Anna Simola

I have a Ph.D. in Sociology and am currently an FNRS postdoctoral researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Families and Sexualities (CIRFASE) at IACS, UCLouvain. Since 2018, I have also been a member of the Centre of Excellence for Research on Ageing and Care and its research group MICA (Migration, Care and Ageing) at the University of Helsinki.

My broad research focus is on human mobilities, especially intra-EU mobilities, to which I have developed subject-oriented and critical approaches. Contextually, my studies have addressed experiences of uncertainty related to a series of interrelated crises (or 'polycrises'), including economic crises, the Covid-19 pandemic, and more recently ecological/climate crises, political/geopolitical turmoil and war. 

My research approach is interdisciplinary, and my research interests span three broad sub-disciplinary areas, which I see as interconnected at the level where individual and family life meets macro-institutional structures and change. These are: 

Sociology of work: precarious and unpaid work, migrant labour markets, administrative bordering, neoliberal worker subjectivity, young workers’ access to financial independence, family dependency and social reproduction. 

Comparative social policy: welfare reforms and welfare conditionality, (de)familialisation, EU citizenship, transnational social protection, street-level welfare state, linguistic diversification of welfare societies. 

Sociology of personal life: Relational approaches to familial and ecological connections, intergenerationality, transnational care, ageing and vulnerability. 

My research has been published in leading journals in these fields, including Sociology, Journal of European Social Policy, Work, Employment and Society, Journal of Aging Studies, Social Policy and Society, and Global Networks. 

My current postdoctoral research project (2022-2025), funded by the FNRS (Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique), aims to develop novel conceptual and empirical tools for the study of mobility and transnational family life, bringing together cutting-edge theorising in the sociology of personal life with research on human mobility and transnational families. The study explores the multidimensionality of the personal life connections (human and ecological) that EU migrants experience with people and places that matter to them. It is set in the current context of polycrisis, which I address with a view to relational and intergenerational experiences of long-term historical change. The promoter of this project at UCLouvain is Professor Laura Merla. 

I completed my PhD at the University of Helsinki (2021) with a thesis entitled Passionate Mobile Citizens or Precarious Migrant Workers? Young EU Migrants, Neoliberal Governance and Inequality within the Free Movement Regime. The study explores the experiences of university-educated European Union (EU) citizens with free mobility under conditions of precarious work from an interdisciplinary perspective. It combines theoretical insights from and contributes to the fields of sociology of work, critical migration studies, comparative welfare state studies and governmentality studies. This study identifies institutional drivers of inequality that emerge between young EU migrants from different national and social backgrounds, affecting their financial security and access to independence, their exposure to precariousness, as well as their ability to use mobility to pursue work corresponding their passion. The study highlights the critical but ambiguous role of families in this context, as well as the short- and long-term consequences of prolonged precarity for the well-being, health and life chances of young Europeans.

Since 2018, I have been a member of the Centre of Excellence for Research on Ageing and Care and its research group MICA (Migration, Care and Ageing) at the University of Helsinki. After completing my Ph.D. in 2021, the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation awarded me a one-year postdoctoral fellowship to develop a novel relational research approach to EU mobilities in the post-pandemic context, working as a visiting researcher at UCLouvain. Since 2022, I have continued this work with a post-doctoral research mandate awarded by the FNRS. In 2022, I was a visiting researcher at the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, University of Manchester, United Kingdom.

Between 2008-2010 I worked at the University of Tampere as a researcher on issues related to migration, labour migration and economic crises at the Research Centre for Journalism, Media and Communication, from which period I have several publications in Finnish.

See my other profile: University of Helsinki 

Responsible teacher of the course: Comparative social protection systems LTRV2720. 

Co-supervisor of the PhD research project of Laetitia Bideauon work-life balance of 'essential' migrant workers in Belgium. 

Supervision of master's theses in sociology and labour studies.