The aim of the Catalyst Grant funding is to provide modest but strategical support for launching initiatives, collecting and sharing new data, acquiring and sharing research equipment, and building new contacts and networks between research groups. We received 57 high quality proposals which were assessed by 2-3 independent reviewers each. The evaluation process paid attention to the following criteria: testing and developing new ideas, multidisciplinarity, the feasibility of suggested action, and promise of added value for other researchers in the SSH field beyond the applying research group. Successful applications were strong on several of the criteria.
Congratulations to all the funded projects! The next Catalyst Grant call for applications will open in autumn 2024.
Özlem Celik
8000 €
Faculty of Social Sciences, Faculty of Science
Nordic Urban Political Economy and Ecology Network (NUPE) is an international network of scholars at different career stages focusing on urban political economy and ecology from a critical perspective. We aim to enable comparisons on how neoliberalism, financialization, and migration are changing the socio-spatial urban landscapes in the Nordics.
Katri Havu
10 000 €
Faculty of Law
What are the necessary steps to enable sustainable consumption decisions? How to ensure the proper enforcement of the rules concerning greenwashing? What is the role of private law? A legal analysis with interdisciplinary and comparative elements to empower consumers in the green transition.
Titus Hjelm
15 000 €
Faculty of Arts
Researching distressing topics may affect the researcher's mental health. Based on a survey collecting experiences of early career researchers who work on sensitive or distressing topics, this project will create actionable, data-based recommendations for the University of Helsinki on safeguarding their well-being and the integrity of their research.
Tellervo Härkki
5 000 €
Faculty of Education
This extended pilot project aims at enhancing use of existing HSSH equipment for measuring HRV and activity. This is achieved by developing a toolkit which enables long-term (2-3 months) tracking of participant wellbeing via comfortable, well-fitting and durable personalized data acquisition interface that provides good-quality data on heart’s electric activity.
Antti Kauppinen
12 000 €
Faculty of Social Sciences
For the past 9 years, Dale Dorsey (Kansas) has organized an invitation-only annual workshop on philosophy of well-being for both advanced researchers and promising young scholars. We propose to organize it in Helsinki with a more interdisciplinary focus, enabling new collaborations among research groups and individual researchers.
Maria Khachaturyan
10 000 €
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
This project aims at making first exploratory steps studying variation in storytelling in a multilingual context fusing linguistic approaches and folklore studies. The goal is to annotate the existing corpus of narrative retellings by children and adolescents speaking Mano, a Mande language spoken in Guinea and Liberia, and supplement the existing corpus by further narratives.
Lina Klymenko
4 000 €
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
We are a group of researchers studying Ukraine at the University of Helsinki. Our aim is to strengthen the interdisciplinary expertise on Ukraine within the university research community, to popularize the study of Ukraine among students and the public, and to assist Finnish policy-makers in understanding Ukraine, both the country and the people.
Charlie Kurth
14 500 €
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
The NEG Network brings together emotion researches from the University of Helsinki and abroad to develop novel approaches to neglected questions, e.g., is there a positive side to experiencing negative emotions, how can cross-cultural comparative research enrich our understanding of emotions’ role in moral and social life.
Leena Malkki
15 000 €
Faculty of Social Sciences
The purpose of the initiative is to develop more solid and sustainable foundations for the research on political violence and extremism in Finland by establish the Finnish Network on Political Violence and Extremism Research at the University of Helsinki.
Niina Metsä-Simola
15 000 €
Faculty of Social Sciences
The project advances historical demography in Finland by classifying historical causes of death recorded in old parish registers following the historical International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) that allows international comparisons. The work will also benefit historians by helping to save complex and locality-specific titles from original sources.
Elina Penttinen
14 000 €
Faculty of Arts
A new multidisciplinary network of scholars is set up to co-create knowledge and understanding on the phenomenon of non-physical violence in diverse institutional settings and different historical times. The network organizes e.g., workshops and a writing retreat to create a solid foundation for research applying multiple approaches and methods.
Heikki Pihlajamäki
15 000 €
Faculty of Law
CoCoLaw Project, in a collaboration with Universidade Federal do Ceará, focuses on digitizing early modern police ordinances in Brazil. The initiative compiles invaluable historical sources, enabling comparative analysis with European normative texts and tracing the global circulation of this regulatory instrument.
Essi Pöyry
13 000 €
Faculty of Social Sciences, Centre for Consumer Society Research
Accessing social media data has turned increasingly difficult during the past years as many platforms have limited researchers’ access to data through APIs. This project maps out existing tools and builds new ones to collect Finnish social media data using presidential elections as a case on which data is collected.
Jason Silverman
7 000 €
Faculty of Theology
How did ancient practices of labor create, reinforce, or challenge patterns of inequality? This project explores these through different aspects of the labor experience, from the practical economic structures, to social expectations, and legal structures.
Eeva Sippola
10 000 €
Faculty of Arts
This project investigates Finnish migration to South America. By preparing a historical corpus of migrant materials and developing digital tools for textual analysis, it will provide material and tools that are of interest to researchers from various disciplines, such as cultural studies, digital humanities, linguistics, and social sciences.
Sanna Tirkkonen
10 000 €
Faculty of Social Sciences
"Enhancing and Reassessing Enactivism" brings together scholars from the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, literary studies, aesthetics, and linguistics working with the enactivist framework. The objective is to build national and international networks and to increase the understanding of enactivism and its applications both within the scientific community and among broader audiences.
Anna von Zansen
15 000 €
Faculty of Education
The project tests two novel research methods in the context of second language (L2) education. The methods, eye-tracking and joystick-based video analysis, enable capturing time-dependent patterns in L2 learners’ behaviour. The methods can be used by researchers interested in human behaviour and interaction in live situations or in technology-rich environments.
Susanna Välimäki
7 500 €
Faculty of Arts
Finnish ElectroAcoustic Research Sources (FinEARS) is a research-driven cultural heritage database project, which answers the question: what should a cultural heritage researcher do to make their research outputs re-usable and available for other researchers? As an outcome, the project will produce models for better workflows of cultural heritage data processing.