I am a professor in philosophy at Tampere University, focusing especially on social philosophy. Currently I am finishing books on social wrongs and social pathologies (with Arvi Särkelä), and on the collective intentionality approach to social ontology. Other ongoing work relates to the topics of mutual recognition, artificial intelligence, personhood, and commitments.
I was a Core Fellow at the Collegium in 2007–2010, with two short paternal leaves. My project concerned philosophy of social solidarity, and I have never entirely abandoned that topic. My fellowship resulted in several publications, including an
During the years at HCAS, I became more involved also on theories of collective intentionality and social ontology and was an affiliate of Finnish Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. I also worked – and still work – on Hegelian and critical approaches to social philosophy. These two topics are relevant for the abovementioned two books in the making, one on collective intentionality and another on social wrongs and pathologies.
My years at the Collegium were happy, even luxurious, academically – plenty of time for research and for forming interdisciplinary relationships in a nice and supportive atmosphere among sharp minds. From the Collegium I went to University of Jyväskylä, where I was a lecturer in philosophy, and in 2013 I got my present post at Tampere. Since then, I have been involved in multidisciplinary consortia and worked as a head of the History, Philosophy and Literary Studies unit, as well as the chair of the academic board of Tampere University. I think the hands-on understanding of other disciplines that I got from the years at the Collegium has been very helpful for working in these posts.
Currently I am a Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki, but at the time of my Core Fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2011–2013), I had just been elected Senior Lecturer in Sociology at UH. After only six months, I left my new post to join the illustrious community at Fabianinkatu. Even though I moved only half a kilometer, the transition offered a wonderful opening for my academic horizons, as I befriended historians, philosophers, scholars in the arts, legal historians, and many others, while also having the privilege of becoming familiar with the interesting work of fellow social scientists.
For me, the Collegium period was one of significant intellectual growth. While my early work focused on professions and professionalism in the welfare state, my intention with the fellowship was to expand my work to new fields, delving into political ideas about how welfare-state countries such as Finland could become forerunners in the competitiveness of national economies. Thanks to a fortunate turn of events, I received funding for a Research Council of Finland project as I began my fellowship at the Collegium. The project enabled me to collaborate closely with a research team that examined, for instance, discourses of migrant care workers as a solution to the austerity pressures on welfare states as well as the way migrant care workers were received in the workplace.
This intensive period of data collection and analysis provided a solid foundation for a later project that grew out of the two years at the Collegium, namely the Research Council of Finland Centre of Excellence project that I was part of in 2018–2025. In that framework I led a team focusing primarily on how migration shapes people’s lives beyond employment. Along this intellectual trajectory, my ambitions have grown from studying professionalism to exploring personal lives within the context of complex and constantly changing societies. It is therefore only logical that I currently participate as a senior scholar in the University of Helsinki’s profiling action on
Thinking back to the Collegium years, I have particularly fond memories of how art and literature were part of the everyday community life. Such openness truly fosters intellectual exchange and openness.