2025, September 26
Join the research group for the evening! AGPE will land on Kallion tapahtumalava (address: Viides linja 11, next to Kallio Library) on Friday September 26th at 17:00-19:00.
We will discuss topics such as young people’s geographies, urban placemaking, and experimental learning with interested public. You can meet our researchers in Finnish, Swedish, and English. Along with open conversation, there will be hands-on activities.
You will have a unique chance to explore the city through more-than-human perspectives with the help of interactive artwork created by our 9–12-year-old co-researchers. Participants are also invited to share their insights by writing or drawing their reflections on the communal art wall created by upper-secondary school students.
The purpose of the Europe-wide, multidisciplinary Researchers’ Night (Tutkijoiden yö / Forskarnatten) is to introduce research work, recent turns in science, and everyday dimensions of research-making to the public in many different forms.
2025, September 2
How can we encounter the changes and non-human ‘others’ of the world?
AGPE members William Smolander and Haikku Arosuo approached this question through a creative learning experiment in a teachers’ further education and training day held on the island of Harakka, Helsinki.
The workshops attracted primary school and upper secondary school teachers in chemistry, biology, and geography. In addition to William and Haikku’s workshop, the participants learned new approaches to tracing the impacts of humans in the world through hands-on teaching on geological times, plankton species of the Baltic Sea, and microplastics in fishes.
At the end of the beautiful September afternoon, the teachers discussed in small groups what they had picked up during the day. Some of these groups will continue to work together throughout the rest of the year to plan their new, multidisciplinary teaching implementations inspired by the day.
The continuing education day was arranged by William and Reija Pesonen in a collaboration between Harakka Island, LUMAlab Gadolin, Geopiste, and the University of Helsinki.
2025, August 26–29
The AGPE research group leader Noora Pyyry and members Mingliang Lin, Haikku (Ilo) Arosuo, and William Smolander took part in the Annual Conference 2025 of the Royal Geographical Society–Institute of British Geographers.
This year, the conference was arranged at the University of Birmingham, UK. The event is one of the major geography conferences in the world, bringing together thousands of geographers each year.
Over four full days, the research group members engaged with Geographies of creativity/creative geographies – this years’ conference theme, chosen by conference chair Patricia Noxolo.
Presenting, listening, discussing, and exploring the city, AGPE made important connections to other delegates working globally on shared themes, such as children’s and young people’s geographies, geographies of learning and teaching, affective geographies, more-than-human geographies, and animal geographies.
You can read about the participating AGPE members' conference presentations in more detail below.
Haikku presented their work 'Strings-Attached – Play as Transspecies Political Geography' in the Emerging Voices in Animal Geographies session on Thursday. The presentation explored string play as an experimental, affective method with the potential to momentarily move beyond categorical and communicative boundaries often drawn between animals of different species. The research is based on fieldwork encounters with free-roaming cats in Venice, Italy.
On Friday morning, Mingliang gave his speech on 'Cruel optimism: young migrants’ geographies of hope in urban villages of Guangzhou, China' in the Meaningful Openings in a Fractured World panel. The presented work analyses how hope is mobilised in everyday geographies of Guangzhou, based on mobile interviews with 50 young migrants in urban villages – informal, low-cost rental residences with poor conditions that offer young migrants temporary living spaces.
Noora presented her work under the title 'Shared atmospheres of play and hesitation: mental mapping as a geo-powerful tool in research with young people' in Friday afternoon's session Crǝativethnographies. In this presentation, Noora introduced mental mapping as a way of following the subtle intensities of a research situation and attuning to its nonrepresentational, transitory elements: for hesitating before the ‘already-known’ and detecting openings for alternative routes of knowledge-making.
2025, August 11
For the first monthly research group seminar of the academic year, the research group had the pleasure of visioning the future of comprehensive education with Docent Venla Bernelius, Senior Specialist at the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.
Having taught and researched at the University of Helsinki, Venla acts as the secretary of the Ministry project for futures work in comprehensive schools. The project envisions the future of education in Finland, recognizing long-term development measures to ensure that education both addresses major challenges in society and offers capabilities that will be relevant in the future. The AGPE research group discussed this important work with Venla, hearing about the ongoing process and providing their own perspectives on the vision work and on the future of education.
2025, April 14
In the research group’s seminar, AGPE met with the digital geographer Kalle Määttä. Beyond working as Chief Growth Officer for ResQ Club (a location-based app that reduces food waste by connecting consumers with restaurants and other vendors), Kalle is one of the creators of ArtOfThinking.ai. ArtOfThinking seeks to clarify and communicate thinking between individuals without compromising on data ownership and surveillance.
After Kalle's coaching demonstration based on ArtOfThinking, there was a critical discussion around how we can think about – or with – machine learning applications. The dialogue focused on the nature and limits of AI, on a new rise of positivist paradigms in relation to the spread of machine learning applications, and on the ways in which technologies can (or cannot) mediate and modulate experience. This latter aspect was especially fruitful in relation to the non-representational and technology-related research of AGPE members.
