Kristiina Mannermaa’s ERC project investigates social links between humans and animals in hunter-gatherer burial sites in north-eastern Europe, ca 9,000–7,500 years ago. The project combines various bioarchaeological research methods to study the life histories of humans, animals and animal-derived artefacts in prehistoric burial sites.
The main aims of the project are to:
The Animals Make Identities project runs from 2020 to 2025 and is led by Kristiina Mannermaa.
Soile Ylivuori’s project investigates the construction of scientific knowledge in 18th-century Europe and the Atlantic World, employing as a case study the experiences of patients in the utilisation of electricity in medicine.
The source material for the study is composed of patients’ personal descriptions as well as scholarly and popular texts on electrotherapies. These will be investigated to establish the role of embodied experiences – a topic which has thus far received little scholarly attention – in the production of scientific knowledge, as well as how gender, class and other intersecting categories of distinction affect the process of constructing experiential knowledge.
The ELBOW project runs from 2022 to 2027 and is led by Soile Ylivuori.
A Foundation for Empirical Multimodality Research (FOUNDATIONS) investigates the way human communication and interaction rely on intentional combinations of multiple modes of expression.
The project develops new methods for empirical research on multimodality that leverage crowdsourcing and neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence. Crowdsourcing is used to produce larger datasets, whereas neuro-symbolic AI is used to synthesise the human insights gained through crowdsourcing with output from AI models. The new datasets and methods enable the critical examination of key concepts of multimodality research. The project data include textbooks, news broadcasts and social media videos.
A Foundation for Empirical Multimodality Research (FOUNDATIONS) runs from 2024 to 2029 and is led by Tuomo Hiippala.
Mikhail Nakonechnyi’s project seeks to understand why and when prisoner health statistics became significant enough to be manipulated for political purposes.
Project’s overarching theme is how penal authorities conceal the prisoners’ poor health with malicious intent for various reasons and by various techniques, statistical and rhetorical. Project focuses on British, Indian colonial, American, and Soviet-Russian prisons and camps from the late modern era – the birth of the Western penitentiary - to the present moment. The interdisciplinary research effort, while historical, combines insights from medical statistics, penology, criminology, penal sociology, and bioethics.
The Death, Smoke, And Mirrors: Manipulation of Health Data in Liberal and Authoritarian Custodial Institutions project runs from 2024 to 2029 and is led by Dr. Mikhail Nakonechnyi.
Jonathan Valk’s project examines the rise of Aramaic writing in the Middle East in the first half of the first millennium BCE.
Aramaic writing first emerged in the region of modern Syria, but soon extended throughout the Middle East when it was ruled by the Assyrian empire. It did so despite the fact that the Assyrian empire was heavily invested in the production of texts written in the Akkadian language and the cuneiform script, the inherited vehicles for an extremely prestigious writing tradition that was already two thousand years old.
The Aramaization of the Middle East: Revisiting the Fall and Rise of Written Traditions runs from 2025 to 2030 and is led by Jonathan Valk.