HSSH Catalyst Grants offers seed money for research groups to enable new initiatives, enhance sharing of research data and acquiring equipment. Call for 2026 grant applications is open 16.6.–1.9.2025.
HSSH Catalyst Grant is a yearly round of open support for research groups at the City Centre Campus. The call for the HSSH Catalyst Grant 2026 is now open and the deadline for applications is September 1st, 2025.
The grant is primarily directed to initiatives that enforce multidisciplinary networking, co-operation between UH research groups or initiating new research groups. Several research groups are encouraged to apply together for shared purposes.
The Catalyst Grant provides modest but strategical support to existing and emerging research groups. Groups can apply support for a variety of needs, ideas, and cooperative initiatives. These may, for instance, include support for:
HSSH methodological unit will offer methodological consultation for awarded projects.
For 2026 we will also select 5–6 projects for methodological mentoring. The HSSH staff will collaborate intensively with these projects and seek to enhance their wider impact on the campus. This can include organization of workshops, publication of results and outcomes in different forms or other activities.
Please indicate in the application whether your project would wish to be involved in this new collaborative programme and what types of methodological, infrastructural and analytical support the project would most benefit from.
All funded projects are expected to present the results of their work in the HSSH weekly Methodological Brown Bag Seminar.
The applications will be assessed by HSSH staff, with the support of selected experts from the UH SSH community. The evaluation pays particular attention to the following criteria:
All existing and emerging research groups working in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities at the City Centre Campus can apply for the grant. The PI of the application must hold a doctoral degree and be affiliated (via an employment contract or a grant-funded researcher agreement) with one of the partner units of HSSH (Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Social Sciences, Faculty of Education, Faculty of Law, Faculty of Theology, Swedish School of Social Sciences, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies). Catalyst Grant funding does not support work for PhD projects.
The application consists of:
Please note that:
Submit your application using this e-form.
The deadline for the 2026 HSSH Catalyst Grant applications is September 1st, 2025 at 16:00.
Decisions for the 2026 grants will be prepared by a working group led by the director of HSSH. Funding decisions will be announced on October 13th, 2025 at the latest.
All funding must be used during 1.1.–30.11.2026.
HSSH University researcher Jouni Tuominen, jouni.tuominen@helsinki.fi
HSSH Director Risto Kunelius, risto.kunelius@helsinki.fi, 040-1904085 (you can leave an SMS request for calling back).
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.
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. We received 36 proposals which were assessed by 3 independent reviewers each. Below you can find a list of all funded projects.
Ben Cowley
14 955 €
Mind&Matter PIs Benjamin Cowley and Riikka Möttönen aim to use cognitive neuroscience to enhance study of cooperative cognition, learning and communication in University of Helsinki. Specialist expertise from post-doc Dr Andrei Rodionov will facilitate non-invasive brain stimulation experiments on how brain rhythms contribute to cognition and help build research networks.
Veikko Eranti
14 850 €
CSD Nordic Encounters in New Social Pragmatism fosters both intellectual and policy-impact development of an academic nordic network of pragmatist sociologists through organizing one academic colloquium as well as a summer school where researchers network and develop thinking together with practitioners of democracy.
Eeva Haataja
8 600 €
Co-teaching is a growing method to support students' diverse needs in today’s inclusive classrooms. However, surprisingly little is known about situational practices of co-teaching. The main objective of this project is to provide knowledge on the eye-contact interaction between co-teachers and methodological development for research communities and future projects.
Ilona Hongisto
15 000 €
The project explores audiovisual methods as tools in critical thinking and analysis. It aims to establish criteria and best practices for using audiovisual methods in making and disseminating academic work.
Lina Klymenko
14 000 €
The International Politics of Narratives, Memory and Power (MAP) research network brings together a diverse group of scholars from social sciences and humanities who work on the role of collective memory in international relations with the aim of organizing common research events, such as seminars, and publishing special issues or collective volumes.
