Research at the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies
The School of History, Culture and Arts Studies is a multidisciplinary unit consisting of 16 departments and five degree programmes. Our research focuses on medieval and early modern history, nature and its diversity, multiculturality and the processes of cultural interaction, arts and popular culture, experiences, stories and memory, as well as humanities-oriented approaches to digitalisation. The School also places a strong emphasis on gender studies across its disciplines. We conduct critical, ethically sound research based on collaboration crossing borders between disciplines, departments, faculties and universities.
The School of History, Culture and the Arts Studies is open to interdisciplinary initiatives and multidisciplinary cooperation. We participate in the Juno doctoral programme, collaborate with the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS), and promote the development of the multidisciplinary themes and areas of strength of the University of Turku.
Welcome to join us!
The campuses of the School are located in Turku and Pori. Most departments operate at Arcanum (Arcanuminkuja 1) on the Turku campus, with Archaeology housed in Geotalo (Akatemiankatu 1). The Pori unit is located at the Pori University Consortium (Pohjoisranta 11 A). The School offers up-to-date, accessible facilities for remote, hybrid, and multi-site work.
The School maintains the Archives of the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies (https://www.utu.fi/en/university/faculty-of-humanities/shcas-archives), a nationally and internationally unique collection that has been accumulated since the 1950s. In 2024, the Sámi folklore collection of the Archives, Talvadas/Dálvadas, was selected for UNESCO’s national Memory of the World Register. The Arcanum also features a library that serves both students and staff. The University of Turku Library, one of the legal deposit libraries in Finland, contains comprehensive collections of Finnish publications. Additionally, the library provides access to extensive digital resources. We are also members of the national FIN-CLARIAH research infrastructure.
The School’s numerous research networks and centres strengthen our infrastructure and support cross-disciplinary coope.
The School of History, Culture and Arts Studies engages in extensive regional and national cooperation with businesses, communities and memory organisations. We participate in multidisciplinary consortia and hold key positions in scientific organisations. We are also an important national cultural policy actor.
Regionally, the Faculty of Humanities has agreements with the Satakunta Museum, the Turku Museum Centre, and the Turku and Kaarina Parish Union. These agreements are central to advancing the School’s teaching and research. The School is active in developing the Culture Campus Turku, a collaboration forum involving regional higher education institutions and the City of Turku.
The University of Turku is a member of the Coimbra Group and the EC2U network, offering numerous opportunities for research and educational initiatives, as well as student and staff exchanges.
Our researchers are members of and hold key positions in international networks and organisations, which supports our collaborative efforts.
We gladly welcome Marie Curie, Erasmus, and Fulbright scholars and encourage our community to actively build contacts.
The University of Turku provides administrative and support services for researchers. This includes project planning, budgeting and monitoring. The university’s research services and financial services have contact persons for the School to assist with the preparation of both EU projects and academy projects. An important part of research support is the supervision and mentoring of doctoral and postdoctoral research, which we strive to further develop.
The University of Turku offers orientation for all new employees. To support international researchers, the Faculty of Humanities has a work buddy programme.
We are happy to provide more information about research activities at the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies. For doctoral studies, the contact person is the coordinator of the Doctoral Programme in History, Culture and Arts Studies Juno (https://www.utu.fi/en/research/utugs/doctoral-programme-in-history-culture-and-arts-studies). If you are interested in research positions at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS), more information is available on the TIAS website (https://www.utu.fi/en/research/research-collegia/tias). For new projects, you can contact the Head of the School or the Vice Head responsible for research. The persons responsible for the departments can be found on their webpages.
Centres and Networks
The multidisciplinary Center for the Study of Christian Cultures brings together research and researchers focusing on the study of Christianity and Christian cultures from different perspectives such as those of humanities and social sciences. The research center examines the ideological, political, cultural and artistic, economic and everyday dimensions of Christianity, both in history and in the present. The foundation of the centre’s activities is its monthly seminar series. In addition, the center organizes various scientific seminars, gives teaching and produces publications on Christian cultures. In addition to research, the center's researchers participate in fulfilling the so-called third task of universities – societal participation – inter alia by acting as media commentators, maintaining a blog and organising public events.
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More information: Katve-Kaisa Kontturi and Milla Tiainen
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The multidisciplinary research centre SELMA is focused on the connections between storytelling, experientiality, and cultural memory from various theoretical and historical perspectives. The centre produces research on, for example, life-writing, trauma narratives, and digital storytelling. It approaches the relationship between experience, story, and memory utilising different research traditions and at the same time, produces interdisciplinary dialogue. The centre’s operation involves several faculties, and as a nationally leading centre for research in cultural memory, it compiles research related to the University’s thematic collaboration in cultural memory and societal change. SELMA collaborates internationally with various networks that conduct research on storytelling and memory. In addition, it organises research events on both theoretical and societally topical issues. The centre aims to promote dialogue between the arts and sciences and to function as a community that brings together researchers, artists, and people outside academia.
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The Human–Animal Studies Network in Turku brings together research on animals and human–animal relations. The Network operates at the University of Turku, in the Faculty of Humanities, but it also involves researchers from the wider Turku area. The studies focus on, for instance, encounters and boundaries between humans and other animals, their shared history and interaction, as well as animal representations and agency. The Network regularly organises research seminars and various other events such as guest lectures.
> More information: Nora Schuurman
Wave Riders (AHA – Aallonharjalle in Finnish) is a network for environmental research and education. Our background is in the humanities and social sciences. We take a broad view of the environment, encompassing both the material and immaterial environment and its various actors. We are open to environmental research from different perspectives. We encourage interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary cooperation between different researchers and disciplines, for example by providing opportunities for discussion and collaboration between researchers from different fields.
