RESET Research Symposium 2025

"We can use that information to kill them or to conserve them" - technologies and protocols of living with(out) others

Tuomas Aivelo 

Humans use knowledge about other species to care or to kill. Studying rats exposes researcher especially for the latter: we so like, want, desire, feel obliged to kill rats that we cause all kinds of problems to us, other species and the ecosystem. It seems like a veritable One Health case.

Helsinki Urban Rat Project contains a transdisciplinary mix of researchers, stakeholders, citizen scientists, artists and rats as we try to unpack the secrets of rats’ lives. Rats are deeply embedded into the urban landscape, through their connections with microbes, infrastructures, waste and metabolism and especially human imaginaria.

Our research has led us to study the interplay of humans and rats. We have especially looked at the practices of living together and I outline in this talk protocols and artifacts that humans have cocreated with rats to facilitate cohabitation of crowded urban areas. I show how taking seriously rats claims to urban space might not be only beneficial, but the only way to coexist.

As we are broadening our research to the human homes, and their multispecies nature, I end with an ethical dilemma. As (socio)ecological citizen science allows human citizens to create knowledge, it also opens a door for caring or killing. While ecologist can often distance themselves from the knowledge they create to the effects that using that knowledge has, in human near-environment this link is short and direct.

Conservation culturomics: digital data sources and methods to study human–nature interactions

Enrico Di Minin

The continued decline in biodiversity is largely driven by unsustainable human activities. Therefore, effectively conserving biodiversity requires a deep understanding of how humans interact with nature. These interactions are widespread but differ significantly across locations and over time, making them difficult to monitor on large scales. However, in the Information Age, we have new opportunities to better study these relationships, as many aspects of human life are documented in digital formats. Conservation culturomics seeks to leverage digital data and methods to investigate human–nature relationships, offering novel ways to approach biodiversity conservation at meaningful spatial and temporal scales. Key data sources include websites, social media, and other online platforms that provide insights into content and user engagement. This deluge of digital data requires using machine learning methods in the fields of computer vision, natural language processing, and multimodal learning for automated visual and/or textual content analysis. As part of this presentation, I will particularly focus on our research that leverages social media data and machine learning methods to study both positive and negative human-nature interactions and how they shape biodiversity conservation.  

The inherent multidisciplinarity of animal welfare research: The case of tail biting in pigs

Anna Valros

Tail biting is a behavioural problem in pigs, causing suffering for the pigs and economic losses for producers. The causes behind tail biting are very multifactorial, but in general, tail biting is a sign of the pigs having faced or currently facing welfare challenges. In most countries tail docking is commonly used to prevent tail biting-related lesions, but in Finland tail docking is not allowed. Tail docking is ethically questionable, as tail biting can be preventing by improving the management and housing of pigs. To reduce tail biting problems, it is not only important to understand the motivational background of the behaviour and the risk factors for it´s occurrence, but also the motivating factors and barriers for farmers to prevent tail biting. In this presentation I discuss tail biting research as a case of the multidisciplinary nature of animal welfare research, leaning on the outcome  of 25 years of work on pig tail biting within our research group.

Double standards regarding animals in legislation: the case of wild fish welfare

Saara Kupsala

Advances in research on animal sentience urgently demands heightened public scrutiny of the regulation of fishing from an animal welfare perspective. In Finland, approximately 2.8 billion wild finfish are caught annually, with global estimates ranging from 1.1 to 2.2 trillion (Mood and Brooke 2024). Finnish legislation was recently updated to address fish welfare. The new Animal Welfare Act, effective from 2024, and amendments to the Fishing Act introduce provisions on the handling and killing of fish.

Within the research project Silent Agents Affected by Legislation (SILE), funded by the Finnish Strategic Research Council, the legislative process and its impact on nonhuman animals as silent agents are analysed. Silent agents refer to individuals who have limited capacity or power to participate in consultation procedures of law-making (Rantala et al. 2025) and require representation by others to gain relevant protection from harm. Since nonhuman animals have no possibility to speak for themselves and represent a heterogeneous group, ensuring their representation is a challenging task.

This presentation draws on ongoing research in which we explore how the perspective of animals has been considered in the proposal for new Finnish animal welfare legislation (Bill 186/2022) and incorporated into the subsequent legislation. We focus on examining the positioning of wild fish in the legislative proposal. We scrutinise the motivations behind the Animal Welfare Act and the Fishing Act's new provisions, as outlined in the Bill 186/2022 and its draft version submitted for public consultation. We also analyse stakeholder organisations' comments during the consultation.

Our analysis delves into the dimensions related to fish as a silent agent in the legislative process through three concepts: intrinsic value, welfare, and utility. Intrinsic value is used in the proposal to ascribe the moral status of animals as sentient beings valuable in themselves. Welfare is defined as the subjective experience of an animal, while utility refers to the ‘justified use’ of an animal, an anthropocentric harm-benefit calculus included in the starting points of the legislation.

The analysis reveals complexities when legislation attempts to reconcile different approaches to fish in animal welfare and fishing legislation: fish as sentient and intrinsically valuable, fish as a natural resource, and fish in terms of biodiversity. The result is a deeply contradictory proposal where respectful treatment of animals is demanded in the general principles, yet the protection given to the welfare of fish seem to differ from that provided to other vertebrates. In conclusion, we highlight the challenges of implementing diverse ethical concepts into law-drafting.

