Risto Kunelius is the Director of HSSH and a Professor of Media and Communications. He specializes in research on the relationship between the media and politics, as well as communication related to climate change. He is responsible for the development of the institute.
Pekka Mäkelä is a research coordinator in the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH) at the University of Helsinki. He is a PI of the research group RADAR (https://radar.cs.helsinki.fi/). His research interests are in normative dimensions of collective and social action, e.g. collective responsibility and trust, social ontology, the philosophy of the social sciences, and philosophical problems of social robotics and human-robot interaction.
Research coordinator Mari Siiroinen has specialized in the research data and infrastructure issues of the faculties at the City Centre Campus. She is currently developing the mobile research equipment loan office for the institute. Siiroinen can help you if you need advice or assistance in collecting, storing, using or managing research data.
Kustaa Multamäki's main responsibilities are preparation of administrative matters, strategic support for the Insitute director, and coordination of on-site support. Please contact him also in all practical matters related to HSSH.
The head of campus development Päivi Karimäki-Suvanto assists the heads of the university units in strategic management and operational development. The head of development coordinate the activities of the university's internal groups together with other directors of sector. Together with the directors of sector, Karimäki-Suvanto is responsible for ensuring that the services of the university's units are user-oriented and resource-efficient, and that users can provide feedback and influence the services.
Research Assistant Anna Jarske-Fransas works with HSSH communications, events and website. In addition, she is working on her PhD at the intersection of study of religions, sustainability and medicine.
Sointu Leikas works as a University Researcher at the HSSH Methodological Unit. Her research background is in personality and social psychology and she specializes in everyday life dynamics in behavior. Leikas gained her PhD in the field of personality psychology in 2010 and has since worked in several research projects in the University of Helsinki. Within HSSH she is interested in developing methods for studying human interaction and behavioral dynamics. She is responsible for HSSH’s collaboration with research groups conducting experimental and experience sampling research.
Heta Moustgaard is a demographer, sociologist and a public health scientist whose research focuses on social inequalities in health and wellbeing. She uses large population data based on individual-level linkages of administrative registers. Moustgaard is interested in the causal processes producing social inequalities and the methodological development in causal inference.
Matti Pohjonen is a University Researcher at HSSH's methodological unit. He works at the intersection of digital anthropology, philosophy and digital methods, developing research approaches for understanding digital cultures and digital politics in a comparative global context. Pohjonen has previously worked as a lecturer in global digital media at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and as a researcher for the VOX-Pol Network of Excellence and at University of Oxford.
Jouni Tuominen works as a university researcher at the Methodological Unit at the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities. He is a computer scientist in the field of knowledge technology. In his work, he applies computational methods for solving digital humanities and social sciences research questions, and has worked extensively especially with different cultural heritage contents. Tuominen is also a visiting researcher at Aalto University where he collaborates in the development of linked data infrastructures (https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/u/jwtuomin/).
Mikko Ojanen (PhD) works as an information specialist in the Helsinki University Library Data Support and as a part-time lecturer at the University of Helsinki Music Research Laboratory and Electronic Music Studio. His research interests are music technology history and sound and technology studies – especially the history and analysis of electroacoustic music in Finland in the 1960s and 1970s. Ojanen has published his research in the national and international forums such as Musiikki, Journal of Art Record Production as well as with Rodopi/Brill and MIT Press Leonardo book series. Ojanen is a board member of Rytmi-instituutti (2018-) and Music Archive Finland (2021-). He is also a member of HSSH institute research infrastructure committee. Ojanen performs frequently as a musician, sound technician and music producer in several electronic, experimental and popular music projects and groups.
Visajaani Salonen works as a Project Planner at HSSH where his responsibilities include working on projects that utilize physiological data collection. He assists with choosing, purchasing, and using equipment, as well as with analyzing the data produced. He also specializes in experience sampling research collecting and software management. Visajaani is a Master of Philosophy, Mathematics. He is currently working on his PhD in Educational Sciences utilizing different, large modeling datasets in evaluation and the usability of old datasets.
MA Pentti Henttonen is a cognitive scientist working as a project coordinator at methodological unit of HSSH, specializing full-stack in psychophysiological research infrastructure and dyadic statistical methods. His past research has focused on conversational interaction in natural and laboratory settings, during performance reviews in workplace context, and involving non-neurotypical and narcissistic participants. His current research topics include emotional responses to conversational ambivalence, the role of prosocial traits in interpersonal synchrony and psychometrics of beneficial and harmful effects of fortitude, also known as the Finnish concept of “Sisu”.