Projects
The three-year research project "An alternative path to a better future: the natural way of life in Finland from the second half of the 19th century to the present day", funded by the Kone Foundation, has started in the autumn of 2023. The project will examine why the natural way of life has appeared to certain groups of people as a solution to the social problems of the time: initially to the upheavals caused by industrialisation and urbanisation, in the 1960s and 1970s to environmental pollution, and today to the crisis of ecological sustainability. The answer is not to be found solely in the opposition between nature and culture, since the natural way of life has never been about a return to 'wild' nature, but about the cultural meanings given to nature. The project analyses, for example, perceptions of nature as a source of health and ethics, and problematises the relationship of naturalness to key features of modernisation such as science, technology or capitalist profit-making. The study shows how, in the shadow of the modernisation process that has led to the ecological sustainability crisis, there has been an alternative approach to a better future based on the idea of a natural way of life.
PI: Suvi Rytty
Duration and funding: 2023–2026, Kone Foundation
Audible future is a two-year project to collect, record and research soundscapes. We are looking for descriptions and observations of soundscapes within the geographical borders of Finland and mapping environments that are important to the participants together with them. This is the third time we have carried out this collection and follow-up study. It continues the One hundred Finnish soundscapes and Transfoming Finnish soundscapes projects carried out in 2004–2006 and 2014–2015. The project studies changes in the Finnish soundscape over the last twenty years. A systematic longitudinal study of soundscapes on this scale is unique also internationally. The project is organised by the Finnish Society for Acoustic Ecology in cooperation with the University of Turku, the Finnish Literature Society, Aalto University and the University of Eastern Finland.
PI: Meri Kytö
Duration: 2024–2026
The consortium Authors of the Story Economy between the universities of Tampere, Turku and Helsinki, funded by the Research Council of Finland, studies the impact of social media on 21st-century literature and authors. The contemporary story economy prompts everyone to share their story and rewards for dramatic stories of change and survival, encouraging also literary authors to seek attention with their personal story. Literature is no longer an autonomous sphere allowing for artistic freedom, but instead influenced by digital storytelling platforms. Authors become influencers whose brand ought to reflect sound moral and political commitments. We analyse how 24 authors in 10 European countries deal with the pressures imposed by the story economy in their literary and non-literary texts and analyse the social media responses evoked by these authors with digital methods. We help authors, media actors, publishers and audiences to analytically and critically revision the future of literature.
PI: Markku Lehtimäki
Duration and funding: 2024–2028, Research Council of Finland
This research project investigates how children’s literature and educational literature participated in the creation of shared identities in the early nineteenth century, contributing to the long project of nation-building. We approach children’s books as a medium that contained various built-in concepts and goals related to teaching shared emotional patterns, values and attitudes. The project produces new information on the thoughts, emotions, social manners and cultural values that were conveyed in books for children and young people. Our research covers the period when Finland as an administrative and political entity began to take shape after the founding of the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland in 1809.
Duration and funding: 2023–2026, Kone Foundation
Connecting Theory and Practical Issues of Migration and Religious Diversity (COREnet) is an interdisciplinary network that aims at knowledge production, knowledge exchange and capacity building across Europe in the intersection of migration and religious diversity with a particular emphasis on bottom-up research. The background of the network is the pressing social situation that is characterised by the fact that migrants and Syrian war refugees coming to Europe, have become one of the major political issues and social challenges during the past years. Research, capacity building and exchange are important tools to analyse what lies behind these challenges and possible solutions. The network aims thus to contribute to overcoming divisions within and across European countries with the help of innovative approach that would add to existing social scientific knowledge on migration and religious diversity the study of religions and theological insights explaining the narratives of migrants and refugees. Drawing in researchers from all stages of their careers, and across different European countries, training a new generation of interdisciplinary action researchers capable of connecting study of religions and theology and the social sciences, and working that into action through processes of co-production. This network brings the bridging of knowledge with stakeholders – governmental, non-governmental and media organizations working in the field of diversity management on the local and national levels.
PI at UTU: Tuomas Martikainen
Duration and funding: 2021–2025, COST Action
The CoE is funded by the Academy of Finland from the 2018–2025 program.
As defined by the Research Council of Finland, “Centres of Excellence (CoE) are the flagships of Finnish research. They are at the very cutting edge of science in their fields, carving out new avenues for research, developing creative research environments, and training new talented researchers for the Finnish research system and Finnish business and industry.”
The Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies is a joint project between researchers from the Tampere University, University of Turku, and the University of Jyväskylä. Across these institutions, over 30 researchers from the humanities, social sciences and technical sciences are engaged in exploring topics related to the research themes of the centre.
The interdisciplinary project, funded by the Kone Foundation in 2021–2024, combining Finnish history and Social work research, will produce new information about the consequences of social crises on the lives of poor and disadvantaged children and young people with a long-term perspective from the 19th century to present. The project provides information, on the one hand, about how everyday poverty experiences differ from one era and crisis to another, and on the other hand, what is the same about poverty experiences as a child and youth, regardless of era and social conditions. Economic crises have been found to have a particularly negative effect on those families whose situation was already difficult before the crisis. Children’s perspectives on poverty and disadvantage are important and worth studying, both in themselves and because of their consequences extending into adulthood. The project emphasizes a new way of seeing and looking that respects poor children’s own experiences and own agency.
Duration and funding: 2021−2024, Kone Foundation
Counter-Narratives of Cancer: Shaping Narrative Agency examines different culturally mediated ways of narrativizing cancer and counter-narratives that challenge dominant narrative practices. The research data consists of literary fiction, life-writing, media texts, and texts produced in bibliotherapeutic groups and narrative agency workshops. We reconceptualize cancer in terms of the idea of illness as an unforeseen ability that allows confronting the randomness and connectedness of life. The project enhances public awareness of different ways of narrating cancer and participates in creating more capacious cancer imaginaries that open up new possibilities of agency.