Aleksi Knuutila
14 850 €
The AI Ethnography Network aims to create methodological innovation in the application of artificial intelligence in ethnographic work and to study the social impact of AI ethnographically. The network brings together scholars from different countries for seminars, maps out existing approaches for a toolkit and supports collaborative grant writing.
Salla Kurhila
14 913,50 €
The project involves updating and supplementing the University of Helsinki Conversation Data Archive by collecting two types of video material: material that is as openly accessible as possible for research and teaching purposes according to current standards, and material that utilizes the latest technology in data collection and processing. The collected material will be transcribed, piloting an automatic conversation analysis transcription program. The collected material will also be used, for instance, in an online course. Additionally, the project will include workshops on data collection and processing.
Antti Lahelma
11 500 €
This project explores the potential of satellite imagery for urban archaeology, specifically in four Roman cities: Pompeii, Herculaneum, Ostia, and Timgad. The outcome will be new methods for studying Roman cities using satellite imagery.
Otto Lappi
12 746 €
This project initiates a collaboration with the Lithuanian Sports University. A large eye tracking dataset is collected in a driving simulator and released as open data. The data collection, sharing and analysis procedures open up possibilities for eye tracking in expertise studies, and scientifically valid applications in sports training.
Pia Olsson
15 000 €
In the project, research-based methods and applicability of SSH urban research will be developed to incorporate experiential knowledge into urban planning. Landscape democracy is strengthened by publishing a methodological guide book for urban planners and organising an exhibition highlighting the role of urban dwellers within the urban planning processes.
Anna Rainio
15 000 €
Universities produce scientific papers and degrees at an ever increasing rate. Is this growth helping us to create a better world? We adopt a unique multi-disciplinary first-person methodology to gain (i) knowledge about how “fast science” affects researchers and students, and (ii) practical capabilities to “slow down” as a collective.
Sakari Saaritsa
15 000 €
The project supports developing a historical database on health and historical demography in Finland in 20th century. It enhances research cooperation between economic and social history and economics across institutional and disciplinary boundaries and consolidates a research group around the database. The project supports developing a historical database on health and historical demography in Finland in 20th century. It enhances research cooperation between economic and social history and economics across institutional and disciplinary boundaries and consolidates a research group around the database. Expertise on managing sensitive data is developed and shared.
Åsa von Schoultz
15 000 €
The University of Helsinki Citizen Barometer, support for technical assistant/researcher to run the daily operations.
Olga Tkach
14 470 €
The COMU Network brings together researchers from the University of Helsinki, across Finland and other Nordic and Baltic countries to develop novel approaches to neighbouring as a form of convivial practice of urban residents, and to design cross-cultural comparative research to understand the current diversity of neighbour and housing relations.
Auli Vähäkangas
14 400 €
We will organise public discussions and workshops and to conduct a pilot study in which we will text minority sensitive co-research methods. Furthermore, we will produce ethical guidelines of ethnography and co-research as well as to discuss how these methods can be utilised while studying sensitive issues.
The mission of the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH) is to enhance methodological development, build new research infrastructures and support multidisciplinary research networks at the University of Helsinki. One element in this work is the HSSH Catalyst Grant, a yearly round of open support for research groups at the City Centre Campus. The call for the HSSH Catalyst Grant 2025 is now open and the deadline for applications is June 10th, 2024.
The Catalyst Grant provides modest but strategical support to existing and emerging research groups. Groups can apply support for a variety of needs, ideas, and cooperative initiatives. These may, for instance, include support for:
We also encourage applicants to suggest ideas other than the ones sketched above. The evaluation process pays particular attention to the following criteria: testing and developing new ideas, reaching for multidisciplinarity, the feasibility of suggested action, and promise of added value for other researchers in the SSH field (beyond the applying research group).
Eligibility
All existing and emerging research groups working in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities at the City Centre Campus can apply for the grant. The PI of the application must be affiliated (via an employment contract or a grant-funded researcher agreement) with one of the partner units of HSSH (Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Social Sciences, Faculty of Education, Faculty of Law, Faculty of Theology, Swedish School of Social Sciences, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies). There are no formal requirements for the PI on holding the title of docent, a degree or a position.
