Leonardo Custódio (PhD 2016 Tampere University), currently a postdoctoral researcher in Minority Studies at ÅAU and PI of the Kone Foundation research project Anti-Racism Media Activist Alliance (ARMA): Research and Activism Collaboration for Creative Uses of Digital Media, Pedagogy and Arts against Racism in Finland (2017-2020). Custódio is a leading scholar on communication for social change in Finland. Working at the intersections between academia, activism and organized civil society, Custódio has established himself as a creative agent for collaborative knowledge production between South and North. He has published in peer-reviewed journals, but also produced the collaborative documentary “Complexos” (Finland/Brazil, 2020) based on his PhD research and co-authored the schoolbook Fair Play: Confronting Racism and Coloniality in Games (Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen instituutti, 2022). Custódio is the author of Favela media activism: Counterpublics for human rights in Brazil (Lexington Books, 2017).
Mirka Koro (Ph.D., University of Helsinki) is a Professor of qualitative research at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. Her scholarship operates in the intersection of qualitative inquiry, methodologies, philosophy, experimentalism, and socio-cultural critique. She has published in various qualitative, methodological, and educational journals. She is also the author of Reconceptualizing qualitative research: Methodologies without methodology (2016), Knowledge production in material spaces: Disturbing conferences and composing events (2022) and co-editor of Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry: Entanglements with the Post-Critical and Post-Anthropocentric (2017) and Intra-Public intellectualism: Critical qualitative inquiry in the Academy (2021).
Pauliina Rautio is a Senior Research Fellow steering a research team AniMate, which includes several senior and junior researchers spanning disciplines from human and social sciences to natural sciences. AniMate collaborates with young citizens as well as artists working on for example speculative fiction and biological arts, exploring processes of becoming and being human with other animals and highlighting multispecies justice as an integral part of education. Pauliina's research within the funded projects of AniMate combines ecological citizen science with education, human-animal studies, childhood studies and the arts, utilising post-qualitative and multispecies (non-anthropocentric) methodologies. Pauliina is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oulu (Faculty of Education and Psychology), an Adjunct Professor of Education at the University of Helsinki, as well as a senior scholar in the Biodiverse Anthropocenes research profiling area of the University of Oulu, the Editor-In-Chief of Trace - Journal for Human Animal Studies, as well as wildlife rehabilitator for injured birds and a companion human to budgies, rats, chickens, dogs and a horse.
Jan Walmsley has honorary chairs at the Open University, UK, and at the University of Cork, Ireland. She has pioneered research with people with intellectual disabilities since the late 1980s and coined the term 'inclusive research' in an article published in 2001. Her 2003 book, written with Kelley Johnson, Inclusive Research with People with Intellectual Disabilities Past Present and Future, has been influential. Since its publication, she has been pleased to continue working with people with intellectual disabilities as a researcher in several ways and to observe 'inclusive research' taking off worldwide.