PI: Hanna Meretoja
Duration and funding: 2023–2027, Research Council of Finland
The project focuses on pleasure travel and consumption at the Baltic Sea with the following questions: How have notions of nation, gender and sexuality been negotiated in the marketing of the ferry traffic and its destinations, as well as in the organization of the cruise experience? How have these notions interacted with notions of social class, race/whiteness, modernity and borders between East and West? The project is conducted through a multi-disciplinary approach, primarily using archival sources, written reminiscences and ethnographic materials. The sub-studies focus on the marketing of ferry travel, the cruise ferries as a transnational space for sexual encounters as well as contemporary trends and the gendered and sexualized segmentation of the ferry market.
PI: Katarina Mattsson (Södertörn University), Riikka Taavetti involved from UTU
Duration and funding: 2023–2026, Östersjöstiftelsen
This book project focuses on exhibitions, which are one of the most influential media in modern society. The project examines the history of exhibition media from the 19th century until today as an international phenomenon, highlighting also the Finnish perspective. The project is preparing the first comprehensive book on the history of exhibition media in Finnish and it is groundbreaking also internationally. Its goal is to form a compact overall picture of the history of exhibition media by looking at different exhibition types side by side. The project participants represent several disciplines: history, archaeology, art history and museology. The work is edited by Taina Syrjämaa and Leila Koivunen. The publication of the book has been tentatively agreed with Gaudeamus.
PIs: Taina Syrjämaa and Leila Koivunen
Duration: 2023–2026
Namibia, and particularly Owambo, has a special place in Finnish culture as the histories of the two societies have intersected on many occasions. This Finnish-Namibian project investigates the transcultural production, mobilities and transformations of knowledges concerning the shared histories of the two countries. The timespan extends from 1870, when the first Finnish missionaries went to Owambo, to the independence of Namibia in 1990, in which the Finns had a noticeable role in the UN Transition Assistance Group. The project produces new information on the history of the Finnish-Namibian interaction and knowledge formation processes. Our aim is to dismantle colonial knowledge and write decolonising and more inclusive, transcultural histories that will benefit both Finnish and Namibian societies.
PI: Leila Koivunen
Duration and funding: 2024–2027, Kone Foundation
The project focuses on joint development of Satakunta region in Western Finland. The objective of the project is to create a digital toolbag and participatory practical models for supporting brand leadership and shared communications. The project is based upon understanding regional identities and to clarify a desired joint image for strengthening Satakunta’s attraction for potential for attracting and holding potential influx.
Sub-project by the Degree Programme in Digital Culture, Landscape and Cultural Heritage studies the regional identities among Satakunta people and provides data for developing the Satakunta region.
PI: Tuomas Pohjola, Turku School of Economics, University of Turku. Sub-project by the Degree Programme in Digital Culture, Landscape and Cultural Heritage (Pori campus) led by PhD, Adjunct Professor Rami Mähkä; researcher MA Tommi Iivonen.
Duration and funding: 2024–2027, European Union & Regional Council of Satakunta
This research project investigates the human relationship with the disappeared, endangered, introduced, and non-native as well as invasive marine animals and plants in Finland. These species and their changed populations have been previously studied almost entirely in the field of natural sciences. This project examines human relations with the changing marine biodiversity from humanistic viewpoints. In this way, the project aims to provide new knowledge for other scholars, decision-makers, and the broader public of how the changes in the Baltic Sea biodiversity have been understood and perceived in Finnish culture and society in the long term, and how these changes have affected Finnish perceptions of sea and archipelago environment. It also offers new knowledge that facilitates the cultural adaptation of introduced species and the changes in the marine environment as well as gives new angles to understand the Anthropocene as a global phenomenon. The project is funded by the Academy of Finland.
PI: Otto Latva
Duration and funding: 2021–2025, Research Council of Finland
The research project Diversity in Finnish comics history: Minorities and self-representation (2023–2026) studies how comics artists from different minorities in Finland and their comics form a part of Finnish comics culture historically and in contemporary society. The research also focuses on what kind of comics artists from minorities have created and especially on how the comics have dealt with minority status and formed minority identities. The focus is particularly on the Swedish-speaking population, women, and gender and sexual minorities in Finnish comics culture. The project combines an interest in comics as a form of expression and the societal and comics cultural context from the 1850s to the 2020s. The project is affiliated to the Department of Finnish Literature, University of Turku, and it is funded by the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland and the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland.
PI: Ralf Kauranen
Duration and funding: 2023–2026, Society of Swedish Literature in Finland and the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland
The aim of the project is to study the entire history of Finnish drama film from the early 20th century to the present day from the perspectives of ecocritical content analysis on the one hand and production-critical analysis on the other. The aim is to produce the first comprehensive study of the complex intertwining of environmental issues and national film culture. By identifying the forms of material production and consumption and their development, we seek to understand the historical dimensions of the "dirty materiality" of Finnish film production. These are the ways in which polluting/environmentally friendly practices evolve over different periods and in different cultural and production contexts, in which they become established as industry norms, and in which they develop as part of the expression and content of films. The aim is also to combine basic historical research with a learning perspective on the past: how can good practices be refined from past practices of film representation and production, and bad ones sifted out for use in current and future film culture?
PI: Kimmo Laine
Project duration and funding: 2024–2027, Kone Foundation
The project examines a major but nearly forgotten line of development in the history of philosophy, by which pessimism has emerged as the mentality that to an important degree determines our times. The main question of the project is: how did the millennia-resistant doctrine of providence come to be replaced with its polar opposite, thoroughgoing pessimism? The project aims at an historical ontology of a mentality that can bring a fresh and original insights into the most pressing problems of our times and the mentality that shapes the human moral condition itself.
Duration and funding: 2023–2027, Kone Foundation
The #ENDOs project is a European initiative that educates and supports adults dealing with chronic diseases, with a specific focus on endometriosis. With a potential reach of 14 million women across Europe – who often refer to themselves as “ENDOs,” this project aspires to empower these individuals to take a more active role in their healthcare journey. The project’s innovative approach incorporates the world of art and culture as skill developers, creating user-centric learning tools that aim to build an engaged community of ENDOs and their caregivers. Through performing and visual arts, storytelling, narrative medicine, and digital tools, healthcare experts and ENDOs will facilitate their understanding and communication with each other.