The grant is primarily directed to initiatives that enforce multidisciplinary networking, co-operation between UH research groups or initiating new research groups. Several research groups are encouraged to apply together for shared purposes.
Application instructions
Applications must include the following:
(No CV or other attachments are required.)
Please note that:
Schedule
The deadline for the 2025 HSSH Catalyst Grant applications is June 10th, 2024 at 16:00.
Decisions for the 2025 grants will be prepared by a working group led by the director of HSSH. Funding decisions will be announced on September 4th, 2024 at the latest.
All funding must be used before November 30, 2025.
Further inquiries
HSSH University researcher Jouni Tuominen, jouni.tuominen@helsinki.fi
HSSH Director Risto Kunelius, risto.kunelius@helsinki.fi, 040-1904085 (you can leave an SMS request for calling back)
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.
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.
The Catalyst Grant funding for HSSH research groups in 2023 received 47 well thought-out applications, and the final decision were made in December 2022. Warm thanks to all applicants and congratulations to the funded projects!
Please see the list of project descriptions and principal investigators of the funded projects below.
Terhi Ainiala
Faculty of Arts
In the project, the close environment and urban dwellers are studied from the viewpoint of meaning-making and affective practices. The focus is on the ways people experience their environment as empowering. The project combines onomastic and ethnological expertise.
Ilkka Arminen
Faculty of Social Sciences
‘Synthetic data as an object and a tool of research’ is a project that explores the possibilities to use synthetic data for research. Synthetic data is generated using the Artificial Intelligence technique of deep generative learning, e.g., deep-fakes. The possibilities of synthetic data for research are worth exploration.
Barry K. Gills
Faculty of Social Sciences
The Global Extractivisms and Alternatives Initiative (EXALT) is a multidisciplinary research network focusing on critical social-scientific and environmental-social-scientific analyses of natural resource politics. We aim to enhance the value of extractivism as an analytical concept in the social sciences and address global crises associated with extractivist practices around the globe.
Daria Gritsenko
Faculty of Arts
Researchers in different fields of HSSH study how humans make decisions. To explore the choices people make and how they think, multiple methods can be deployed. Our project is the first step towards formalising how multimethod synergies can be created by multidisciplinary research groups studying judgment at a cognitive level.
Roosa Haimila
Faculty of Arts
The project is a multidisciplinary research collaboration that investigates non-religious non-theists’ views about right and wrong in ten countries. Non-religious non-theists are commonly seen as individuals who lack beliefs, including (religious) moral views. The project provides the first data-driven cross-cultural examination of non-religious non-theists’ views about right and wrong.
Jaana Hujanen
Swedish School of Social Sciences
The proposed research project and network will investigate the agency and role of professional journalists, interloper practitioners and local environmental actors in maintaining and sustaining the public knowledge about global and local environmental problems, enabling public participation and enhancing finding solutions to environmental challenges. The research conducted by the network focuses on global North.
Santeri Junttila
Faculty of Arts
Uralilainen etymologinen viitetietokanta (Urevi) on sanahakemisto uralilaisten kielten etymologisesta tutkimuskirjallisuudesta. Hankkeen tässä vaiheessa keräämme viitteitä vuodesta 2001 alkaen julkaistusta kirjallisuudesta. Ilman viitetietokantaa on ajantasaista tutkimustietoa hyvin vaikea löytää ja tehdä sen pohjalta omaa tutkimusta. Viitetietokanta siis vauhdittaisi kielihistorian ja lopulta kaikkien historiatieteiden edistymistä.
Kalle Juuti
Faculty of Education
“Helsinki-Node" symposium and bi-monthly online seminar series will be organized. Helsinki-Node promotes and enhances the use of network analysis in research on teaching and learning briging together professionals from different disciplines to build new collaborations and initiate research applying network analysis.
Tuukka Kauhanen
Faculty of Theology
The Hexapla (= “Six-folded”) was an ancient work that compared the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) with four to six of its Greek translations in parallel columns. The project will produce a new edition of the remaining fragments of the Hexapla of the Books of Samuel for the international Hexapla Institute.