Environmental impacts of alternative proteins for food 

Hanna L. Tuomisto1,2,3 

1Future Sustainable Food Systems –Research Group, Department of Agricultural Sciences, Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland  

2Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS), University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland  

3Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke), Helsinki, Finland 

Agriculture and food production are the main drivers of environmental change. The environmental impacts of food systems are mainly caused by livestock production even though livestock products provide only 20% of food calories and 34% of protein globally. Plant-based diets and replacement of animal-source foods with alternatives could help to improve the environmental sustainability of food systems. In addition to plant-based protein sources, alternatives are being developed from algae, insects, fungi and microbes, as well as through cellular agriculture. Cellular agriculture means the use of cell-culturing technologies to produce agricultural products, such as cell-cultivated meat and proteins similar to those that are found in milk or eggs. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is commonly used method for estimating the environmental impacts of food products along the whole production chain from resource extraction up to waste management. The LCA studies show that alternative proteins can have lower negative environmental impacts compared to livestock products. Some of the novel technologies require relative high energy inputs, and therefore, the climate benefits depend on the sources of energy used. The decrease in livestock production can provide indirect climate and biodiversity benefits, for instance, due to reduced need to clear forests to agricultural land. The reduced land use for feed production can also provide opportunities for reforestation or using land for renewable energy production. As many of the alternative protein production technologies are still under development, the environmental sustainability of the products depend on how the commercial scale production will be implemented. The total environmental benefits also depend on the level that consumers are willing to adopt alternative protein sources as substitutes to livestock products.  

Transformation of production and consumption systems: new citizen roles in the circular economy 

Angelina Korsunova-Tsurak

Everyone is expected to have an active role in the circular economy: governments, municipalities, companies and citizens.  Companies are often seen as primary drivers of innovations, while the role of citizens is to readily adopt new circular products, sort and recycle the old ones, and switch to being users of services, rather than consumers. Slow progress in the circular transition is often blamed on the lack of consumer interest in circular products and services. 

Are citizens doing their part for the circular economy? What motivates them? What  skills and competences does it take to participate in circular economy in everyday life? 

This talk will examine how circularity blurs the borders of production and consumption, uncovering a diverse range of activities that citizens engage in for prolonging the life of products, sharing and recirculating the resources they have. These activities often remain invisible in the economy, and therefore may not get the needed support from municipalities and governments. 

Discussing diverse value creation for the circular economy in everyday life, beyond the buying of circular products and recycling, is important for developing support mechanisms and enabling progress in circularity.

Crisis Atmospheres and Feminist Ethics of Care 

Riikka Hohti

How to talk about sustainability and multispecies childhood in the era of Trumpism: 
Why future is feminist new materialist 

This presentation assembles viewpoints around a few personally timely questions. The first is the question, what do I mean by sustainability. That is, how to think and talk about sustainability (education) in the context of postcolonial, postsustainability and other critiques, in a multispecies world.  

The second is an effort or almost an imperative (albeit an uncomfortable one) to situate my empirical research focusing at the intersections of childhood, sustainability, and multispecies relations, in the current political context of Trumpism and fossil fuel economies.  

The third is the need for thinking about sustainability education beyond the common emphasis on nature relations, empathy, “good Anthropocene” and techno fix, well-wishing morality, or adding the prefix “eco” to frameworks which essentially remain the same.  

The little brainstorming in this presentation draws on my previous empirical work around environmental atmospheres, multispecies relations, and feminist ethics of care, to address some ways in which multispecies childhoods are both implicated and affected in the environmental crises. In addition, I draw from gendered analysis on fossil fueled petrocultures to analyse the ways in which materiality and affect operate in the current politics. These dynamic interrelations, whether in terms of destruction or care, are a crucial focus, and this is why I argue that future is feminist new materialist.  

Social sciences in interdisciplinary collaboration: what could they offer? 

Salla Sariola 

While interdisciplinary research collaboration is increasingly expected, its implementation is difficult in practice. Nevertheless, in RESET and various other cooperations and networks, we find ourselves within interdisciplinary collaborations. Building on crowd-sourced and my own experiences of collaboration, this last talk of the day I will present reflections on social scientists' roles in collaboration to answer the question set in the title – what does engaging with social scientists offer? 

The talk identifies a spectrum of satirical roles that social scientists have found themselves in collaboration, emerging from their own disciplinary cantankerous orientations, strategic alignments as well as false expectations laid upon them.  

Shedding light to these caricatures aims at illuminating how we might approach interdisciplinarity genuinely together to successful ends.  

Eda Altan

Emerging infectious diseases in changing environments of East Africa [GLOBEID]

Khalil Betz-Heinemann

After Malaria: Transdisciplinary Platform for Malaria Cessation

Maija Suvanto

Mosquito- and tick-borne orbiviruses in Finland

David Caicedo Sarralde

Indigenous and ancestral ontologies for seed sovereignty in the Colombian Andean-Amazon region

Tino Johansson

HELSUS Co-creation Lab

Peter Krawczel

Welfare implications of grazing for dairy cows

Mika Saarenpää

Urban greening alters urban bacterial communities

Tiia Sudenkaarne

A Queer Feminist Posthuman Framework for Justice: The Case of Antimicrobial Resistance

Juulia Manninen

Potential association between PAH exposure and microbiota among children genetically susceptible for type 1 diabetes in a highly urbanized country

Mikael Niku

Maternal microbial metabolites and extracellular vesicles in the fetal immune system development

Mohammad El Wali

Biodiversity impact of global transition to cellular agriculture

Elisabet Miheludaki

The role of a UBI in the transition towards aligning with natural rhythms