Nationally, we play a key role in the development of analytical and critical humanities skills, as well as in training in a plurality of fields. In addition, we spearhead the development of new methods and lead efforts in building research infrastructure – initiatives that both strengthen academic collaboration and serve broader societal needs.
The key aims of the Faculty are
These main aims are further explained in the next section, which elaborates on the different elements in this strategy and in some cases provides a few practical examples on how this may be implemented.
With diversity at the core of the Faculty of Arts’ profile, a key task is to develop more inclusive and integrated research and teaching programmes, combining disciplinary expertise to foster the development of a pluralistic skill set among our graduates and researchers. We will increase awareness of our teaching programmes, emphasising the benefits of competencies built on cross-disciplinary methods in humanities research.
Basic and ground-breaking research are systematically integrated into multidisciplinary learning practices. While other institutions, traditionally less diverse, struggle to develop an interdisciplinary framework and learning culture, the diversity of the Faculty of Arts makes this interdisciplinary outlook attainable by all, students and staff alike. The Faculty is committed to channelling this interdisciplinary framework into more systematic and institutionally structured collaboration on thematic research programmes. Integration of master’s students and early career researchers in research programmes (groups/projects) should be a priority and a common practice. Likewise, project leaders, department heads and Faculty leadership should continue to promote the integration of early career and grant researchers in the research community.
Among the initiatives to be developed, we should consider planning the integration of courses in order to bring varied points of view for the students from other – close or distant – disciplines; give doctoral researchers the opportunity to lecture; consider planning courses in a way that can lead to an academic or outreach publication; and integrate into courses academic practices such as guided discussions on research literature, student presentations in class with discussion, or peer review practices as part of the coursework in order to develop research competencies in our students.
The Faculty is committed to promoting the openness of research by encouraging our researchers to publish in an open form, when possible, any collected datasets and research findings, according to the principles of responsible and ethical use. For the period 2025–2028, we aim at developing at the Faculty and in collaboration with the other faculties in the City Centre Campus and the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH) better forms of registering, collecting, sharing, and storing such data, as well as of implementing the best practices with respect to data protection, the ethical reuse of data, and the recognition of researchers’ ownership rights.
A new Research Data Policy Implementation Plan has been prepared by the HSSH and is being implemented in all faculties in the City Centre Campus. In addition, data management handbooks for the use of different kinds of data have been prepared and will be continuously updated according to the needs and input of the researchers, by means of yearly workshops. The Faculty is also involved in the long-term storage of research data by the University of Helsinki Databank service. The Faculty provides clear guidelines and instructions for its researchers.
The Faculty encourages an openness to societal challenges and the active involvement of the academic community in finding unique solutions for global challenges that require humanities expertise. It is equally important to increase societal interaction and academic impact and invite social actors to contribute to teaching and research activities.
The Faculty aims at being a thriving research community that uses open and unbiased recruitment processes to attract specialists of high-quality research and teaching to its fields. New recruitment must be considered from the perspective of successful integration into existing degree programmes, but at the same time, the development of degree programmes and the definition of hiring priorities must consider the natural evolution of the research profile of the different disciplines and the unit as a whole.
In addition, the ability to collaborate with researchers within the Faculty, the University, and national and international networks is essential in a changing research funding environment, where competition for strategic and interdisciplinary funding is ever more pressing. Investment in the Faculty’s research communities constitutes good sustainable development of large-scale research projects. The Faculty encourages its research communities to develop their research activities systematically and independently. Collaborative research should also find expression in the development of a wide scope of teaching for multi-degree programmes.
The Faculty emphasises the role of ethics while preserving academic freedom in a polarising society, where hate speech and the political targeting of researchers is increasing. Ethical research practices are closely related to the practice of democracy. As an embedded part of society, the Faculty mirrors its democratic conditions, while at the same time, our academics strive to affect the national discourses on values, civic freedoms, and constitutionality.
