HSSH Catalyst Grants offers seed money for research groups to enable new initiatives, enhance sharing of research data and acquiring equipments. Call for yearly grant applications is open in October.
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.