Jannika Lassus
Faculty of Arts
The project aims to create a corpus of the essay tests from 2021 and 2022 in Swedish as mother tongue and makes the corpus accessible through the Finnish Kielipankki and Korp. It supports the study of contemporary Finland-Swedish and will be an important source of information for language researchers.
Beata Mäihäniemi
Faculty of Law
The initiative establishes a research group examining the uses and character of behavioural economics in the field of technology law. The group aims at 1) building a research network, 2) developing digital research expertise for legal scholarship, and 3) publishing novel work in the topical area.
Elizabeth Peterson
Faculty of Arts
This project investigates English pragmatic borrowings in Finland Swedish, ie, everyday borrowings such as swear words and response particles. While pragmatic borrowings from Finnish have already been studied, this is a new inquiry for Finland Swedish, offering critical insights into the dynamics of language borrowing in the current era.
Pekka Posio
Faculty of Arts
The project Language, gender and sexuality: theoretical and methodological perspectives sets out to create a network and a discussion forum for researchers working on the intersections of language, sexuality and gender in Finland and beyond, starting with a workshop and a joint publication.
Veijo Pulkkinen
Faculty of Arts
The ARNE (archival research network) project builds a multidisciplinary network by organizing three workshops focusing on different types of archival material: born-digital, thematic collections of personal experiences, and transnational and multilingual material. The aim is to provide a forum for developing new research approaches and methods to archival research.
Niko Pyrhönen
Swedish School of Social Sciences
An examination of “conspiracy talk” in the lives or ordinary Americans: Studying the prevalence of conspiracy theories across the United States through analysis of American Voices Project data. A research visit and collaboration between researchers at the University of Helsinki and Stanford University.
Samuli Reijula
Faculty of Arts
The Cognitive Architectures of Science workshop develops a new research program where theoretical resources from cognitive science and the philosophy of science are used to analyze science as a distributed cognitive system.
Riikka Räisänen
Faculty of Education
The project will initiate a novel multidisciplinary material and artifact research group at the UH Center Campus. Focus of the research is especially in textiles and fibers with research methodology applying qualitative and quantitative methods and view angles varying from material research to historical, cultural and societal context.
Sakari Saaritsa
Faculty of Social Sciences
The project supports developing a historical data infrastructure on health, education, and economic development in Finland in the 19th and 20th centuries. It enhances research cooperation between economic and social history and economics across institutional and disciplinary boundaries and consolidates a research group around the database.
Elina Seye
Faculty of Arts
The project is a peer-reviewed multimedia publication for promoting cooperation and multifaceted production of knowledge between researchers and artists. Specifically, this project seeks to foster new democratic ways of engagement in the publishing of knowledge produced together by music researchers and various actors in the fields of music and arts.
Tanja Säily
Faculty of Arts
The project consists of two parts: (1) upgrading the infrastructure of the open-access web publication, Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, and (2) acquiring new corpora and databases that are of interest to researchers and students ranging from linguists to historians, social scientists and data scientists.
Tuukka Tanninen
Faculty of Arts
The project aims to locate Jaakko Hintikka’s unpublished scientific manuscripts, notes, and correspondence, and found a scholarly archive. Hintikka left behind a significant Nachlass, now scattered around the world. The Nachlass will be collected, catalogued, described, and thereby made available for researchers. Eventually Hintikka’s Nachlass will be incorporated with The von Wright–Wittgenstein Archive into a unique research infrastructure of history of analytic philosophy in Helsinki.
The Catalyst Grant funding in 2022 for HSSH research groups achieved great popularity with 62 applications submitted. The projects cover a wide range of subjects from social and economic themes to epidemiology and human interaction. Most of the applicants employ methods from sociology, social and educational sciences, linguistics or economics. Multi- and interdisciplinarity are also common features. Funding is used mainly to acquire equipment, hire researchers and assistants, as well as cover seminar and travel expenses.
Warm thanks to all applicants and congratulations to the funded projects!
Please see the list principal investigators of the funded projects below.