Putting more weight on the transparency of researchers’ actions is inevitable and beneficial because ethics, in fact, ensures the quality of research. Ethics guarantees the reliability and credibility of research results. How one acquires research data and source materials, how one treats research participants, how collected data is stored and secured, how data is analysed, and what frames of interpretation and criteria of publishing are used – all of these aspects have a grave influence on the validity of research outcomes. The Faculty is committed to the use of FAIR principles (findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability) and the evaluation of researchers in accordance with the national recommendation for responsible research assessment, the DORA Declaration, and the CoARA Agreement.
The Finnish Research Council emphasises the necessity for research infrastructures to be envisioned with a lifespan of 50 years or more, incorporating a solid foundation staffed by dedicated personnel and the ability to evolve and adapt to meet future needs. The Faculty will maintain its leadership in both national and international infrastructure development, with a particular focus on creating a hub on the City Centre Campus for research infrastructures. The recognition by the Research Council of Finland of FIN-CLARIAH as a national “lighthouse”-level infrastructure of the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) field exemplifies the position of the Faculty as having critical strategic value. Systematic efforts to develop and position it as the cornerstone of the future SSH research infrastructure strategy of the Faculty, the City Centre Campus and the University must continue. Moreover, the Faculty is devoted to a continuous evaluation of its researchers' infrastructure needs, including keeping an updated inventory of existing research infrastructures, ensuring that these needs are addressed while also anticipating the evolving demands of future research.
The Faculty is committed to putting data-driven research of various types at the centre of its strategy in research infrastructure and to enhancing the competencies of staff in the use of digital methods in research and teaching. This commitment is aimed at increasing our share of external research funding and at remaining at the forefront of advances in this area of research.
The Faculty remains committed to the wellbeing of staff and students by promoting social and environmental sustainability through considering and encouraging responsibility, collegiality, and healthy working practices and environments. These are also the foundations for creativity and inclusive and safe work/learning environments, values to which the Faculty and the University are committed. These aims must be explicitly acknowledged across the various departmental and administrative divisions.
In order to meet the University’s ambition to be “the best place to study and work”, concrete measures must be taken. To find the best solutions to make this happen, the Faculty promotes collegial attempts to foster dialogue between the academic staff and the administration, with the goal of streamlining administrative practices and avoiding redundancies. To foster collegiality, the Faculty is committed to encouraging the academic staff and the administration to identify practices that cause an unnecessary workload and/or undermine inclusivity and collegiality. Clarity about recruitment practices and areas of development, for instance working conditions and spaces, are defined in consultation with staff and students.
Furthermore, the staff’s efforts to apply for external funding continue to be supported through work arrangements (for instance, funding for the research-intensive periods), administrative and peer support, and the encouragement of collaboration. The Faculty is committed to targeting the support for external research funding applications to staff, according to their needs, career stage and appropriated funding instruments for their research profile.
The Faculty aims at retaining and expanding the amount and range of external research funding from different sources – the EU, national funding agencies, and private foundations. It is also important that the Faculty’s leadership work in close collaboration with the heads of departments, namely by providing up-to-date relevant information about funding (instruments, success rates, etc.) and by supporting their work, for instance, by frequently visiting the departments to discuss research-related matters.
The Faculty is characterised by the diversity of its disciplinary fields and degree programmes, which conduct interdisciplinary research while being very strong in disciplinary research.
Diversity in research themes, disciplines, and teaching is at the core of the Faculty’s structure and intertwined with how it defines, understands, and promotes values. For example, the Faculty has a unique position in that it is the only academic institution offering research and teaching on certain subjects in Finland. This embedded diversity of fields invites and even calls for a strong structural embedding of diversity in other aspects, such as hiring practices.
Emphasising that the freedom to think is a prerequisite for intellectual flourishing, the Faculty considers pluralism crucial to academic innovation and integration. To maintain and advance its potential to produce scholarly breakthroughs, the Faculty takes diversity as one of its foremost values. This additionally supports the Faculty’s ability to generate meaning for broader social and cultural discourses and to promote the values of a democratic, pluralistic, ethical, and critical society. It values a variety of quality criteria for research excellence and establishes practices to better identify such criteria. The Faculty promotes the diversity of academic subjects and fields, as well as the internationalisation of its researchers and research groups.
