Areas of expertise
Biography
I work as a University Teacher of Study of Cultures at the School of History, Culture, and Arts Studies.
Previous years I have worked as a researcher in a project concerning climate change and the Baltic Sea, funded by the Tiina and Antti Herlin Foundation (2018–2020), and in the project Living with the Baltic Sea in a changing climate: Environmental heritage and the circulation of knowledge, which is funded by the Academy of Finland (2018–2022).
I have done two Master’s theses: one in Comparative Religion, in which I examined the position of the Seneca-Iroquois women before the year 1848, and the other in Education. I have also worked as a schoolteacher for fifteen years.
I spend half the year living on a small island in the Finnish archipelago, and I enjoy spending time by or at the Baltic Sea.
Teaching
At present, I teach various methodological courses in basic and substantive studies in the Study of Culture. I supervise one doctoral thesis. I also run creative writing workshops and shamanic courses in my leisure time.
Research
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 research and teaching laboratory for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University specialising in the study of maritime and other water systems.