People

Leader of the research group

Dr Noora Pyyry is Associate Professor of Geography Education. Her own work and research group, Affective Geographies and Politics of Education, deals with human subjectivity, knowledge creation, learning and educational politics, as well as with issues of young people’s participation and spatial justice in the city. She is interested in what counts as knowledge, and how learning takes place with(in) various geographical and ideological landscapes. Inspired by her participatory research on young people’s practices of hanging out, she approaches learning as an ongoing and non-linear geographical process that does not begin or end with humans. She uses feminist posthuman and non-representational theorisation to study the multiple forces that are at work in the various encounters from which knowing, participation and everyday affective politics emerge. At the core of her research on learning, is the re-organizing power of enchantment, a radical encounter that makes it possible to ontologically re-think the world. She argues that creating “pedagogical spaces of enchantment” in education is critical for transformative encounters and learning in the Anthropocene.

Email: noora.pyyry[at]helsinki.fi

Fran Trento (they/them) is an artist-researcher and currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, within the Research Council of Finland-funded research project 'Enchantment in young people's technoscientific urban landscape: Encounters of difference and the opening of politics in the post-social city'. Fran worked as a postdoctoral researcher at The University of The Arts Helsinki, where they led projects that investigated academic ableism and neuroqueer intimacies and taught critical disability studies. Fran’s research interests are neurodiversity, anti-ableism, and the pedagogies for neurodiversity, in connection with an investigation into how young people may perceive and stigmatise these questions in the use of technology. Fran is a translator who translated several works into Portuguese, such as Brian Massumi’s “What Animals Teach Us About Politics”. Fran is also a social sustainability coordinator at Frame Contemporary Art Finland. Their background is initially in media studies, but they have worked with critical disability studies, process philosophy and neurodiversity studies for several years.

Raine Aiava is a postdoctoral researcher in the Research Council of Finland project 'Enchantment in young people's technoscientific urban landscape: Encounters of difference and the opening of politics in the post-social city'. Working in the field of human geography, he is part of the research group, Affective Geographies and Politics of Education, where his research explores the politics of difference in eventual encounters and emphasizes non-representational and more-than-human perspectives. His current work examines the affectual and political potential of enchantment, love, and learning as re-ontologizing encounters. In this way, his work examines the diverse modes of subjectification and knowledge creation mobilized within and through landscapes of education. Aiava’s previous training was in the Philosophy of Aesthetics which continues to influence his work. He has Masters of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, and is a co-founder and board member of the Museum of Impossible Forms in Kontula, Helsinki, a cultural center funded by the Kone Foundation.

William Smolander is a PhD student in the Doctoral Programme in Political, Societal and Regional Changes at the Department of Geosciences and Geography. His research deals with more-than-human geographies and education beyond the human. By rethinking geography education, William wants to probe the traditional separation between humans and Earth, upheld by fixation on representation and the autonomous human subject in today’s education. By exploring experimental educational processes, his goal is to find new ways for geography education to attend to our co-dwelling with Earth and face the problems of the Anthropocene. William works in the research group of Affective Geographies and Politics of Education.

Email: william.smolander[at]helsinki.fi

Christina Ruth is a PhD student at the Department och Geosciences and Geography, in the the Doctoral Programme in School, Education, Society and Culture (SEDUCE). Her research focuses on the Matriculation Examination in geography. She has a 25 year teaching experience in geography in the upper secondary school. She has written several textbooks for upper secondary school geography education and has been an associate member of the Finnish Matriculation Examination Board since 2002. Currently she works as a geography teacher at Tölö gymnasium in Helsinki. Christina works in the research group of Affective Geographies and Politics of Education.

Mingliang Lin is a PhD student in the Doctoral Programme of Political, Societal and Regional Changes at the Department of Geosciences and Geography. He is interested in youth urban politics and geographies of aspiration in the context of urban China. His research focuses on daily practices, place-making, and spatial politics of young internal migrants in urban villages (in Chinese: 城中村, meaning the villages located in the center of cities) of Guangzhou, China, through participatory research. By taking young migrants’ political agency seriously, he studies how they respond to and engage with neoliberal urbanization of China, reflecting on how to secure right to the city for young migrants. 

Email: mingliang.lin[at]helsinki.fi

Lauri Jäntti works as a doctoral researcher at the Department of Geosciences and Geography, in the Doctoral Programme in School, Education, Society, and Culture (SEDUCE). His research focuses on experimental methods in geography education – i.e.,  creative experimentation with art-based methods that engage young people – and on posthumanist geographical theorization of the learning process.

Lauri is inspired by experimentation with initiatives related to public urban space as well as by collaboration with various civil society actors, opening up new directions for thinking and activism. In addition to developing experimental geography education, a key aim of his research is to build collaborative networks within the field of education in order to create new opportunities for youth participation both in Finland and more broadly.

Email: lauri.t.jantt[at]helsinki.fi

Haikku Ilo Arosuo is a PhD researcher in the Doctoral Programme of School, Education, Society and Culture (SEDUCE) at the Department of Geosciences and Geography (research group: Affective Geographies and Politics of Education). Haikku’s doctoral research explores learning as a geographical, affectual, bodily process through non-representational theory and experimental methodology, focusing on multispecies matters and everyday politics of pleasure and play. Their work deals with subject formation in encounters with other species and spaces, including the ability of encounters to undermine notions of stability in the contours of human subjects. With this work, Haikku seeks to critically question individualism and anthropocentrism in learning, believing that this is pivotal in addressing the ontological core of contemporary global challenges. Alongside their research, Haikku edits the popular science publication Versus and coordinates the geography specialist group of Tieteen termipankki, the Helsinki Term Bank for the Arts and Sciences.

Email: haikku.arosuo[at]helsinki.fi