ everyday insecurities, and informal practices.