Professor Virpi Timonen

A Finnish national who earned her doctorate at the University of Oxford, Professor Timonen's work focuses on the sociology of ageing and social policies as they are unfolding in ageing societies. Since her PhD was awarded in 2001, Professor Timonen has published over 125 research outputs on intergenerational relations, ageing, care, and research methods, including three sole-authored and one co-authored book, two edited volumes, 25+ book chapters and 65+ journal articles. Approximately 70% of her journal articles have been published in Q1 journals, and a further 20% in Q2 (Scopus SJR). Professor Timonen's research has 4,450+ citations (Google Scholar) and her H-index is 38+. Her journal articles span journals from many disciplines, indicative of the intellectual scope of her work - including, e.g. Gender & Society (Q1 - Scopus), Ageing & Society (Q1), Family Relations (Q1), Qualitative Health Research (Q1), Journal of Aging Studies (Q1), Social Politics (Q1), Technological Forecasting and Social Change (Q1), Research on Aging (Q1), Social Science & Medicine (Q1), Health and Social Care in the Community (Q1), Journal of Family Issues (Q1), Journal of Social Policy (Q1), Qualitative Research (Q1), European Journal of Ageing (Q1), International Journal of Qualitative Methods (Q1), British Journal of Sports Medicine (Q1), Health Services Research (Q1), among many others. Professor Timonen has had leading research and advisory roles in over 18 major research initiatives, including over 12 research grants which have involved gaining and personally managing over € 3 million in research funding, as well as collaboration in projects in excess of € 20 million. As Founding Director of the Social Policy and Ageing Research Centre, Director of Research and Director of Postgraduate Teaching and Learning in her School, as Course Director for the four-year BA in Sociology and Social Policy, and as non-executive director in the largest teaching hospital in Ireland, a significant amount of Professor Timonen's time has been devoted to management and leadership duties. She also has a track-record of involvement in numerous cross-Faculty initiatives in Trinity, including the Ageing Consortium, the Irish Longitudinal Study of Ageing and the Ageing and Inclusive Society research themes. In 2014-2018, Professor Timonen served as the elected President of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Ageing (RC11) of the International Sociological Association (ISA), the largest global scholarly community of social gerontologists. Professor Timonen has supervised 16 PhDs to successful completion, and mentored and supervised five post-doctoral researchers in her own research teams. Professor Timonen has taught diverse courses in Social Policy and Sociology (foundation and advanced level); these include Comparative Welfare States (3rd year undergraduate); New Risks and Welfare States (3rd year UG); The Life Course and Evolving Welfare States (2nd/3rd year UG); Introduction to Social Policy (first year undergraduate); and Ageing Societies (final year undergraduate), in each case having designed and taken responsibility for full module delivery. At postgraduate level, she has delivered research methods teaching, including a full module of instructing at postgraduate diploma level, and original course content on the Grounded Theory method (the latter having also been presented as guest lectures at the University of Helsinki).

  Ageing and the life-course   Community Services   FAMILY   FAMILY STUDIES   Globalization   Governmental Functions   Immigrants   Intergenerational Solidarity   Migrant care workers   Migration   National Planning/Policy   OLDER ADULTS   OLDER PEOPLE   OLDER PERSONS   Politics of the welfare state   Senior Citizen Service Programs   Social security policy   Social Services   Social Services Delivery   Social Services Planning/Policy   Social Welfare Planning/Policy   Welfare Reform

Professor Timonen's work has transformed understandings of ageing societies across several inter-connected topics of research and made original contributions to both theory and research methods. 1.) Her original work pertaining to long-term care policies has illuminated the ways in which public, private and informal actors' involvement in care is evolving over time. Her work on this topic is highly-cited both among scholars and in policy debates and is grounded in her earlier research on the politics of welfare state restructuring. Through her work, Professor Timonen has demonstrated the strategies that governments follow in trying to 'square the circle' of expanding demand for care and concerns about costs of care. These include, for instance, the incentivisation of family care inputs, opening of opportunities for private sector operators, and greater expectations of independence and agency on the part of older adults. 2.) Professor Timonen's investigations of family-level practices between different generations have provided transformative insights into how older adults contribute to the maintenance of family solidarity but also make choices that break with established roles. She has illuminated the agentic behaviour of older women in 'undoing gender' through orientation to third-age activities and away from expectations of care, and how such choices are shaped by women's socioeconomic positions. Her original investigations of intergenerational solidarity at societal level have revealed the interconnectedness of public and private solidarities, especially in welfare states such as Ireland that are highly dependent on practices of solidarity at family and community level. 3.) Professor Timonen's work has demonstrated the centrality of social positionalities to both individual and societal level patterns in ageing societies. She has drawn out the significance of social constructions around ethnicity in the production of care and the centrality of gender in shaping family-level care practices. Her work on migrant care workers demonstrates the continued reliance on globally mobile women who are socially constructed as 'suited' to care work that underpins social care regimes in the western world yet remains precarious and undervalued. 4.) Professor Timonen has generated novel theory on how older adults and 'successful' ageing are socially constructed and operationalised by a range of actors, including policy-making processes and commercial interests. She theorises that these actors 'model' old age in ways that are detrimental to the marginalised groups among older adults. Her Model Ageing theory amounts to a transformational critique of paradigms that currently dominate policy making for older adults. 5.) Professor Timonen is a research methodologist who is making Grounded Theory more accessible and usable among a wide range of researchers across substantive fields of research. Her translation of different strands within the Grounded Theory method into a unified re-interpretation has drawn out their underlying commonalities. In totality, these contributions demonstrate transformative inter-linking of substantive research domains, intrepid theorising, and original contributions to research methodology.