The project is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Education and Training Programme.
Project partners: Le LABA, France: Vulgaroo, France; L’Agence Créative, France; Momentum, Ireland; Stockholms Kvinnohistoriska, Sweden; University of Turku, Finland; Università Degli Studi Di Palermo, Italy; National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland ja Digital Narrative Medicine, Italy.
Finnish PI: Dr Avril Tynan
Duration and funding: 2023–2026, EU Horizon
This project explores cultural appropriation – a phenomenon which has sparked multiple media scandals both in Finland and elsewhere in recent years. Though the concept of cultural appropriation is new to Finland, Finns have borrowed symbols from Indigenous cultures throughout the twentieth century and used these in building Finnishness. This project focuses on what meanings Finns have invested in the symbols, material objects, and practices of Indigenous cultures when borrowing and imitating them. Using archival research, oral history, and Sámi yoik as methods, the project team seeks to understand why Indigenous cultures spark intrigue. Focusing on Finland, the project compares how and what is appropriated from both the Sámi community, situated partially within Finnish borders, and transnationally from Native North Americans. The project is funded by the Kone Foundation.
Duration and funding: 2023–2030, Kone Foundation
The project studies the fauna and flora of the Finnish region through historical, cultural and linguistic research. It brings to light sightings of different species from the 19th century to the 1970s, hidden in newspapers and magazines, which have not been previously known in a natural scientific and public context. The aim of the project is to renew the understanding of Finnish biodiversity and to provide researchers, organisations and the general public with more comprehensive information on the occurrence of species in Finland. The project is funded by the Alfred Kordelin Foundation and has received funding from the Foundation’s Major Cultural Projects funding programme.
PI: Otto Latva
Duration and funding: 2023–2025, Research Council of Finland
The research aims at a comprehensive account of the representations of food and eating in Western painting from the 1650s to the 1950s. It clarifies the role that the artworks played in the changes of the discourses on food and eating – or how they reacted to the developments related.
Under the centuries in question, the Western relation to food, eating, and food production probably changed more and faster than ever before. This transformation of the relation plays an essential role in ecological crisis, climate change, and loss of biodiversity. As such, the research discusses the causes that affected the changes, and offers means how our relation to nature can still be discussed.
The research is funded by Kone Foundation.
The project, funded by Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland 2022–2025, approaches the writing skills of 19th-century Finns from the perspective of crime and examines the situations in which people were convicted of forgery. Through cases of forgery the project opens up the social history of Finnish society in the early 19th century, and especially the everyday life of the working -class and low-income part of society. The project brings up, on the one hand, the expanding literacy of Finnish society, and on the other hand, the authorities’ growing need to control the movements and work of especially the low-income part of the population. People needed written certificates of their status and work, proving where they came from and where they were going, and whether they were reputable workers.
Duration and funding: 2022–2025, Society of Swedish Literature in Finland
The project examines the industrial transformation of society in the freezing climate of the North and the significance of this transformation for the cultural meanings of winter.
PI: Anna Sivula
Duration and funding: 2024–2028, Research Council of Finland
https://sites.utu.fi/talvenhistoria/
New technologies have dramatically changed the way we study historical materials. The availability of newspapers and magazines in digital format has enabled us to ask novel questions, as we can examine those collections on a larger scale, beyond what is possible through close reading. The Imagined Homelands project seeks to take advantage of these opportunities and to develop methods for the study of transnational, Finnish culture in North America. Our basic idea is that the textual construction of immigrant newspapers provides clues to how they imagined both past and present homelands. The immigrant press took shape between cultures, publishing news from both Finland and North America, sometimes directly copying, but also reminiscing, reflecting, and imagining the conditions of the former homeland. During the project, around 350 000 pages of Finnish-language newspapers and journals from North America will be digitised and made available via the digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi service.
PI: Hannu Salmi
Duration and funding: 2024–2027, Kone Foundation
The IN SITU project is coordinated by the University of Coimbra and studies cultural and creative industries (CCIs) in the non-urban regions of Europe. IN SITU focuses on cultural actors in non-urban areas to find out their specific features, needs and capabilities. IN SITU unites institutional partners from 12 European countries. The core of IN SITU are six Labs, one of them based in UTU. The Finnish Lab is led by Professor Maunu Häyrynen (PI), Landscape Studies, and Katriina Siivonen, University Lecturer at Finland Futures Research Centre. The Lab will study CCIs in the non-urban areas next to the cities of Rauma and Eurajoki. Activities within the Finnish subproject will cover CCIs representing different sectors of cultural and creative economy, their networks and patterns of creative work, as well as the local tangible and intangible resources they use for their activities.
Consortium PI: Nancy Duxbury, University of Coimbra
Finnish PI: Maunu Häyrynen, Landscape Studies
Duration and funding: 2022–2026, EU Horizon
Reading has become a major focus on contemporary discussions on social justice. Activism related to reading has had many forms recently in Finland and internationally (reading hour -movement, Lukemo-project in Finland). However, there is no academic research on Activism and reading, or Activist reading. In the project Intersectional Reading, Social Justice and Literary Activism (INTERACT) we examine reading related activism in the contexts of intersectionality and social justice. In this project, we apply intersectionality in order to increase educational democracy, and our aim is to create solid research-based methods for activist reading.
Raising from the long tradition of Black Feminist thinking intersectionality is both a theory and a mode of thinking committed to social justice. In this project, we direct intersectionality’s potential in increasing social justice and educational democracy to the use of literary educators. Our project imagines a form of literary activism and social justice-oriented pedagogy needed in times of complex global systems of inequalities. By analyzing literature and literature related activism we focus on structural inequalities and societal conflicts. Our aims are related to literary studies, intersectional pedagogy, and epistemological challenges related to activism and academic scholarship. INTERACT is funded by the KONE foundations thematic funding scheme “Language, Power and Democracy” 2022—2025.
