In practice, what we blame people for—and the degree to which we blame them—partly depends on the outcomes of their intentions and efforts. We blame a murderer who kills more than the equally malicious person who fails to kill because the intended victim happened to wear a bulletproof vest. We also sometimes blame individuals as members of groups, implying that both the content and extent of our blame are influenced by the actions of others. Should our blame—whether directed at others or ourselves—be sensitive to outcomes and group membership in these ways? Compelling arguments suggest that it should not. First, a widely accepted principle holds that only factors under our control should affect how blameworthy we are. Secondly, it is arguable that only our own motivations and attitudes can genuinely reflect poorly on us, implying that neither the outcomes of our intentions and efforts nor the behaviour of others should bear on how blameworthy we are. In response to these arguments, I will develop an account of individual and collective moral responsibility that affirms the ethical significance of both the results of our actions and the actions of other members of groups to which we belong.
I was born in the geographical bull's eye of Sweden (Östersund) in 1978. At the end of the 1990's, I started studying cognitive science and philosophy at Linköping University. After working as e.g. a lifter driver in a refrigerated warehouse, technical writer and journalist, I started a Philosophy PhD in 2008 at the University of Edinburgh on the topic of shared agency. Since receiving my PhD in 2013, I have worked as a postdoc and researcher in Copenhagen, Lund, and Gothenburg, and done a six-month stint as a visiting scholar at Stanford. I work mainly on agency and moral responsibility.
Panic presents a confusion of semantics and experiences confounded by disciplinary divergences. Panic is an individual physiological response to being starved of air, a social and collective experience, a medical-diagnostic subcategory of anxiety, a moral upheaval driven by media spectres, and the cause of the sudden bursting of economic bubbles. Panic has become the byword for the effects of crisis, disaster and disease as well as for the experience that immediately precedes crisis and disaster, whether on an individual or on a mass scale. Panic has distinct definitions in sociology, psychology, medical practice, physiology, and economics. Panic Studies aims to bring these diverse disciplines together, to unify and collectively disrupt understandings of panic, and to clarify some of this conceptual confusion. It aims to better understand the situational experience of panic and the politics of the construction of panic states, and to provide tools for greater understanding of the conditions and treatment of both panic disorders and societal level panic events.
Rob Boddice, PhD (British/Canadian) is the author/editor of 15 books, including "The History of Emotions" (2nd edn, Manchester UP, 2024) and "Knowing Pain: A History of Sensation, Emotion and Experience" (Polity, 2023). His books have been translated into twelve languages. Boddice has published dozens of academic articles and written popular essays for Aeon Magazine, History Today and Psychology Today. He is general editor of Elements in the Histories of Emotions and the Senses for Cambridge University Press and serves the editorial board of Emotion Review. Boddice is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Finnish Historical Society.
My project seeks a scientific understanding of consciousness: what it is, what it does, and how it arises from physical systems. I bridge rigorous theory with lived experience by using tools from information theory to formalise core features of phenomenology, such as unity, differentiation, and a sense of self. I connect these ideas to data through cognitive and computational neuroscience, combining behavioural experiments, brain imaging, and large-scale modelling to assess when and how conscious states change. A second strand asks what this tells us about intelligence more broadly. By comparing biological brains with artificial and collective systems, I examine which informational principles are shared across organisms, AI models, and groups, and which are uniquely human. At its core, the project is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing on philosophy of mind, cognitive science, neuroscience, and AI to build shared concepts and methods. It links centuries old philosophical inquiry about the mind to contemporary information theoretic models.
Acer (Yu‑Chan) Chang is a cognitive scientist and computational neuroscientist studying consciousness and intelligence. His work integrates philosophy of mind, information theory, and cognitive neuroscience to link phenomenology with mechanism. They develop information‑theoretic models of conscious experience and test them with behavioural experiments, brain imaging, and large‑scale simulations. He also compares informational principles across brains, AI systems, and collective agents. At the Collegium, he will build shared concepts and open tools that connect theory with data and foster interdisciplinary collaboration.
Fake news demands real scholarship, especially in a media and political landscape that attributes popular narratives about hidden power to irrational or ill-informed "beliefs." This new book project is premised upon a comparative analytical strategy that deploys anthropology's established capacity for examining sorcery and witchcraft accusations as a foundation for examining conspiracy theories. Both phenomena are to be treated as analogous subjects for the purposes of the project, and also as an epistemological provocation. If both sorcery and conspiracy narratives are approached primarily as social and political in nature rather than as matters of belief, does this open up new opportunities for understanding what is happening when these phenomena occur?
Dr Melissa Demian is a social anthropologist ordinarily based at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Over a 26-year professional career she has conducted research on legal pluralism, customary law, local-level courts and informal disputing systems, gender-based violence, and community organisations in urban settlements. Most of this research has been conducted in Papua New Guinea, and some has been conducted in collaboration with the international development sector. She is the author of In Memory of Times to Come: Ironies of History of Southeastern Papua New Guinea (Berghahn Books 2021), and editor of Grassroots Law in Papua New Guinea (Australian National University Press 2023).
Human reason and decision making are not solitary mental accomplishments but are embedded in social interactions and subject to influence from others. A series of famous studies in social psychology have shown how obedience (Milgram) and conformity (Asch, Zimbardo) dynamics can produce extreme and even irrational behaviour. I seek to show how social influence processes evolved in small group interactions, took on new political significance with the development of the “public sphere” (Habermas), and have transmogrified in the age of internet to produce new forms of polarization and extremism. I will review digital media studies of language and polarization to investigate how social influence has adapted to the new online environment, and to understand how the internet is affecting politics and collective wellbeing.
