Kollektiivi

AniMate on tutkijakollektiivi, jonka jäsenet työskentelevät pääasiassa Oulun yliopistossa, mutta myös sen ulkopuolella. Ihmisiä tulee ja menee: toiset puurtavat väitöstutkimuksen parissa ja toiset työskentelevät rahoitetuissa projekteissa postdoc- tai senioritutkijoina, jatkaen sitten omien hankkeidensa ja tutkimusryhmiensä pariin – joskus myös palaten takaisin. Sanomme usein, että AniMatesta voi lähteä, mutta AniMate ei lähde sinusta, se on mielentila.

Pauliina Rautio

KT, Professori

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Animaten perustaja ja johtaja, kasvatustieteiden ja psykologian tiedekunnan yleisen kasvatuksen yksikön varajohtaja (Oulun yliopisto) sekä useiden laajojen tutkimushankkeiden vastuullinen johtaja. Hänen tutkimusintresseihinsä kuuluvat yhteiskuntatieteellinen biodiversiteettikasvatus monilajisten ja posthumanististen lähestymistapojen kautta, muiden eläinten roolit ja asema (tieteellisen) tiedon tuottamisessa, eläinestetiikan pohtiminen sekä osallistavan kansalaistieteen kehittäminen. Pauliina toimii vapaaehtoisena loukkaantuneiden lintujen kuntouttajana (Instagram: @pihalintu) ja jakaa arkensa undulaattien, kanojen, koirien ja hevosen kanssa.

Tuure Tammi

KT, yliopistotutkija

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Tuure on Animaten perustajajäsen ja sen nykyinen varajohtaja, Tampereen yliopiston dosentti ja yliopistotutkija Oulun yliopiston kasvatustieteiden ja psykologian tiedekunnassa. Hänen tutkimuksensa liittyy kasvatuksen ja lapsuuden uudelleentarkasteluun enemmän-kuin-inhimillisten teorioiden ja relationaalisten ontologioiden näkökulmasta. Viime aikoina hän on kirjoittanut ja ollut mukana kirjoittamassa monilajisesta lapsuudesta keskittyen muun muassa homeeseen ja mikrobeihin, hoivan monimutkaisuuksiin, kurittomuuteen ja väkivaltaan lapsi–eläin-suhteissa sekä modernin mielikuvituskriisiin vastaamisen mahdollisuuksiin. Tuure toimii myös Kasvatus ja Aika -lehden sekä Trace – Journal for Human-Animal Studies -lehden toimituskunnassa.

Anna Vladimirova

PhD, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Education

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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.

Maria Helena Saari

PhD, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Education

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Maria is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education & Psychology at the University of Oulu. She is currently Co-leader of WP2 Unlearning with Other Species in the Strategic Research Council funded project MUST: Enabling Multispecies Transitions (2023-26) and Co-leader of the Environmental Education Working Group in the Global Innovation Network in Teaching and Learning (GINTL) project ‘Co-designing teacher education that connects theory and practice and is relevant to the needs of the society’ between the University of Oulu and University of Namibia (2021-24). Maria has lead research initiatives including the Envisioning Sustainability Hub of the Biodiverse Anthropocenes Research Program at the University of Oulu, where she served as Co-leader of the Hub between 2021-24, as well as to lead the education research strand at the Human-Animal Studies Hub at ICS-ULisboa, where she was a Visiting Scholar and PI of the project Multispecies Climate Change Education (2022-2023).

Maria earned her PhD in Educational Sciences from the University of Oulu in 2021 and her doctoral thesis ‘Animals as Stakeholders in Education: Towards an Educational Reform for Interspecies Sustainability’was awarded the Senior Animal Law Researcher Award by the International Centre for Animal Law & Policy (ICALP) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona for its innovative interdisciplinary approach. Maria’s interdisciplinary research focuses on animals in education (policy and pedagogy), multispecies justice and sustainability, environmental education, governance solutions for planetary sustainability, curriculum development, and teacher education. She co-coordinates and teaches undergraduate courses on environmental education and multispecies childhood studies. Prior to her research career, she worked in the field of education in teaching and leadership roles.

Riikka Hohti

PhD, Associate Professor of Sustainable Futures in Education and Ethics

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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).

Tuomas Aivelo

PhD, Assistant Professor in Science Communication

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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 Kervinen

PhD, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Biology, Education

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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.

Mika Simonen

PhD, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Sociology

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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.

Brandon Edwards-Schuth

PhD, Post-doctoral Research Fellow

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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.

Marina Pliushchik

PhD researcher, Education

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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.

Ayako Shimada

PhD researcher, Education
MA Curation of Contemporary Art

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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.

Natalia Múnera Parra

PhD researcher, Education

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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.

Kristina Vitek

PhD Researcher, Education

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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.

Joffy Conolly

PhD Researcher,
Education

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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.

Isla Hirvonen

citizen expert,
animal philosopher

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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 Varfolomeeva

PhD, Postdoctoral researcher, Environmental humanities

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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.

Kumppanit ja yhteistyötahot

Teija Peura

Ympäristökasvatuspäällikkö, Luontoliitto

Hanna Seimola

Ympäristökasvatuksen johtaja, WWF Suomi

Anna Muotka

Director, Foundation for Environmental Education Finland (FEE)

Heidi Holmroos

johtava asiantuntija, ympäristö, ilmasto ja varautuminen, Martat

Mari Tähjä

Ennakoinnin asiantuntija, Lasten ja nuorten säätiö

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