PI: Kaisa Ilmonen
The project explores the shaping of film and television in the context of different historical durations. Film and television were long perceived as mutually exclusive, and the history of each medium has been written separately. Our project takes a different perspective. We will look beyond the struggle and examine the forms of collaboration and interaction that have developed between film and television since the late 1950s, in terms of aesthetics, production and distribution, and which, on this basis, have become an essential part of the contemporary landscape of intermedial audiovisual culture. The intertwining of film and television will be examined primarily in Finland, but also from a comparative perspective with other Nordic countries. The aim is to produce 1) a Finnish-language history of Fennada-Filmi, a pioneer of film-television collaboration, and 2) an international volume on the early stages of film and television in the Nordic countries.
PI: Kimmo Laine
Duration and funding: 2021–2024, Finnish Cultural Foundation
Funded by the Strategic Research Council, the research consortium Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (IDA) critically examines datafication in contemporary Finland, asking how it is experienced, made sense of, and resisted among different groups of people, and what socially sustainable solutions remain available. The consortium first analyses the impact of data-driven culture in and for people’s different social roles and relations, as well as the vulnerabilities that it gives rise to. Second, it inquires how intimacy functions as a contested resource in data-driven creative labour, public careers, and social connections. Third, IDA explores and develops just ways of managing, protecting, sharing, and using personal data.
PI: Susanna Paasonen
Duration and funding: 2019–2025, Research Council of Finland
How and why have Finns participated in the mapping of the global south during the 20th century? How did the global networks of producing geographical and cartographic knowledge transform in the wake of decolonization? DEVMAP answers these intertwined questions by analysing Finnish participation in the mapping of different parts of the world, for instance in Nepal, Namibia, Tanzania, Bangladesh, and Egypt, in the context of development cooperation between the 1970s and the 2000s. By analysing the practices of mapping in these different geographical contexts, the project examines the mobilities of cartographic knowledge and cartographic expertise on different scales. It analyses the maps that were made because of development cooperation. The project critically examines the interests that different actors had in the making of the maps, the power relations that existed in making them and thereby seeks to illustrate the transnational practices of “development cartography”. The project is funded by the Research Council of Finland.
PI: Johanna Skurnik
Duration and funding: 2023–2027, Research Council of Finland
Project site: https://sites.utu.fi/devmap/en/
By exploring online mental health support in Finland, this Research Council of Finland funded project (decision no. 356256) produces novel knowledge on how technology provides care. The project widens the scope of feminist research on digital intimacies to online mental healthcare, opening up a novel field of research. It simultaneously examines mental vulnerabilities and digital vulnerabilities, analysing how vulnerabilities align with e.g. gender, sexuality, class, age and ethnicity, but it also consideres new digital divides and their impact on mental healthcare. The data comprises interviews, online discussion threads, promotional materials and newspaper artices, and tools provided by both conventional textual analysis and by new materialist inquiry will be used as analysis methods. The site of the project is the University of Turku, and the research team comprises the PI and two postdoctoral researchers. The results will be useful in improving mental health care, and the project contributes to sustainable mental health policy.
Duration and funding: 2023-2027, Research Council of Finland
The project The Novel’s Knowledge focuses on the ever-changing functions and roles of fictional novels along with their authors, in the era of global medialization and commercialization of the 2000s. The functional role of the author in the contemporary media-driven world is evolving, while the social relevance of an author as an intellectual has remained relatively unaltered. The project is interested in how authors of fictional novels take advantage of other forms of media and how the Finnish contemporary novel relates to different modes of knowing and ways of presenting. Scientific facts, audiovisual culture and social media have substantial influences on discourse about literature and literary forms as well as methods and practices of reading. The project, funded by the Kone Foundation, offers tools and capabilities for understanding the evolving functions and modes of expression of the contemporary novel, the stakeholders being the different operators of the literary culture, literary field, and cultural politics.
PI: Markku Lehtimäki
Duration and funding: 2022–2024, Kone Foundation
The project Opera in the periphery? Åbo and Paris as musical and theatrical capitals, 1790–1840 studies the cultural interaction between Åbo (Turku) and Paris and how urban musical and theatrical life contributed to the birth of the public sphere and and of civic ideals. More specifically, focus is laid on French comic opera (opéra-comique), a genre that dealt with social and political issues in the spirit of enlightened discussion. The project employs four reserchers and produces significant new knowledge on the early stages of Finnish music and theatre history.
PI: Charlotta Wolff
Duration and funding: 2024–2027, Society of Swedish Literature in Finland
On what grounds can we claim that there is causality between polemical texts and persecution? From the High Middle Ages onwards, European Christians increasingly engaged in both verbal and physical violence against heretics, Jews, Muslims, and others they perceived as religious enemies, but in which ways did hostile rhetoric actually contribute to persecution? This is the core research problem of PERSECUTIO.
The project is based on the extensive collection of structured data about polemical texts, their manuscript witnesses, acts of persecution as well as persons and institutions involved. The objective is to observe and explore the causal mechanisms between polemics and persecution both quantitatively and qualitatively. The project is the first step in a broader re-evaluation of the causes of persecution in the Middle Ages.
The project leader is Docent Reima Välimäki.
The research is funded by the Research Council of Finland (Academy Fellowship 2023–2027), grant number 356086) and the University of Turku
Website: https://sites.utu.fi/persecutio/
Diverse range of research projects and other activities centered around plant heritage and museum gardens.