Kevin Durrheim is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Johannesburg and heads its UJ Methods Lab. An NRF A‑rated social psychologist from South Africa, he explores intergroup relations, racism, segregation, polarization, and social change. With over 190 publications and an h-index around 65, his interdisciplinary work spans experimental, qualitative, and computational methods. He co‑edited influential books like Racial Encounter (2005), Race Trouble (2011), and Qualitative Studies of Silence (2019), and authored key texts on research methods. His research tackles how everyday discourse and identities shape and respond to social transformation.
One of the striking features of evidence gathering is that when we collect evidence, it can significantly matter how that evidence was collected. Scientists and philosophers of science call the effect the selection procedure has on any evaluation of hypotheses in light of evidence the observation selection effect (OSE for short). This research project aims at developing a general and unified account of scientific inference involving OSE. It employs a combination of formally oriented Bayesian philosophy of scientific inference, and practice-oriented analysis of inferences involving OSE in both empirical (e.g., physics, biology) and social sciences (e.g., law). With this combination of perspectives, we can analyse OSE conceptually as well as in its concrete scientific use.
I am Assistant Professor at University of Lodz. I received my PhD in philosophy from the University of Groningen and my PhD in law from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. I was a visiting researcher at the University of Bristol and Stockholm University, a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Montenegro, and a research fellow at the University of Fribourg. I mostly write about philosophy of probability and chance, formal epistemology, rational norms governing evidence gathering in science and legal fact-finding, and rational choice theory (in particular, causal and evidential decision theory).
A core use of human language is to describe facts about the world, using simple sentences such as “Abby is in the library.” However, we can also use complex expressions to convey sets of possible alternatives, as in “Abby is in the library or at the store.” My project will investigate the grammatical strategies employed by different human languages for describing and asking about different alternatives. In other words, I will study cross-linguistic variation in the use of question words, disjunctions, and related grammatical particles and the interpretational mechanisms that underly these uses and their variation.
Concretely, two subprojects are planned. First, I will investigate languages that have multiple disjunctors with contrasting range of use, such as Finnish “vai” versus “tai”. My preliminary work shows that such pairs of disjunctors in various languages of the world do not encode the same distinction. Second, I will investigate the use of question words (‘who’, ‘what’, etc.) to express non-interrogative, quantificational meanings, especially in combination with other grammatical particles. I aim to develop a compositional semantic theory that helps to explain the prevalence of such patterns and their cross-linguistic regularities.
I am a linguist broadly interested in how human languages express meaning. I investigate how we form sentences and map these structures to meaning, and the extent and shape of variation in these strategies across languages of the world. I combine formal linguistic theory, which allows us to make fine-grained predictions about grammatical behavior, with detailed empirical work on individual languages, including through original fieldwork. In particular, much of my work is based on the study of underdescribed languages of Southeast Asia.
My project focuses on environmental crisis and human reproduction that are both pressing issues in public, political and academic debates. I examine the interrelationships between the embodied and ecological environments that condition reproduction and how liveable futures are imagined. The project studies procreation from the perspective of ‘being scarred’. I focus on bodies and ecosystems as reproductive environments that are wounded in ways that hinder fertility and reproductive desires. In other words, I focus on embodied and ecological conditions that may not enable the continuity of life in the form of new births. The project juxtaposes two cases of activism. First, I explore patient activism that emerges from the experience of living with endometriosis, a chronic disease in which cells similar to the uterine lining grow outside the uterus causing persistent pain (subproject 1). Second, I draw on an analysis of younger people’s climate anxiety and activism and explore the effects of damaged ecological surroundings on the decision not to have children (subproject 2). Through its juxtaposition of patient and climate activism, my study’s objective is to analyse struggles to improve the conditions of life in scarred environments – with or without babies.
Elina Helosvuori is a sociologist and science and technology studies scholar. Her earlier work includes multi-sited ethnography about assisted reproduction in Finland, in which she explored the entanglement of clinical practices, laboratory labour and patient experience in fertility treatment practices. Elina received her PhD in sociology from the University of Helsinki in 2021. As a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University, Elina has used ethnographic methods to explore intersections of medical practices and experiences of chronic pain, focusing on surgical interventions to endometriosis. Her current research is situated at the intersections of feminist science and technology studies, medical sociology and environmental humanities.
“Three Miles an Hour” is a creative-ethnographic project that explores the cultural and emotional lives of service workers along Spain’s famed Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route. Drawing on participatory methods and ethnographic songwriting, this project involves co-writing original songs with hospitaleros, café owners, and baggage porters—those who make the pilgrim’s journey possible but are rarely centered in its narratives. By walking the Camino alongside these individuals, I seek to document the stories of labor, hospitality, and cultural exchange at the speed of the human body in motion—three miles an hour. The songs will be shared through public performance, podcasting, and a companion album.
“Together at the Table” brings together two of the most powerful vessels for cultural storytelling: music and food. This project pairs six original songs inspired by real-life cultural encounters with a multi-course meal co-created with a professional chef. Each course corresponds to a song, drawing out themes of belonging, migration, memory, and hospitality. The performance unfolds as an immersive dining experience, engaging all the senses in dialogue. “Together at the Table” will be developed and premiered during the fellowship and is designed to tour internationally in community spaces, homes, and festivals.