The Faculty will continue to support the development of research at the departmental level, contributing to existing initiatives or promoting new ones, for instance the recently launched research communities. Investment in these communities is aimed at expanding the levels of external research funding devoted to those thematic areas as well as at actively promoting the integration of younger researchers.
Among the targets for the 2025–2028 period is the development of interdisciplinary research networks within the Faculty, with other faculties in the University, and with other universities in Finland and abroad. The aim is to build on disciplinary excellence to develop thematic and strategic research that addresses regional and global societal challenges, for instance those related to sustainability (climate change, inequality, war, rule of law), diversity, integration (extremism, nationalism and identity, migration, populism, social conflicts, multilingualism), and the digital transformation.
The Faculty encourages interdisciplinary collaboration within its departments, with other universities, and between Faculties to boost its potential to solve the global problems mentioned above, e.g. challenges related to intercultural encounters or health. Joint courses between faculties or inter-faculty research seminars with guests from other faculties, matching experts with experts, could provide a starting point. Various forms of inter-, trans-, and multidisciplinary approaches are discussed in the Faculty’s research seminar to provide a conceptual basis for different kinds of collaborations.
Strong disciplines, however, form the basis of any interdisciplinary collaboration, and this principle is in line with the University of Helsinki strategy in the Roadmap for the Implementation of Research Themes. Thus, both disciplinary and interdisciplinary levels of collaboration are to be encouraged, as is the development of methodologies of interdisciplinarity. This will take place within the Faculty, between faculties, and further in Finnish and international academia.
In addition to the strong collaboration of humanities researchers with Nordic and European universities in a variety of fields, we envisage the strengthening of research and teaching cooperation with universities in the global south (South America, Africa, and Asia) in line with the University’s strategic areas of sustainability and Indigenous studies. Finland’s geographical location and recent NATO membership give new relevance to the unique expertise of our researchers; thus, collaboration with other Universities in Europe and North America is to be further consolidated. As a bilingual country dealing with new immigration policies and cultural transformation, recognised excellence in linguistic variation and interactional linguistics should open new avenues for large-scale research programmes on cultural and linguistic pluralism, such as is the case with the Profiling action on Diversity in Society and Life, funded by the Research Council of Finland and coordinated by the Faculty.
Visibility is key for a successful academic faculty, especially when it comes to its research. Research visibility must not stop at the usual factors of grant successes, scientific publication output, and academic exchange via conferences and invited lectures. The Faculty is committed to developing initiatives showing the broad spectrum of research done in the humanities as well as its social relevance, exploring different ways to underline the significance of research in the humanities and its contribution to science and society at large.
For the period of 2025–28, the strategic focus will be on the ‘soft’ indicators of Societal Impacts and Public Engagement. Despite recognising the current challenges in measuring societal impact, these indicators are becoming increasingly more important in the research environment, as academia faces more pressure from politics and governments to justify its use of public funding and describe how academia benefits society. This matters particularly for a humanities faculty.
Consequently, the Faculty promotes engagement at all levels of possible societal impact, from mass media (TV, radio, newspapers) and specialist media (science magazines, etc.) to modern social media, as well as non-academic books and popular articles, and various forms of visualisation and exhibitions. Researchers are also encouraged to explore alternative ways of making research results available to different generations via, for example, video games and comics, and to reach out not only to schools but also, for example, to care homes for the elderly.
In order to enhance research visibility and provide tangible aims and future benchmarks, for the period of 2025–28 the Faculty is committed to pro-actively supporting its staff when it comes to Societal Impacts and Public Engagement; organising training courses for its staff at all levels, to make them aware of, advise them on, and explain possible “Pathways to Impacts” for its disciplines; bringing academics and communication managers, journalists, and other stakeholders together and thus facilitating matchmaking long-term relationships; improving the coordination between the areas of research and societal interaction to promote research Impacts and Engagement within the Faculty; and striving to develop better and well-suited criteria for assessing the visibility and impact of research in the humanities.