Juho Pääkkönen (M.Soc.Sci) works as a project coordinator at the HSSH methodological unit, where he coordinates and develops methodology, practices and research infrastructure around new digital data. He is a sociologist of science with expertise in science and technology studies, philosophy of science, and computational social science. His PhD work examines how social scientists adapt and repurpose new digital data and analysis techniques into their research, with special focus on large-scale social media data and computational text analysis.
Eetu Mäkelä is a tenure-track associate professor in Human Sciences–Computing Interaction at the University of Helsinki, and a docent (adjunct professor) in computer science at Aalto University. At the Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities, he leads a research group that seeks to figure out the technological, processual and theoretical underpinnings of successful computational research in the humanities and social sciences. Additionally, he serves as a technological director at the DARIAH-FI infrastructure for computational humanities and is one of three research programme directors in the datafication research initiative of the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities.
Emilia Palonen is a Senior University Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Helsinki. Currently Emilia is on research leave as Programme Director in Datafication at the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities and as Leader of HEPPsinki research group. She is PI of Academy of Finland project WhiKnow (2019-2022), Kone Foundation project Now-Time Us Space (2020-24), European Commission funded DRad project (2020-2023), and Academy of Finland and other Trans-Atlantic Partnership project funders' ENDURE exploring resilience in crisis (2022-2024). Palonen has been evaluated as fit for full and associate professor (2022). She received in 2015 a title of Docent (Adj./Ass. Prof.) in Political Science (spec. Cultural Politics), University of Jyväskylä, where she has taught and collaborated in research projects.
Katja Valaskivi is Professor in Religious Studies and Media Research in the Faculty of Theology as well as one of the three research programme directors in the datafication programme at HSSH. She also heads the Helsinki Research Hub on Religion, Media, and Social Change (Heremes), a joint project of the Faculties of Theology, Arts and Social Sciences. Valaskivi's background is in media studies. In her teaching she focuses on the role of media and technology in religion and belief systems, as well as in the birth, circulation and change of collective imagination in the datafied media. Valaskivi's research interests include datafication of religion, imagined communities in datafied media environments, mixed methods research of hybrid media events, epistemic communities and epistemic contestations, as well as ‘technologism’ and ‘innovationism’. The research projects she currently leads focus on the mediatization and datafication of conspiracy theories and religious populism, among other things.
Anton Berg is a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences under the University of Helsinki. He is also part of the Mediatized Religious Populism project (MERELPO), funded by the Academy of Finland, and the interdisciplinary Helsinki Social Computing Group. Berg examines the connections between religion and datafication — especially phenomena such as religious populism on hybrid media platforms. His background is in religious studies, digital humanities and cognitive science. Berg has previously worked in the University of Helsinki's Image Media project (2020-2021), which utilises machine learning, image recognition and computational analysis, and in 2019-2021 as part of the Moralities of Intelligent Machines research group which studies with the moral psychology of robotics and artificial intelligence by using experimental social psychology and cognitive science.
Kirsikka Grön is a doctoral researcher in the Datafication research program at Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities. Grön’s research focuses widely on the social effects of various digital, data-intensive technologies. Currently, Grön studies the everyday effects of algorithmic systems and digital platforms and focuses especially on how people perceive big tech companies’ increasing power in the times of datafication. Grön’s background is in sociology and science and technology studies. Before starting at the institute, Grön has worked at the Centre for Consumer Society Research of the University of Helsinki and the Department of Computer Science of Aalto University.
Dayei Oh is a postdoctoral researcher at HSSH Datafication research team. She also works with the Emotions, Populism and Polarisation research team (HEPP) at Helsinki. Her background is in discursive psychology and media/communication studies. Her research interests include the intersection of digital technologies, public spheres, and democratic discourse. She is interested in mixed-methods research including computational social science. Before joining Helsinki, Oh has worked as a research assistant/associate at Loughborough University and a news assistant at the Associated Press.
I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Datafication research program at Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH). My research field is related to computational social science, solving social issues with applying data-driven approaches on large-scale behavioral data. My main focus at HSSH will be on developing computational indicators and analysis methods that can be used to study the datafication of society and in particular contested epistemies and epistemic communities in online environments.
Feeza Vasudeva is a postdoctoral researcher in the Datafication research program at Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH). She comes from an interdisciplinary background with her bachelor's in Economics, master's in International Relations, and Ph.D. in Cultural Studies within the framework of Inter-Asia Studies. Her broad research interests include contemporary political theories, the study of violence, discourse theory, media studies, and the intersection of populism(s) and nationalism. Her doctoral research analyzed the violence of lynching and the crisis of democracy in India, and her research at HSSH will explore the contested epistemic communities vis-à-vis the datafication of the society.