PI: Maija Mäki
The IDA research consortium analyzes the impact of data-driven culture on social roles and relations, as well as the vulnerabilities that it gives rise to. We ask how intimacy functions as a contested resource in data-driven creative labour, public careers, and social connections. We explore and develop democratic ways of managing, protecting, sharing, and using personal data. In Politicized Intimacies research group we scrutinize how platformisation shapes the profession and everyday life of politicians, actors and cultural workers, on how trans and non-binary persons experience lives on social media and how non-commercial menstrual cycle tracking applications attempt to solve issues of intimate data.
PI: Anu Koivunen
Duration and funding: 2019–2025, STN-CULT, Strategic Research Council, Research Council of Finland
The three-year project examines the Pori Jazz Festival, which began in 1966, from the perspectives of its cultural heritage, internationality, locality, nearby nature and environment, and the application of technology. It aims to create a comprehensive picture of a festival that is local yet highly interconnected internationally, while also offering new technological solutions for data-driven management. Technology will also be applied to foster a better understanding of the use of the festival environment and nature. All parts of the project focus on Pori Jazz's role as a cultural actor and product, both in the past, present, and future. The project combines the humanities (University of Turku) and engineering sciences (Tampere University), leveraging each other's data and findings while also producing independent research within their respective fields.
PI: Petri Saarikoski
Duration and funding: 2024–2026, Finnish Cultural Foundation
The project explores queer and trans people's experiences of loneliness in the Nordic context. It asks how loneliness has affected the lives of queer and trans people in the Nordic countries now and in the past, where and how queer loneliness is experienced, and what intersecting differences and complexities in the experiences of loneliness can be identified.
The project stems from gender studies and is theoretically interdisciplinary, drawing from e.g., feminist loneliness studies, queer studies, and affect theory. The data will consist of archival materials from queer history archives, expert interviews with LGBTQ organisations, and texts and photographs describing the experiences of loneliness, collected via an open call of participation.
The project aims to diversify the images of loneliness and seeks to gain a broad understanding of the history and present of Nordic queer loneliness. The output of the project is a scientific monograph (in English) and a creative non-fiction book (in Finnish). The project is funded by the Kone Foundation.
PI: Varpu Alasuutari
Duration and funding: 2024–2028, Kone Foundation
This interdisciplinary project studies the representation, meaning and value of recovery from illness in culture, medicine and society. It explores the relationship between recovery and narrative from a critical perspective that interrogates narrative’s claim to cure. It argues that recovery functions as an organisational tool of medical and social management that has the power to grant or restrict access to biomedical and economic resources and services, and to systems of care, relationships and freedoms. The data includes fiction and non-fiction literature, film, mass media and social media written in English, French and Finnish languages. The site of research is the University of Turku. The project is linked to the SELMA Centre and the Research Centre for Culture and Health.
PI: Avril Tynan
Duration: 2023–2027
Through relics God touched the earth. The relic’s divine power made it a desirable and inseparable part of the life of medieval people. From the early thirteenth century onwards, however, the notion of the relic was challenged, and the ecclesiastical authorities sought to monopolize the definition and use of relics for the Church. As a result, late medieval people embraced new items and new relic practices for contacting God and saints. Thus, the tumultuous era together with the Church attempts to restrict sanctions on the relics engendered new pluralism in holy matter. The project focuses on the Dominican cultural milieu in late medieval France and Italy and considers the ways in which the relic was perceived in various forms of interaction with holy. Ultimately the question is, who had the right and the means to determine what counted as a relic and to whom?
PI: Marika Räsänen
Duration and funding: 2022–2027, Research Council of Finland
https://sites.utu.fi/ossagloriosa/en/projects/rethinking-the-late-medieval-relic-c-1200-1550/
The Satumaa project focuses on new uses of peatlands and related livelihoods. The aim is to understand the past, present and potential future importance of peatlands as part of the economy, natural ecosystems and culture.The active peat production phase is a small moment in the thousand-year landscape history of a peatland, but it can still span generations and become a significant part of local culture, livelihoods and lifestyles. The next phase of development after the production phase may again continue for several generations, or perhaps millennia.
The Satumaa project will map the ecological, regional economic, social and cultural values of peat bogs in Satakunta, and collect local knowledge in the three selected sites. Through a multidisciplinary review, future scenarios will be created in cooperation with the participating groups to support the choice of new uses and the emergence of new livelihoods.
PI: Eeva Raike
Duration: 2023–2026
The project examines experiences of forests as homes shared with other animals. The research makes visible the networks and dynamics of interspecies relations and how they change in time and space. It challenges the anthropocentric notion of home and connects the everyday relations with forests to interactions with animals and experiences of homeness. By combining multidisciplinary research on forests, animals and the home, the project explores forest-related experiences, embodiment, practices and agencies from a spatial and posthumanist viewpoint, including also the agencies of animals. The research materials to be used include written oral history narratives, social media and videoed walking interviews.
PI: Nora Schuurman
Duration and funding: 2023–2027, Kone Foundation
The project aims to investigate how the sonic environment in six European villages is changing and how this is experienced. The villages are Skruv in Sweden, Bissingen in Germany, Cembra in Italy, Lesconil in France, Dollar in Scotland and Nauvo in Finland. The project will provide information about the interaction between place, sound and listening and how this interaction is changing. The project draws on ethnomusicology and anthropology of sound and will focus on material, economic, technological, legal and cultural factors. It will pay particular attention to global changes in the context of the Anthropocene, digitalisation and the impact of different types of mediated content and their manifestation in everyday life in villages. Fieldwork will be carried out in six European villages using qualitative and quantitative methods such as participatory observation, sound level measurements and interviews with villagers, supported by archival research, to improve contemporary analysis of acoustic environments and inform policy makers about acoustic design and its impact on wellbeing.
