In my doctoral thesis, Vesi kuljettaa ääntä - Autoetnografinen tutkimus Lypyrtin kylän historiantuottamisesta (2017), I studied the history production of the old pilot village Lypyrtti, which is located in the south-western archipelago in Finland. The oral and written source material of the study was diverse, and an essential part of it was formed by ethnographic interviews, my research diary, and the book Lypyrtti-Lypertö, Kylä väylien varrella (2011), which I wrote on the village before conducting the thesis. While the thesis is autoethnographic, I also applied research methods used in oral history, microhistory, memory studies and environmental history.
Currently, I am combining two themes in multidisciplinary research. Firstly, I will continue the deduction of my dissertation by examining the experience-based knowledge of the people living by and with the Baltic Sea, mainly in the Turku archipelago. I focus on water-related mythic and folklore and creative writing material collected around the Baltic Sea.
Secondly, I examine imagination as a broader theoretical and analytical framework for tacit, situated and experience-based knowledge. As a special focus in my study, I will examine animism as a social imaginary as well as shamanism as a technique of co-imagination. I am also organising future research and shamanistic workshops to produce up-to-date data. My standpoint is strongly methodological, and I bring into the discussion the double agency of a researcher as someone who experiences and conceptualises.
In my work as a researcher and a teacher, I have practised and produced co-operative and interdisciplinary views. I am a founder member of Wave Riders (AHA–Aallonharjalle in Finnish), a network for research and teaching on environmental humanities in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University.