Kristina Jacobsen is an ethnomusicologist, cultural anthropologist, and singer-songwriter whose work bridges academia and the arts. Her recent books include Sing Me Back Home (University of Toronto Press/NeoClassica, 2024) and The Creative Ethnographer’s Notebook (Routledge, 2024). Jacobsen’s interdisciplinary projects span ethnographic songwriting, language politics, and musical activism, with fieldwork in Sardinia, the U.S. Southwest, and beyond. A Fulbright Scholar and touring musician, she leads international songwriting retreats and community collaborations from Spain to South Africa. At HCAS, she explores voice, vulnerability, and belonging through place-based songwriting, with a focus on sound and listening in transnational contexts.
This project explores the relationship between playful activities and the evolution of human thought and technology. By focusing on material culture like string and toys, my work studies how these cultural expressions have influenced cognitive development and technological innovation throughout (pre-)history. The project uses an interdisciplinary approach, combining cross-cultural ethnography, mathematics, archaeology, and computational methods, to understand and model the cultural evolution of playful activities. The goal is to understand how our tendency to seek cognitive challenges in our leisure time may have contributed to complex material and symbolic culture, providing fresh perspectives on the drivers of human creativity and technological change.
I'm a multidisciplinary human scientist interested in how cultures and technologies evolve. My research explores how people, across vastly different times and places, have solved everyday problems and built knowledge systems. Currently, I'm investigating the evolution of string technologies, an area I call ethnotopology, and examining the role of play in shaping cultural and cognitive evolution. My work combines cognitive science, anthropology, ethnomathematics, archaeology, and computational methods. I try to apply my research to help preserve a more culturally and ecologically diverse world.
Illiberalism does not represent a novelty or a disruption of the European order but rather a continuation of an anti-universalist intellectual tradition. My project at HCAS examines the coexistence of knowledge regimes in Europe by situating illiberal political philosophy within the Counter-Enlightenment tradition, which challenges the liberal societal order. Recognizing that political transformations are fundamentally epistemic in nature, I focus on the types of knowledge practices cultivated by illiberal epistemic institutions and explore how they navigate international connections and reconcile inevitable philosophical contradictions. Additionally, I analyze the intellectual heritage that illiberal thinkers implicitly and explicitly draw upon with the aim of positioning illiberal political philosophy within the longue durée of epistemic transformations. While addressing these questions from an international perspective, my research is anchored in the context of Hungary, where I have conducted in-depth ethnographic fieldwork for over a decade.
I am a social anthropologist specializing in the crisis of liberalism in the European context. Before joining HCAS as a Core Fellow, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for European Studies, University of Helsinki (2023–2024). I earned my PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Helsinki, and I hold an MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and a BA in Politics and Development Studies from SOAS, University of London.
The political and literary histories of Ukraine and Finland bear a surprising number of similarities, particularly in their struggles under imperial domination and the revival of national identity through culture and literature. The first half of the XIX century became one of the key and decisive periods for both literatures. 1835 saw the first publication of Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala; Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar appeared in its first edition five years later. As prominent examples of Romanticism, both books became prime examples of their respective literary languages, the national myths worked into them by their authors experienced a revival, and both, in the end, had significant impacts on art in the succeeding years.
The current project emphasizes the possibility of studying two classical texts through a comparative, postcolonial lens, focusing on Kobzar and Kalevala as texts that made a significant contribution to the development of national Ukrainian and Finnish myths and narratives. The outcomes of this research are expected to contribute to deepening the topic and constructing new interpretations and methodologies in the literary realm, which will unite two cultures that are geographically distant but close in spirit.
Dr. Tetiana Kalytenko – PhD in Philology (Literature Studies), writer, editor, and literary critic.
Born in Kyiv, Ukraine. Holds a bachelor’s degree in Ukrainian Philology from National Pedagogical Dragomanov University. Received a master’s degree and defended a doctoral thesis at the National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”.
Participant of academic fellowships at the University of Helsinki and Europa-Universität Viadrina.
Author of two fiction books: the novel Antero and the stage play An Agony, as well as numerous literary articles for Chytomo and Culture.PL. Works as a freelance editor for Vovkulaka, Varvar, Vivat, Komora, and RM publishing houses.
Together with archaeology and genetics, linguistics is a discipline that contributes to the reconstruction of human prehistory in terms of communities of the past and their interactions. However, methodologies able to untangle signals about social networks of the past from modern languages need continuous elaboration, which is also true for a more structured effort of triangulating outputs of various disciplines in comprehensive reconstructions of the past.
My project explores both directions. On the one hand, it develops a more general linguistic method that promises to broaden linguistic contribution to prehistory, and on the other, it enhances the interdisciplinary dialogue by facilitating a methodological discussion between linguistics, archeaelogy, folklore studies, and anthropology.
I hold a degree in theoretical and applied linguistics with a specialization in typology and fieldwork from Lomonosov Moscow State University; the PhD I defended in 2005 at the same University was in the field of semantic and morphosyntactic typology. In my postdoctoral projects at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and at the University of Edinburgh, I extended research questions of my thesis to historical domains and worked on documentation and description of two Samoyedic languages in Northern Siberia. In 2017, after an extended maternity leave, I resumed my academic career as a permanent researcher at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, leading an own research group 'Dynamics of language contact in the circumpolar region'. Around the same time, I became affiliated with the University of Helsinki, where my interests went fully interdisciplinary and where I became immersed into Uralic historical linguistics. Currently, I lead an international working group on language diversification and spread in the Siberian North at the University of Helsinki (supported by the Kone foundation). My expertise in integrating linguistic evidence into interdisciplinary reconstructions of the past has been reflected in my recent contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language, International Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics (Elsevier, 3rd edition), and recent papers in the Diachronica journal.