PI (UTU): Meri Kytö, PI of the consortium Heikki Uimonen (UEF)
Duration and funding: 2024--2027, Research Council of Finland & Niilo Helanderin Foundation
https://uefconnect.uef.fi/en/group/someco-sonic-mediations-and-ecocritical-listening/
DIGHT-Net is a collaborative research initiative focused on advancing digital cultural heritage studies at Tallinn University (TLU) through partnerships with the University of Bologna (UNIBO), the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and the University of Turku (UTU). To mobilise and amplify digital cultural heritage research locally, nationally and internationally, ensure sustainability and maximise the impact, the joint research hub of Digital Cultural Heritage studies (DIGHT-Hub) will be co-established at the TLU’s School of Humanities.
The project shall prototype a Twinned Digital Archive of Juri Lotman and Umberto Eco, digitize the archive materials of Lotman, and build a semiotic theory of digital cultural heritage, based on the work of Lotman, Eco and other scholars.
Consortium PI: Marek Tamm (Tallinn University). Finnish PI: Hannu Salmi
Duration and funding: 2024–2027, EU Horizon
Actions stem from words. The way we talk about forests today influences how we treat them now and in the future. Language carries with it the thought patterns and arguments from the past. The Talking about Forests project focuses on a crucial historical period and region that shaped the discourse on forests—High Medieval Southern Italy. It was here, during the early Middle Ages, that many of the ways of discussing forests, which have since become fundamental elements of Western forest discourse, were formed. Southern Italy served as a meeting point for different cultures and scientific traditions, at the crossroads of the Mediterranean world between the 9th and 12th centuries. Here, many Greek and Arabic texts that would later form the foundation of Western natural science were translated; at the same time, the Latin tradition of antiquity also thrived. At the center of this translation work and scholarly discussions were monasteries such as the Latin Montecassino and the Greek Grottaferrata, which are central to this study. These same monasteries were also active in the exploitation of forests, an activity that greatly increased during this period. The favorable climate conditions of the Medieval Warm Period (ca. 900–1300) led to a rapid population increase in Europe, which resulted in large-scale forest clearing for agricultural land. Monasteries played a key role in this clearing work. They oversaw monks, farmers, and, in part, the warrior nobility who carried out the practical work. Thus, the study of monasteries like Montecassino and Grottaferrata offers insights not only into abstract concepts of forests but also into how these concepts were implemented in practice. The Talking about Forests project unpacks this complex issue. Through a diverse range of sources, we examine how forests were portrayed in the texts written, translated, and read in Southern Italy. We ask how people of the time legitimized their actions towards forests and, ultimately, at what point concerns about the harmful effects of human activity began to emerge in the texts.
PI: Teemu Immonen
Duration and funding: 2024–2027, Kone Foundation
https://sites.utu.fi/tucemems/en/research-projects/talking-about-forests-2/
The project examines the Grand Duchy of Finland as a space of imperial and trans-imperial mobility in the decades between the end of the Crimean War and the First World War. At that time, Finland's position as part of the Russian Empire changed significantly, and the Russian Empire and its global position were in transition. The industrializing, bureaucratizing and colonizing empire mobilized people, objects and ideas in an unprecedented manner, thus connecting the Finnish region to transimperial networks. In this project we analyse the production of mobility and space in the Grand Duchy of Finland as part of transimperial and cross-border networks that mobilized people, things, and information. The project is funded by the Kone Foundation.
PI: Johanna Skurnik
Duration and funding: 2024–2026, Kone Foundation
This research looks back to the work of white activists for Native North American rights in the US, Canada, and Western Europe from the 1960s to the 1990s. Using archival research, literary writings, and oral history interviews of members of past rights organizations led by white Europeans and North Americans, this research will question how effective solidarity can be built. What role did underlying assumptions about land, race, and indigeneity play in shaping the possibilities of building decolonial solidarity? How did these activists conceive of their own positions in relation to Indigenous peoples? The project aims to advance the scientific understanding of the structures of whiteness and settler colonialism and their intersections. It is funded by the Research Council of Finland.
Duration and funding: 2023–2028, Research Council of Finland
Whose City is a three-year project started in 2021 and funded by the Kone Foundation. We study the history, present day and future of Finnish cities from the perspective of equality and justice, using the methods of historical research and art. We focus especially on the period of drastic change that took place in Finnish cities in the 1960s and 1970s and the related discussions around urban space and equality. Many of the developments that started during this period still influence the urban environments today. The project group is made up by the comic artist Tiitu Takalo and historians Ainur Elmgren, Tiina Männistö-Funk and Hanna Tyvelä.
PI: Tiina Männistö-Funk
Duration and funding: 2021–2025, Kone Foundation
Words for Care: Literature, Healthcare and Democracy investigates the meanings of literature and shared reading in the context of multilingual healthcare. The project brings together narrative medicine and cultural language learning for the first time. We are developing multilingual narrative medicine practices and studying the potential of reading groups to enhance narrative, cultural and linguistic competence, as well as the social inclusion of social and healthcare professionals who speak Finnish as a first or as a foreign language.
The starting point of our project is the idea, based on narrative medicine and cultural language learning research, that reading fiction together, and discussing and writing about what is read, supports individuals’ cultural, linguistic, and narrative competencies, as well as their sense of professional and societal belonging. The project expands literary and narrative research to the lives and work of professionals in different fields.
Duration and funding: 2024–2026, Kone Foundation
The Finnish Public Broadcasting Company Yle turns 100 years in 2026. In this project, we investigate the company’s history by investigating its cultural programming from the earliest radio years to the current multi-platformed digital age. We analyse a variety of programme genres: from radio and TV plays to podcasts and Instagram dramas, from radio concerts and TV pop shows to interactive, multi-platformed music programming, from documentaries to educational programming, and the place of cultural journalism in radio and television. The project investigates the creative work within YLE focusing especially on media technological changes and transnational influences and networks. In so doing, we trace the transformation of the company from a national cultural institution to an actor in a global media ecosystem.
