Collective

Leader and founder of Animate, a deputy leader of the General Education unit at the Faculty of Education and Psychology (U Oulu), and a principal investigator of several large-scale research projects. Her research interests include social scientific biodiversity education via multispecies and posthumanist approaches, exploring the roles of other animals in practices of (scientific) knowledge creation, thinking about animals and aesthetics, and developing inclusive citizen science practices. Pauliina volunteers as a wildlife rehabilitator for injured birds (Instagram: @pihalintu), and is a companion human to budgies, chickens, dogs and a horse.

Tuure is a co-founder and vice-leader of Animate, an adjunct professor (University of Tampere) and Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education and Psychology (University of Oulu). His research joins the efforts for rethinking education and childhood with more-than-human theories and relational ontologies. He has recently written and co-written on multispecies childhoods with a focus on mold and microbes, complexities of care, unruliness and violence in child-animal relations, and the possibilities of responding to the imagination crisis of modernity. He is an editor for the academic journals Kasvatus ja Aika and Trace – Journal for Human-Animal Studies.

Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Oulu. Drawing on different poststructural theories, in her PhD thesis Anna explored the relationality of children and forests from the affective/material/spatial perspective, its implications for the outdoor education research, teaching and learning. Focusing specifically on salt, salt materialities, and halophiles, she is currently interested in the role of more-than-human agency in place-making and how non-human others counter-map human exploitation of territory. Anna is a salt-lakes geek indulging herself in beading. Find her also in www.bodyplaceresearch.com.  

Associate Professor of Sustainable Futures in Education and Ethics (University of Helsinki). Riikka has written about multispecies childhoods, atmospheres, care, materiality and temporality. She has developed participatory and post-qualitative methodologies at the intersections of childhood studies and human-animal studies and education. She is a researcher in the AniMate research group (University of Oulu), and leads the projects Children of the Anthropocene (2022-2025, Kone Foundation) and Figurations of the child and more than human politics of childhood for the post-Anthropocene: The fossil, the microbe, the weather (2023-2027, Research Council of Finland).  

Assistant Professor in Science Communication (Biodiversity & Society) at Leiden University, Academy Research Fellow in the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences at University of Helsinki and Adjunct Professor in Science Education in University of Oulu. Tuomas is an award-winning rat and parasite connoisseur whose interests include mammalogy, disease ecology, science education and science outreach, including citizen science. Tuomas leads the Helsinki Urban Rat Project.

Anttoni works as a teacher at the Viikki Teacher Training School and as a visiting researcher at the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences in the University of Helsinki. Anttoni’s research interests include science education, outdoor learning, citizen science, role of technology in learning and teacher professional development.

Post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Helsinki. Mika is spearheading the research topic on Animals and Social Interaction for Frontiers in Sociology and has co-edited (2024) a special issue on interspecies pragmatics for Journal of Pragmatics. In his post-doctoral study (2017-2020), he investigated human-dog interaction with research questions such as how does interactional reciprocity between dog owners and their dogs might exist in interaction, how humans treat their dog’s mind in interaction, and how dogs and their owners organize their group dynamics during dog walking sessions. 

Postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Education and Psychology (University of Oulu). Brandon’s research is at the intersections of Eco-Democratic education, social activist movements, teacher education, and Critical Podcast Research Methodologies. His focus is on the radical possibilities for (re)imagining education and society, rooted in prefigurative and non-hierarchical praxis towards social and environmental justice.

Doctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Education & Psychology at the University of Oulu. Her research interests include, very broadly, human-animal relationships, animal ethics, multispecies methodology, posthumanism, and citizen science. She is fascinated with Donna Haraway’s concept of killability, particularly how insects become killable in scientific and educational practices. Besides contemplating the questions of killing and dying, Marina enjoys spending time with her multispecies family, knitting, birdwatching, and more.

Doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Education and Psychology (University of Oulu). Ayako’s research interest is in how to actualise the possibility of expansion and transformation in the experience of non-understanding, while education is heavily focused on understanding. Outside academia, Ayako helps people to become more of themselves: physically, through regaining the sense of connection with nature where everyone belongs, mentally: through liberating oneself from norms that don’t serve one’s life anymore, and emotionally: through reconnecting with suppressed and dismissed emotions.

Doctoral researcher on the possibilities of plants as teachers towards a sense of meaning in multispecies everyday co-living. Based at the Faculty of Education and Psychology at the University of Oulu (Finland), Natalia’s research interests include multispecies relational methodologies, animism and indigenous thinking, multispecies co-living, and social change. Natalia is passionate about co-creating ways to lead meaningful everyday lives in relationship with the living world. Natalia crafts plant preparations, holds space for others to build relationship with their own ancestors, and walks el camino rojo del corazón while being accountable to and in relationship with the ancestors and wider-than-human relationships.

Doctoral researcher in early childhood education and educational sciences at the Faculty of Education and Psychology at the University of Oulu. Kristina’s research interests include indigenous, posthumanist, and new materialist ways of thinking with multispecies and material childhoods, postqualitative inquiry, and children’s geographies. In her PhD thesis, she is exploring childhood multispecies secret places. Her favorite AniMate is a sheep called Otto.

Doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Education & Psychology (University of Oulu). Joffy’s research explores how we might incorporate ecocentric perspectives into critical thinking. He is an AniMate collaborator and his more-than-human household includes a cat called Harmi.

As a high-school student with a special interest in moral and animal philosophy, physics and chemistry Isla is an AniMate collaborator and an expert citizen member.

Anna is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Biodiverse Anthropocenes research programme and the Faculty of Education and Psychology (U Oulu), collaborating with AniMate researchers. Previously, she worked at the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS), University of Helsinki. Anna is the Social and Human WG Secretary at the International Arctic Science Committee. Her research interests include more-than-human relations with resource extraction, Indigeneity in the Arctic and Siberia, and local visions of sustainability. Anna is fascinated by Northern landscapes and loves exploring the Arctic diversity.