Throughout the history of European integration, democratic representation and practices have been an ongoing source of contention and, for some, of condemnation. The project will analyse and explore the historic nature of public-political interactions between citizens, who critics allege have been isolated and uninvolved, and their representatives in the European Parliament. In exploring this topic, the project will address shortcomings in existing literature. It will challenge studies that unduly emphasise a post-Maastricht turning point, and it will seek to show that democratic representation was not a fixed or a set process but one which changed over time, and that any focus on elections as the exclusive indicator of democratic participation is but only one part of the picture. The project will seek to reveal that a plurality of views and forms of contact, among citizens and their representatives, were a core feature of the history of European integration.
William King is a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (HCAS), University of Helsinki. His current research examines the history of European integration. Prior to joining the HCAS, William was a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute London, and before that a Teaching Fellow in History at Sciences Po (Reims). William holds an MPhil in Historical Studies from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in International History from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Conceptual history
Digital humanities
Sociolinguistics
Resilience of Power: The Russian Literary Language Through Political Changes
My project explores the history and present role of the Russian “literary language,” a powerful cultural institution that has shaped society for more than two centuries. Unlike the idea of a “standard language,” the Russian version was never just about grammar or style: it was a tool of social and political power. In the 19th century, it was promoted as the noble language of Pushkin; during the Soviet Union, it was enforced through schools, dictionaries, and censorship; and today it continues to influence politics, education, and even artificial intelligence.
The project asks why this institution has survived revolutions, regime changes, and the digital age, and what this means for the future of Russian and related languages. To answer these questions, I combine historical documents, large digital text collections, and advanced computational methods. By tracing how governments, teachers, writers, and now AI technologies have used language as symbolic capital, I aim to reveal how power struggles are embedded in everyday speech.
Understanding this hidden history helps us see language not just as a neutral tool of communication, but as a force that shapes identity, culture, and politics — both in Russia and post-Soviet countries.
I am a linguist and university teacher specializing in computational linguistics and the diachronic study of East Slavic languages. My research explores the sociopolitical dimensions of language and applies computational methods to intellectual history and education. I have held academic positions at the Higher School of Economics, Russia (Professor, 2019–2022), University of Helsinki (Associate Professor, 2011–), and the University of Stockholm (Affiliate Professor, 2023–). My international experience includes a Fulbright Senior Scholarship at Harvard and a visiting professorship at Middlebury College, USA.
My project at the Collegium examines the use of authoritative texts in early Christian processes of identity construction. The objectives are 1) to produce new knowledge of the ways in which early Christian writers used authoritative texts when shaping the group identity of their audience, 2) to develop concepts and models for analysing the authority of texts, and 3) to demonstrate the connections between power, identity and scriptural argumentation. The results will provide significant new perspectives by combining the use of authoritative texts with identity construction and develop models for analysing textual authority. At the same time, they may also help to understand the identity building processes of our own time. To examine the interplay between using authoritative tradition, shaping the identity of one’s audience, and wielding power through texts, the project combines close textual study, study of rhetoric, and social psychological theories. The source texts are early Christian writings from the 1st and 2nd centuries CE and include Pauline letters, Hebrews, James and 1 Peter, 1 and 2 Clement, the Epistle of Barnabas, and Justin Martyr’s works.
Dr Katja Kujanpää is a Finnish biblical scholar focusing on Early Christian authors of the first and second centuries. She is interested in applying interdisciplinary approaches (e.g. social psychological theories, quotation studies) to the study of ancient texts. Her doctoral dissertation The Rhetorical Functions of Scriptural Quotations in Romans was published in Brill’s Supplements to Novum Testamentum (2019), and her recent articles examine the relationship between using authoritative texts and forming a robust group identity. After her doctorate at the University of Helsinki (2018), she has made research visits to Oxford University and Australian Catholic University.
This project combines existential media analysis and disability theory to challenge the powerful messianic hypes and norms for being human, forged within socio-technical imaginaries of today. Through pertinent case studies of biometrics, assistive AI, chatbots and video sharing platforms, it places the “extraordinary self” at the heart of the analysis. Rethinking the entanglements of disability, technology, and selfhood, it offers a broadly relevant and much needed critical analysis for our times of interrelated crises.
Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of media and communication studies, PI of the Uppsala Hub for Digital Existence and researcher at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society at Uppsala University. She is a founder of the field of existential media studies. Her current work spans intersections of biometric data, disability and selfhood; and the ambivalent AI imaginary and its relationship to both futures and endings. In her monograph, Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (OUP, 2022) she introduces Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy of limit situations for media theory. She is currently under contract for her new book Dismedia: Technologies of the Extraordinary Self with The University of Michigan Press.
The Arctic climate is currently changing at least three times faster than the climate of the planet as a whole. There is no doubt that this warming has an anthropogenic cause. It is less well known that a hundred years ago, there was also a period of regional Arctic warming that had predominantly natural causes. Warming affected fisheries in the North Atlantic sector of the Arctic waters, motivating studies of glaciers and sea ice and encouraging the exploration of the Northern Sea Route by the Soviets. Observations of changes affected the general understanding of climate mechanisms and forced scientists to shift their views towards accepting the possibility of climate change on a historical scale that they previously rejected. The need to study changes in the Arctic was one of the drivers behind the organization of the Second International Polar Year in 1932 – 33. However, political instability in this period, with the Great Depression, Hitler’s coming to power, and repression in the Soviet Union, hampered Arctic research and international cooperation. The proposed book addresses the following issues: how Arctic warming came to be recognized; what methods were used for its documentation; its influence on sea ice distribution, glacier ablation, and marine animal migrations; how knowledge of Arctic warming circulated transnationally; relations between scientists and authorities in this period and their influence on research agendas in different national and transnational contexts.