PI: Anu Koivunen
Duration and funding: 2022–2026, Finnish Broadcasting Company
Completed projects
Agents of Enlightenment. Changing the Minds in Eighteenth-Century Northern Europe’ is a research team and an Academy of Finland research project (2017–2021) working on the reception of the Enlightenment in Scandinavia and the Baltic area between 1740 and 1810. Our research focuses on how scientific knowledge and radical philosophy affected identities, representations and practices at an individual and local level in the Baltic area in the second half of the eighteenth century. We are particularly attentive to individuals and practices behind intellectual change.
Wood was a ubiquitous material for premodern communities living in the subarctic region. The present project focuses on the use of wood in North-Eastern Europe from the 12th to the 17th century. We will take a long-term perspective on the significance of wood, embodied in both material and metaphorical movements of the substance from forest to households and markets, and from blocks of wood into ecclesiastical sculptures. The project shifts emphasis from such artefact groups as ceramics, metal objects, and individual works of art to this less inconspicuous but omnipresent substance.
Comics and migration. Belonging, narration, activism is a three-year project funded by the Kone foundation. The project started in the beginning of year 2018.
The project both studies the narrative means used in comics addressing migration and produces and brings forth comics with migration as the main theme.
Both researchers and comics artists are represented in the project group. On the one hand, the analysis of comics and narration done by the researchers is illuminated by the artist’s view provided by the comics artists, and, on the other hand, the research on artistic practices informs the artists’ understanding of their work and, perhaps, brings out new forms of work and narrative practices.
This project investigates industrialised animal exploitation since the late 19th century until the present and analyses how and why unsustainable practices, vis-a-vis animals in different sectors of social and commercial life, came into being and were established as norms. Empirically the project examines Finland in the wider context of the Global North. The project consists of three subthemes: knowledge, technology and political economy. Transversal themes present in all inquiries are the ethical dimension of human-animal relations and multi-specific perspective. The project refines methods for analyzing multispecies societies and opens up a new and historically and culturally-informed theorisation regarding sustainability and the Anthropocene.
Contact person: Taina Syrjämaa
The DISCE project, funded by the EU Horizon2020 programme of multi-European universities, is exploring and developing the accessibility and sustainability of creative sectors.
The project examines the multi-faceted relationship between humans and ticks from the perspective of environmental history and environmental humanities.
"Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory" develops ideas and analytical instruments that help researchers, professional groups and non-academic audiences navigate today’s social and textual environments that are dominated by storytelling. We put contemporary literary fiction in dialogue with manipulative stories that are spread on the internet, in order to reveal the dubious relationship that some narratives have with identity, truth, politics, and complex phenomena such as climate change. In order to confront these issues, we reveal the sophisticated story-critical ideas and techniques offered by works of contemporary fiction. The team in Turku brings into dialogue contemporary story-critical fiction and the broader uses of narrative in contemporary consumer culture in which narrative identity is often understood in narrow, limiting, and commercially motivated ways. It examines the relationship between narrative and identity from two interlaced perspectives: in relation to 1) metanarrativity and 2) the uses of narrative in promoting wellbeing.
The objective of the LeNeRe project is to produce new knowledge on contemporary religious and spiritual milieus as sites of learning and to identify and understand processes through which people integrate their religious or spiritual learning to other spheres of life. To approach this objective, we will conduct ethnographically informed research on adult individuals in Finland who have embarked on (for them) new religious and spiritual paths.
The Mission Finland project examines American, British and Soviet cultural operations in Finland during the Cold War period. We explore how foreign states attempted to have an impact on Finnish people and Finnish society by sending artistic tours to the country, organizing exhibitions and trying to influence media agendas. The project aims at creating a big picture of cultural Cold War in Finland, until now an internationally unknown dimension of a global phenomenon. The new interpretation and results provided by the project will widen public knowledge of the cultural Cold War and provide tools for understanding the legacies of Cold War cultural diplomacy and propaganda, and their ongoing influence on information warfare and soft power today. The project draws on historical qualitative methods and utilizes archival records, media materials, oral history interviews and visual materials.
The research project New Economies of Artistic Labour – from Entrepreneurship to Sustainable Collectives (funded by the Kone Foundation 2020–2024) maps and analyses the changing forms of artists’ work in contemporary Finland.
The project focuses on intra-actions between different fields of art, wider changes pertaining to labour markets and current forms of labour, as well as economic structures, ecologies and practices.
The project combines in new ways theories and methods from the study of arts, social sciences and artistic research.
SCISMA studies how Rome survived the greatest crisis of the late medieval church. Roman popes of the Great Western Schism (1378–1417) are counted into the official continuum of the papacy, but this retrospective view blurs the fact that the Roman party was in a deep crisis. Most of the competent administration joined the French Pope Clement VII in Avignon, and Urban VI was left in Rome with
a skeleton staff. A comparable blow hit the religious orders that operated directly under the pope: the influential French provinces and the University of Paris backed up Clement VII.
At the same time, the crisis opened new opportunities. Rome was open for new ideas and loyal men could advance in ecclesiastical career. SCISMA focuses on 1) how the Roman curia rebuilt its administration and practices, 2) how religious orders and churches in Rome defended their authority and sought political alliances, 3) what strategies new groups and individuals used in the crisis to raise
their status within the church.
The project explores both the pleasurable and hurtful edges of play and playfulness in personal and collective sexual lives that unfold in increasingly media saturated and networked environments. SaP offers novel ways for understanding the captivating and gruelling attractions of sexuality and contemporary media, as well as their connections with gendered and racialised identities.
Talking Machines is a research and artistic project in which the devices imitating and assisting human speech are set into their cultural and historical context. The project aims at interdisciplinary synthesis on the ideas, evolution and cultural significance of talking and listening machines and applications.
The main idea of the study is a critical examination of speech technology as a cultural metaphor and as a textual trope: the authors study devices and services as a part of technological imagination and the experience of technology in the current century and the latter half of the 20th century. Envisioning and adopting the machines and techniques that imitate interpersonal human communication create a phenomenon, which cannot be understood only from the point of view of the technical development.