Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius (The Polish Academy of Sciences and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Study – Core Fellow 2019/2022)
I am an interdisciplinary scholar, trained in media and communications but often venturing into other disciplines, such as memory studies, cultural studies, political science, sociology, or history. My main interests lie at the intersection of media with racism, nationalism, and illiberalism, and I am increasingly curious about how conspiracy theories figure in this mix. Empirically, I focus on Central Eastern Europe, particularly Poland. Accordingly, my articles have been published in major academic journals across disciplines, including ‘Journalism’, ‘Nations and Nationalism’, and ‘History & Memory’.
From November 2022, I am a Marie Sklodowska-Curie PASIFIC Cofund Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS), where I work on the project titled ‘Mediated re/making of democratic imagination in Poland’. Before PAS, I was a postdoctoral researcher (core fellow) at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in August 2019 – July 2022, and a KONE Foundation Fellow in media and communications at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki.
Tero Toivanen (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Study – Core Fellow 2022-Present)
My initial training is in economic, social and environmental history. I am interested in the study of past and present socio-ecological transformations and the environmental history of capitalism. I seek to understand social and economic conflicts and contradictions related to the environment at both the world-system and local levels. In recent years, I have turned more intensely to multidisciplinary environmental studies and researched such topics as the political economy of sustainability transformations, low-carbon industrial transition, political ecology of Finnish forestry and political resistance to climate mitigation. I am an original member of the interdisciplinary BIOS Research Unit (established in 2015) and a board member in journals Tiede & edistys (Science & Progress) and Poliittinen talous (Finnish Review of Political Economy). I’m a postdoctoral fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2021–2024). In my three-year Collegium project, I study the far-rights role in the climate crisis.