In February – July 2025 Julia Lajus was a Senior Smithsonian Fellow at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, and in the fall of 2024 - a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Amsterdam. In 2023, she served as a Visiting Associate Professor at Columbia University (New York), where she taught courses on the history of the Arctic and the history of climate science. Before 2022, she was the Head of the Laboratory for Environmental and Technological History and an Associate Professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in St.Petersburg, Russia. In 2011 – 2015 Julia Lajus served as a Vice president of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH).
While “superhuman AI” routinely achieves tremendous performance in tasks which humans find challenging, it may seem paradoxical that the best available algorithms struggle on many tasks which humans find easy and natural. Especially in domains based on physical activity humans have a clear advantage: expert performance in any sport is beyond the dexterity of current machines. Even apparently simple everyday tasks like finding one’s way around a kitchen and making oneself a sandwich or a cup of coffee are vastly beyond current perception, planning and motor coordination algorithms.
To identify what gives human intelligence this advantage in embodied skilled performance requires bringing together cognitive science, computer science/AI, neuroscience and even philosophy. Experimental research "in the wild" can provide data on human performance beyond narrow laboratory tasks (which are not a major challenge for machines). But such synthesizing findings into a rigorous framework for human-machine comparison requires engaging the fields of AI and robotics at a foundational level. This is my purpose in the INTELLIGENCE3 fellowship.
Otto Lappi is head of the CogEyeSimLab and a tenured Senior University Lecturer in Cognitive Science at the University of Helsinki where he obtained his PhD in Cognitive Science 2014. He has published over fifty original research & review papers and one book.
He was an Academy Research Fellow in 2025–2025, and currently an INTELLIGENCE3 research fellow (2025–2028) at the Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies. He has spent mobility periods (1–3 months) in Ecole Centrale Nantes (Erasmus+), University of Graz (COLIBRI fellowship) and TU Munich (Global Visiting Professors fellowship).
The great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam once wrote to his mother from Paris in his youth that it was not Russia he felt nostalgic for, but Finland. The aim of my project is to provide a detailed commentary on this remark. In the poet’s mind, Finland was associated with some of the most important events of his life: his first love, his first true youthful friendship, his fascination with revolutionary ideas, and his baptism into Lutheranism. My work will focus on each of these aspects and on their shared Finnish dimension.
I was born in 1967, defended my Candidate’s (PhD) dissertation on Osip Mandelstam in 1995, and my Doctoral dissertation on Acmeism in 2002. I am the author of over 850 published works. In Russia, I have been designated a foreign agent.
My project investigates the complex history of work-related fatigue in occupational medicine. In the project, the concept of fatigue refers broadly to disabling tiredness that can be physical, mental or both. By analysing medical texts and archival findings, the research uncovers how the idea of the working body was transformed in post-1945 occupational medicine into a complex entity that could be modulated to tackle fatigue, the nemesis of modern society. The aim of the research is to contribute to academic and public discussions focused on stress, psychosomatic illnesses and public health.
I am a historian with a multidisciplinary background in the humanities and social Sciences. I did my MA in cultural history (2009) and my PhD in gender studies (2015) at the University of Turku. In 2021, I was granted the title of docent in political history at the University of Helsinki. In recent years, my research interest has focused on the history of fatigue and stress. In 2026, I will start working as a University Researcher at the Centre for Consumer Society Research, University of Helsinki.
Worldwide, persons with mental illness are overrepresented in criminal justice systems. Despite Finland’s comparatively lower inequality and its strong social safety net, there is significant and persistent overlap between mental health problems and criminal offending. In this project, I apply integrated life-course criminological and mental health recovery perspectives, guiding a set of studies to examine factors that place persons with a mental illness at risk for offending and incarceration. With an interdisciplinary network of colleagues at the University of Helsinki, University of Eastern Finland, and government agencies (Finnish Institute of Health and Welfare, Finnish Criminal Sanctions Unit, Prison Health Service), using administrative and survey data, I focus on: (1) How social embeddedness factors, such as education, employment, and living situation affect the risk of criminal offending for persons with and without mental illness; (2) Among prisoners, how do key social psychological factors, such as resilience, loneliness, and social inclusion affect the risk of reoffending? and (3) How do adolescent mental health problems affect the risk of delinquency and subsequent offending, by impeding normative adult transitions in terms of educational attainment, employment, and independent housing?
I received my PhD from the State University of New York at Albany and was a NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. I was a Fulbright Scholar, Fellow of the American Scandinavian Foundation, and hold the title of Dosentti at the University of Helsinki. My research, in the areas of crime, mental illness, and social control has been published in American Journal of Sociology, Criminology, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Psychology Quarterly, Aggression and Violent Behavior, International Criminology, Advances in Criminological Theory, and Nordic Journal of Criminology. I am the Editor of Society and Mental Health.
