Katarina Pettersson (Principal Investigator)
PI Katarina Pettersson (DSocSci, docent) is an assistant professor in social psychology at the University of Helsinki, where she is co-leader of a research group of social psychologists studying ethnic relations. Apart from interethnic relations, her research interests include political communication, right-wing populism and anti-gender movements, racist and misogynist hate speech, and polarization. She has studied these topics from the perspectives of social identity theory and critical discursive psychology and is keen on applying interdisciplinary and multimodal approaches in her research. She is lead editor of the book The far-right discourse of multiculturalism in intergroup interactions: A critical discursive perspective (2022, Palgrave Macmillan). Katarina leads the MOSH project in collaboration with Leikas and Lönnqvist and the international collaborators.
Sointu Leikas (CO-PI)
Sointu Leikas is a personality and social psychologist and acts as CO-PI in MOSH. She completed her PhD in personality psychology in 2010 and has worked with a diverse set of psychology-related topics since. Her research interests include everyday life dynamics between persons, situations and behaviors, social competence, attitudes, values, and well-being. She currently works as a university researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH), at the University of Helsinki. She participates in methodological development in the human and social sciences and serves as a methodological expert in addition to her research work. She is also on the current editorial board of the journal Personality Science.
Jan-Erik Lönnqvist
Jan-Erik Lönnqvist (PsD, MA) is a professor of social psychology at the Swedish School of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. His research has focused on political psychology, moral psychology, and methodological questions. The methodologies and data that he has employed in his research have varied from self-reported coin-flip results in dictator games to large scale data sets, with the single common denominator of involving numbers (quantitative approach). In the MOSH project, he contributes by helping in the development of new methods that allow for new types of data.
Viivi Mäkinen
Viivi Mäkinen (DSocSci) is a postdoctoral researcher with a broad interest in topics related to the social psychology of intergroup relations and a passion for research with practical implications for addressing contemporary societal issues. In her recently completed doctoral dissertation, she studied the role of social norms in attitude change among adolescents and carried out school-based interventions utilizing vicarious contact. Before joining the MOSH project, she has also studied bystanders’ intentions to confront ethnic prejudice.
Helenor Tormis
Helenor Tormis is a Ph.D. candidate at the university of Helsinki, currently completing her dissertation on right-wing populism and populist thinking on controversial issues, using interview material. She will join the MOSH project in autumn 2025. Helenor brings to the project a deep interest in societal and political social psychological topics, such as nationalism, populism, prejudice, and segregation at both micro and macro levels. Her research is guided by interdisciplinary and critical perspectives on these issues and her expertise in qualitative methods, particularly critical discursive psychological and affective-discursive approaches. With an interest in the everyday lived experiences of citizens, Helenor’s role will involve conducting and analysing interviews with citizens in the Helsinki region. She is also a junior consulting editor for the European Journal of Social Psychology and the co-organizer of the Critical Yappers book club for students and researchers at the UH.
Ira Frejborg
Ira Frejborg is a Ph.D candidate at the University of Helsinki, conducting her doctoral research within the MOSH project. Her thesis will be interdisciplinary, combining experience sampling with walking interviews and analysis of online discourse. During her time as doctoral student, she would like to tinker with different methodological and theoretical approaches, introducing perspectives from other disciplines to social psychological research on the everyday. She also currently chairs Suomen Sosiaalipsykologit ry, the Association for Social Psychologists in Finland, and co-coordinates the Critical Yappers book club, organized in the hopes of encouraging herself and others to read more critical theory and learn from one another.
Siru Pikkarainen
Siru Pikkarainen is a Master’s student in Psychology at the Department of Medicine at the University of Helsinki. Prior to her current degree she conducted her Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology at the University of Aberdeen. Having always been interested in how Psychology can be applied to various other academic fields and topics, she took on an opportunity to conduct her Master’s thesis in an interdisciplinary fashion. She is writing her final thesis for her degree in Psychology as part of the MOSH research project at the faculty of Social Psychology. In her thesis she applies walking interviews and thematic analysis to study the relationship between self, others and space.
Riikka Yrttiaho
Riikka Yrttiaho is a master's student in social psychology and is finishing her master's thesis concerning collective and individual memories related to experiences of Finnish people in Kotka during the occupation of Czechoslovakia. She is graduating this year and planning to continue her studies as a PHD candidate. She graduated with Bachelor of Science from University of Gothenburg with psychology as the main subject and additional studies in international relations and law, Middle Eastern politics & economy as well as political science.
Kevin Durrheim
Kevin Durrheim is Distinguished Professor in Psychology at the University of Johannesburg, where he heads the UJ Methods Lab. He is an NRF A-rated scientist and nominated member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. He is a social psychologist with a program of research related to segregation, polarization and social change. His co-authored and co-edited books include The Routledge International Handbook of Discrimination, Prejudice and Stereotyping (2021), Qualitative studies of Silence (2019), Race Trouble (2011) and Racial Encounter (2005).