2025, January 31
This historical and moving day marked the ‘coming-of-age’ of the first doctoral thesis to be defended from the Affective Geographies and Politics of Education research group: Raine Aiava’s Becoming-otherwise: Towards a politics of difference in nonrepresentational geographies of knowledge-making.
Raine’s theoretically ambitious work was presented to the public at the University Main Building’s Karolina Eskelin room, setting the bar high for future AGPE dissertation defences. The main supervisor of Raine’s longstanding work, Associate Professor Noora Pyyry, acted as the custos, joined on stage by the opponent, esteemed Professor of Historical and Cultural Geography John Wylie from the University of Bristol, UK. The beautiful defence ceremony attracted plenty of public from all ages, followed by a traditional karonkka dinner and afterparty at Bokvillan in Arabianranta, Helsinki.
AGPE is elated to have Raine continue working with the group as a postdoctoral researcher in the Academy project ‘Enchantment in young people’s technoscientific landscape: Encounters of difference and the opening of politics in the post-social city’.
2024, December 13
The greenhouse project Galleria Kasvihuone/Kasvun tila, an integral part and builder of which has been the AGPE member Lauri Jäntti, received recognition from the University of Helsinki's Faculty of Education as one of the Work Community Deeds of this year.
Since its initiation in 2021, the greenhouse project has hosted a wide range of activities such as community gardening, sustainability education and outdoor pedagogy, art exhibitions, creative writing, eco printing, and dance workshops. AGPE members have conducted important research work with the help of the greenhouse, which also aims to function as a catalyst for spontaneous urban encounters.
Since early 2024, the greenhouse project has received funding from the University's Kipinä-grants under the project name 'Kasvun tila', establishing a greenhouse now at the Faculty of Education in Siltavuorenpenger.
2024, October 31
In the evening gala of Geography Days 2024 in Turku, Finland, the newest AGPE research group member, Haikku Ilo Arosuo, received an award from the Geographical Society of Finland for the Best Geography Master’s Thesis of the Academic Year 2023–24.
The thesis, titled Via dei gatti: toward transspecies geographies, was supervised by the AGPE research group leader Noora Pyyry. In addition to Noora, also other AGPE researchers contributed with helpful feedback along the way. The thesis was recognized for its “courageousness, theoretical discussion, intensity of fieldwork, and willingness to push the grounds of geographical thinking to new territories and contexts.”
The national prize is awarded yearly by the Geographical Society of Finland to mark the most distinguished master’s-level thesis in the country. This early-career scholar’s prize is given out along honorary medals awarded to senior academics for their significant and longstanding work: in the award ceremony, Haikku joined the stage with medal recipients Professor Risto Kalliola, Professor Petteri Alho, and Professor Jukka Käyhkö.
Haikku will continue to build on this work as part of the Affective Geographies and Politics of Education research group under the supervision of Noora Pyyry.
2023, September 11
2023
The Affective Geographies and Politics of Education research group leader Noora Pyyry has received four-year funding from the Academy of Finland for her project 'Enchantment in young people’s technoscientific urban landscape: Encounters of difference and the opening of politics in the post-social city'. Along with Assistant Professor Noora Pyyry, the postdoctoral researcher Fran Trento and doctoral researcher Raine Aiava will be working on the project.
The project produces new theorization of the effects of the technoscientific framing of urban life for the formation of diverse young people’s political agency. New conceptualizations are built by probing the limits and possibilities for enchantment in their everyday encounters. Fundamentally different from the ‘wow’ effect of entertainment, enchantment is an ontological re-ordering of the world by affective force through encounters of difference. Enchantment thus opens space for politics. In the project, young people, including neurodivergent youth, are understood as post-social beings who live their lives in the complex geographies of the city. Mobile phones and other interfaces are active agents in this system, which has radically changed young people’s existential conditions, bodies and subjectivities. The project asks if the speed and continual quest for the novel linked to commercial interfaces allows for the ‘moment of hesitation’ that lies at the heart of enchantment.
2022, August 30–September 2
Raine Aiava and Noora Pyyry of the AGPE research group participated in the Annual Conference 2022 of the Royal Geographical Society–Institute of British Geographers.
The conference was this time held in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, with the theme Geographies Beyond Recovery. Together with Mikko Joronen of the University of Tampere, Raine and Noora presented their paper 'Enduring love: Dwelling in vulnerability'.
2022, June 20–22
The AGPE researchers Noora Pyyry, William Smolander, and Raine Aiava joined fellow geographers in Joensuu, Finland, for the 9th Nordic Geographers Meeting. The conference was held around the theme Multiple Nordic Geographies.
Noora and William presented on 'Attuning to geostories: Learning encounters with urban plant', whereas Raine, Noora, and Heikki Sirviö's contribution was on 'Encounters, enchantment, and eventual learning: a qualitative analysis of the new Finnish curriculum for basic education'.