This project investigates the development of philosophical virtue ethics in the Islamic world between ca. 900 and 1500 CE. The big question concerns the philosophical and religious components of ethical thought. Many recent studies have shown the philosophical interest of ethical arguments in theology and jurisprudence; in contrast, scholarship of philosophical virtue ethics has been scarce. Yet, during this period, virtue became a central concept in religious disciplines, and thus an important component of "Islamic ethics". The big question can be divided into a historical and a philosophical part: 1) How is philosophical virtue ethics, ultimately grounded in Greek philosophy, fused with the Islamic components of jurisprudence and theology, as well as with Arabic, Persian, and Sufi notions of virtue; 2) how can the focus on the moral status of acts in jurisprudence and theology be combined with the focus on moral agent in philosophy?
This big question is approached through various case studies. The first concerns the reception of Miskawayh (d. 1030), the most prominent moral philosopher of the Islamic tradition: In what ways do later authors adapt his seminal treatise of the Purification of Character Traits into their respective religious contexts? A second case study addresses the taxonomy of virtues: How and by what grounds are the initially Platonic and Aristotelian classifications of virtues transformed by later authors?
Janne Mattila earned his PhD from the University of Helsinki in 2011. He is a researcher of the history of Islamic philosophy and philosophical theology. His research interests have primarily related to ethics, including animal ethics, and philosophical interpretation of religion, as well as to technical questions concerning the formation of the philosophical encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity.
The overarching theoretical goal of the project is to analyze sociologically the responses of Orthodox actors to modernity and modern issues, in particular, discourses that are formed around environmental issues. The research explores the reception of environmental ideas in the Eastern Orthodox Church and its engagement in environmental activities. The aim of the research project is to study the environmental projects in Orthodox churches in several European countries, analyze the eco-narratives that are used by the research participants to describe them, and, finally, elicit and study the discourses about environment that exist among Orthodox believers across Eastern Orthodox Churches. While many scholars focus on studying the discourses produced by high-ranking church officials and religious opinion leaders, the significance of this research is to explore narratives and discourses formed on the ground through the lived environmental experiences of Orthodox believers. Primary research data will be collected in Greece, Poland, and Finland as countries that have Orthodox communities which run environmental initiatives.
As a sociologist, I study various aspects of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and monasticism. More broadly, I am interested in alternative lifestyles and intentional communities, including ecological ones. I defended my PhD magna cum laude at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). My doctoral research focused on contemporary Eastern Orthodox monasticism in North America. Previously, I conducted research on environmental initiatives within the Orthodox Church, as well as on contemporary monasticism in Russia. An academic nomad, I have studied or worked in Russia, Canada, Germany, Poland, the U.S., and Greece.
Corded Ware culture (c 2900–2200 BCE) changed the Stone Age life of the Finnish coast when it arrived 5000 years ago, bringing potentially a new language, genes, material culture, burial practices and subsistence to an area previously inhabited by hunter-fisher-gatherers. This project studies the establishment and adaptation (even – disappearance) of Corded Ware communities in Finland in general and the regional differences within the country in particular: how these groups responded and coped with the challenges of the northern environment, both socio-cultural (local hunter-fisher-gatherers) and natural (boreal biogeographical region under climate change)? Key questions are: 1) how did the Corded Ware societies react to the local natural and cultural environments? 2) what kind of networks and relationships prevailed between different communities? 3) are there dissimilarities in development within and/or between different regions of Finland and what is the reason for them? Even if the focus is on past events, the themes of this project – cultural encounters in the age of climate change – are also relevant in the world of the 2020s.
Kerkko Nordqvist is a prehistoric archaeologist and did his PhD in the University of Oulu in 2018. His main fields of research are prehistoric archaeology and boreal hunter-gatherer archaeology in particular, as well as the interaction of forager and farmer populations. His research interests include prehistoric material cultures and their manufacture, distribution and exchange, economy and subsistence, as well as culture and society in eastern and northern boreal Europe. Nordqvist is the author of two hundred publications, including numerous scientific articles, edited volumes and popular scientific papers.
Elina’s research in HCAS will complete her long-term project on expectations, and implicit and explicit ideals, for how scientific knowledge should and could matter in society, among academics, university students, activists, government officials and the general public, in Finnish research collaborations that relate to Africa. Such collaborations usually have explicitly pronounced hopes for relevance regarding knowledge production and development, especially in the fields of health and gender. The project focuses on the fields of biomedicine and Gender Studies, two fields with highly different epistemic and ontological discussions and aspired societal roles. Epistemic questions are often regarded as internal debates of quality; here the questions are about future oriented affective desires for how knowledge should matter in the world. The overall book project includes sub-studies, authored in collaboration with colleagues, on a vaccine trial set in Benin 2017–2020 by a team of Finnish biomedical researchers; a study on the experienced relevance of an increased emphasis and visibility of questions regarding race, racialization and global LGBTIQ rights and processes of knowledge production among gender studies scholars and students that deal with imagined or real “Africa”, and a study on policy-academia collaborations in the field of development.
Elina Oinas is professor in Sociology at the Swedish School of Social Science at the University of Helsinki since 2015. She has also worked in Global Development Studies and Gender Studies departments. She has been visiting scholar in Addis Ababa, Cambridge, Witwatersrand, Berkeley, Western Cape; and as staff member in University of Turku, Åbo Akademi, and the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala. She is currently serving as Vice President of the International Sociological Association 2023–2027. Her long-term research interests are gender, the body, health, feminist science studies, global sociology, development and critical studies of the Nordic.
In developing his view of knowledge (epistēmē), Aristotle addresses various kinds of epistemic priorities. This project explores four distinct types: (i) the priority of perception over illusion, (ii) knowledge over belief, (iii) non-demonstrable knowledge over demonstrable knowledge, and (iv) the methodological priority of what is ‘better known to us’ over what ‘better known to nature’. These four types have not previously been examined together in a single study. By undertaking this task, my principal aim is to develop a novel, comprehensive perspective on Aristotle’s epistemology and theory of science. The project builds on my previous work on Aristotle’s theories of perception, memory, thought and scientific methodology, particularly epagōgē (induction). Another aim of the project is to review what is distinctive about Aristotle’s approach to knowledge and scientific inquiry in relation to later developments in this field. In what sense can Aristotle be considered a precursor to ‘virtue epistemology’, the idea that knowledge is an achievement of our cognitive capacity, i.e., epistemic virtue? Why did Aristotle prioritize knowledge? I am also leading a Kone Foundation project that explores the scientific approach to biology taken by Aristotle and his successors, and translates Aristotle’s zoological treatises into Finnish for the first time.
I have studied classics and philosophy at the Universities of Helsinki and Oxford. After obtaining my doctorate from the University of Helsinki in 2010, with a thesis on Aristotle’s theory of perception, I pursued a post-doctoral project funded by the Academy of Finland in Helsinki. I have held fixed-term University Lectureships in Helsinki and Jyväskylä and have undertaken research visits to the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (Uppsala), the University of Gothenburg, and Clare Hall, Cambridge. I am also a full member and the 3rd vice chair of the Finnish Matriculation Examination Board for the term 2025–2027.
The project proposes new conceptual and methodological approaches that replace the established notion of individual teacher competence with that of a collective, relational agency, which involves mobilising support and knowledge that exists within school communities. Migration flows and overlapping crises have highlighted the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration for supporting increasing diverse population of learners. Diversity and uncertainty have become a normal, common features of schools today. Yet their implications, such as unprecedented numbers of immigrant students, are often seen as an additional demand on teachers. In this context, the project explores new knowledge base for teachers’ collective practice using interdisciplinary network approaches to examine the interaction between teacher agency and social/institutional structures. It involves collaboration between social and data scientists to map the norms embedded in the social networks of schools and wider communities. The aim of researching teaching practices as interdependent with those of other actors is to capture the untapped potential of collective agency for educational change, in ways that are transferable to other disciplines.
Nataša Pantić is a Professor of Educational Change and Diversity at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her current research focuses on relationships and community building in education settings. Recently she led a multinational study of teacher agency and collaboration in the contexts of migrant education. She has published in the field’s leading journals, taught on teacher education and postgraduate courses, and led consultancies for international organisations. For more information and publications, see https://sites.google.com/site/natasapantic/
The aim of this project is to investigate the experiences of children and young people affected by the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war and to assess the short- and long-term consequences of these experiences. It seeks to identify key factors that support adaptability and resilience, while also mapping the profiles of population groups that require additional attention and support. By examining psychological, behavioral, and biobehavioral processes that influence health and well-being, the research will contribute to a deeper understanding of how individuals and communities respond to prolonged adversity. The findings will inform evidence-based policies and practical strategies to support recovery, promote resilience, and sustain health in life-threatening and chronically stressful environments. A particular focus will be placed on mechanisms that protect and promote well-being at both individual and collective levels, including strategies that can be mobilized by families, communities, and state institutions. Ultimately, this work aims to contribute to the broader vision of rebuilding a peaceful, healthy, and flourishing society for Ukraine’s future generations.
Iuliia Pavlova is a Ukrainian health scientist and Full Professor at Ivan Boberskyj Lviv State University of Physical Culture. Her work explores trauma, resilience, mental and physical health, public health policy, with a focus on displaced and war-affected populations. She applies cross-cultural and biobehavioral approaches to investigate psychological adaptation in high-risk environments. A frequent collaborator in international consortia, she has published extensively on mental health, subjective well-being, and posttraumatic stress. She is affiliated with several international scientific networks on digital mental health, physical literacy, and psychosocial support for youth.
My current research explores the Holy Land as an idea. I read this idea of the Holy Land as a culturally constructed ideological phenomenon, and I’m interested in how this landscape of the mind has taken countless forms in the Christian imagination. The manifold ideas of the Holy Land are projections of a multiplicity of religious and cultural narratives, collective memories, and ideals that each contribute to reimagining a sacred landscape and conceptually imprinting it upon the physical place. I focus on processes of ideological competition and interreligious contestation in the formation of ideas of the Holy Land. As Christian visions of the Holy Land are enacted and reinforced on the ground, they entangle with Jewish and Muslim constructions of sacred place which weave different histories and meanings around the same locations, and lay claim to the same place. My work investigates how these encounters with the religious and cultural other shape diverse concepts and expressions of sacred space.
I am Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Merrimack College, and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lund University. I received a Ph.D. from Boston College, as well as degrees from Boston University and Bard College. My publications include the monographs The Nun in the Synagogue: Judeocentric Catholicism in Israel and Remembering the Future: The Experience of Time in Jewish and Christian Liturgy, and the edited volumes Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Interreligious Hermeneutics: Ways of Seeing the Religious Other and the forthcoming Jerusalem in Memory and Eschatology: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Visions of the Past and Future of Jerusalem.
Ever since the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, there has been a lot of academic and public interest in Large Language Models or LLMs and the chatbots based on them. Chatbots seem to produce meaningful English text and make assertions about the world. Yet, the current consensus seems to be that they lack beliefs, intentions and linguistic understanding. Since human language use is universally thought to depend on such mental states, many people quickly infer that chatbot language use is a mere illusion, wholly in the eye of the beholder. But this conclusion leaves us in an uncomfortable place, shifting all responsibility relating to the output and its potential negative effects from the chatbot and its programmers to the users who interpret the outputs. My aim in this project is to argue that even if we think that LLMs and chatbots lack mental states, we can still see them as really using language.
I'm a philosopher working on foundational questions about language and mind. I'm currently finishing a book about the nature of linguistic meaning.
I completed my Ph. D. at the University of Southern California in 2014. I then worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Rice University, completed Postdoctoral Fellowships at Institut Jean Nicod and University of Barcelona, and taught at the University of Edinburgh. Currently, I'm a senior researcher at the University of Vienna.
The project contextualizes the plays of Václav Havel – former President of Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic, as well as an internationally renowned playwright – within the broader literary tradition of European drama. Although Havel’s work has been examined in relation to the Theatre of the Absurd, the influence of ‘canonical’ authors such as Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Goethe on his writing has not been systematically explored. This project identifies how Havel’s recurring references to these authors allowed him to comment on the challenges and dilemmas of living in a socialist and, later, neoliberal society. It also investigates how Havel's dramatic and dramaturgical approach informed his political thought. More broadly, the project highlights the transcultural importance of European authors from the 16th to early 20th centuries in shaping ideas around conscience, identity, and dissent in Central and Eastern Europe during the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Jitka Štollová is a literary scholar with a focus on the intersection of literature and history, the concept of tyranny, and early modern drama and its reception. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2018. Before joining the Collegium, she held a Title A Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford. She has taught modules on Shakespeare and early modern print culture at Cambridge, Oxford, and Queen Mary University of London. Her BA dissertation, Anatomy of Villainy, was awarded the Jan Palach Award, the highest honour conferred by the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague.
My research project traces the dramaturgical practices of three Singaporean artists/groups — socially engaged theatre company Drama Box, minority dance group P7:1SMA and playwright Nabilah Said — as they navigate the climate transition from a small island in the Malay Archipelago. In artmaking, we often consider how the climate and adjacent crises might dictate the creative processes of a work, where artists might source for sustainable materials, reuse sets, or offset carbon. Here, I consider the reverse: how dramaturgical thinking can shape climate thinking, especially for island ecosystems that are especially at risk of the ongoing polycrisis. In this vein, my project identifies emergent “dramaturgies of inconvenience” in ecologically oriented Singaporean artmaking, and articulates how inconvenience, and its contingent affects of discomfort, slowness and friction, can become a productive — even pleasurable — frame through which we might collectively address disagreement and dissensus in service of a planetary call to action.
Corrie Tan makes sense of art through intimate writing. A wayfarer between journalism and academia, her creative practice traverses criticism, dramaturgy, facilitation and research. She holds a Ph.D. in theatre and performance studies from King’s College London and the National University of Singapore, and for the past 15 years has written extensively about performance and culture for The Guardian, ArtsEquator, Exeunt Magazine and The Straits Times. Corrie is the arts editor of Jom, an independent digital magazine based in Singapore, and the director of the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network. In her work, she is committed to a politics of care in critical discourse across South-east Asia.
Social media is a crucial platform for contemporary efforts to speak against various forms of violence and rights violations, including human gender-based violence as well as violence and harm-doing toward animals and the environment. Whereas social media activism focused on such topics can be effective and empowering, anti-violence social media activists face constant resistance and hate speech, which can pose limits to the sustenance of their activism. My project delves into the affective dynamics and experiences of participation in social media struggles focused on human and more-than-human violences. The research aims to develop an understanding of the particularities, continuities and interconnections of affects created in struggles over different forms of violence and harm-doing on social media, and of the ways in which anti-violence activists’ intersectional positionings and identifications get shaped in and shape their participation and possibilities to be heard in such struggles.
Satu Venäläinen is a university lecturer in social psychology, University of Helsinki. Her previous research has focused on violence and gender, which she has examined from the perspectives of online and offline discourses, affects and the construction of intersectional identities. Her research tends to blend a social-psychological orientation to subjectivities formed through social dynamics and critical insights from disciplines such as gender studies and media and cultural studies. Her recent postdoctoral project focused on young people’s perspectives and affective experiences of sexual harassment, in which she continued developing an affective-discursive approach to analysing the entwinement of meanings and embodied experiences.
Our listening environment consists of many overlapping sound objects—that is, sounds that can be linked to a specific source, such as human speech, a passing car, or a singing bird. These moment-to-moment changing listening environments can be called soundscapes. My research seeks to understand the neural mechanisms that allow such soundscapes to be parsed into components, enabling, for example, the tracking of speech in situations with many distracting background noises. I also investigate how our brains recognize, learn, and form new sound-object representations and categories. This work is important because it has recently been understood that certain sound-related syndromes are tied to either external (sound sensitivity) or internal (tinnitus) sound objects that fill the mind and challenge well-being.
I graduated as a psychologist in 2012 and a PHD in 2019 at the University of Helsinki. Over my career I have worked at several Finnish (Aalto University, Tampere University, University of Turku) and international (Newcastle University, Georgetown University) universities. Since 2021, I have served as a PI at the University of Helsinki. In 2023 I formed the Attentional Multimodal Networks research group. Our group studies how brain function changes across functional and cognitive contexts. We use neuroimaging methods combined with computational modeling, developing methods to integrate information from different neuroimaging datasets collected with experimental designs that approximate natural situations.