University of Helsinki
Anna-Maija Pirttilä-Backman. My research interests focus on various knowledge and justice related topics.
More information of my research and other activities can be found here.
Inari Sakki. My research interests include nationalism, collective memory, hate speech, political rhetoric, otherness, and social change in the contexts of national and European identities and history teaching. Of particular importance in my current research are history representations and the role that they play in the construction of identities and intergroup relations.
I am currently working as an Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Eastern Finland and as a Finnish Academy Research Fellow in a project entitled “Narrated Nation: History Representations in Media, Politics and Education” (2016-2022).
Publications will be listed here.
Antti Karjunen. BSc (Econ) Antti Karjunen is currently writing his master’s thesis on social representations of remote work. Prior to his master’s thesis project, Karjunen has gained work experience in the fields of communications and marketing.
Eemeli Hakoköngäs. I currently work as a University Lecturer in Social Psychology at the University of Eastern Finland (Dr. Soc. Sci., University of Helsinki, 2017). I am adjunct professor (title of docent) in Social Psychology at the University of Helsinki. My research interests include social representations, collective memory and political psychology. In addition to these topics, I have specialized in visual and multimodal research methods.
More information of my publications can be found here.
Helena Rovamo. Helena Rovamo is a PhD student from the University of Eastern Finland. Helena’s doctoral research studies populism as a social psychological phenomenon that evokes emotions and images. She is interested in the intertwined relationship between populist and anti-populist thinking. In general, Helena is excited about ways people build their understanding of the world and their identities as part of social reality.
Jennifer de Paola. In my research, I use Social Representations Theory (SRT) as a theoretical framework to capture shared common-sense conceptions of happiness in Finland. SRT offers a means to introduce a variety of data-gathering and analysis methods that have not previously received attention in the research on happiness. In my study, I employ a mixed-method approach to analyse multimodal materials. The materials consist of naturally occurring data, such as Instagram photos and forum discussions on social media; material collected through word associations with happiness and unhappiness and questionnaires.
Jari Martikainen. My interdisciplinary research combines approaches of social psychology and visual culture studies. My main research interests include the theory of social representations, visual representations, visual perception, visual and arts-based research methods and pedagogy of art history. Currently, I work as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Eastern Finland..
Jose Cañada. I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Social Sciences and has a PhD from the same university (2018). I have been especially interested in expert and lay discourses about science and technology, the production of knowledge and the material practices associated to sociotechnical controversies. During my career, I have worked on topics such as pandemic preparedness and response, biobanking, and the development of water infrastructures. I am currently a post-doctoral researcher for the AMRIWA project where I study issues related to AMR global policy-making and national implementation in West Africa. More information on my projects and activities can be found from the Cultures of Cultures website, my personal website or Twitter.
Jenni Savonen. I am a doctoral student in social psychology and my thesis study relates to dependency and substance use issues in Finland. The focus of the research is on substance users, especially illicit drug users, and their marginal position in society. Specifically, I study e.g. the social representations and attitudes associated with this stigmatized group of people.
Katarina Pettersson. My research focuses on political rhetoric, which I mainly approach from critical discourse analytical perspectives. Thematically, my core areas of interest lie in nationalist and radical right-wing political rhetoric, political hate-speech and political communication and persuasion in the online sphere. Through my research, I examine, for example, how politicians draw upon various social identities (e.g. ethnicity, nationality, gender) in their discourse, and what societal implications this discourse may have.
Keshia Dsilva. In my project, I explore how dangers to women are represented by different organizations working for gender justice in India. This topic is pertinent given India’s status as the most dangerous country in the world for women, generating public debate on the treatment of women in India. I will focus on representations at three levels- production, by interviewing communication managers of the organizations; content, by analyzing campaign material and finally reception, by exploring public response to these campaigns. This will provide a multi-faceted picture on how dangers to women in India are constructed by agencies promoting gender justice, the politics involved in such constructions and the messages derived by the public from these campaigns. The theoretical framework is social representations (SR), a social psychological theory dealing with everyday constructions of knowledge.
Matteo Stocchetti. Matteo Stocchetti is docent in political comunication at Åbo Akademie and Helsinki University, and principal lecturer at Arcada University of applied sciences. A core aspect of his research and teaching work is the multidisciplinary study of the communicative construction of relations of power and relations of meaning
Rusten Menard. Read about Rusten Menard’s research interests here.
Salla Ahola. My research interests include values, knowledge-related issues, lay-expert relationships, and wellbeing at work. I currently work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Wellbeing at Work Research Group, Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University. Information on my current research activities can be found here.
Satu Venäläinen. My research focuses on interrelations between publicly circulating meanings of gender and violence and enactments of gendered identities. My PhD research focused on violence perpetrated by women, and specifically on how it is portrayed in the tabloid press, and
how women imprisoned for violent crimes negotiate meanings of violence and their gendered identities. Currently I work in the project “Social Inequalities and Discourses
of Violence. Current Controversies in Finnish Online Forums and Discussions among Welfare State Professionals”. In this research I examine how gender and violence are made sense of in internet discussions, and how these understandings are related to those relied upon by professionals.
Timo Häkli. Timo Häkli is a Doctoral Researcher in the Doctoral Program in Social Sciences, in the discipline of Social Psychology. In his research Timo explores the socially shared meanings attached to food in contemporary society. More specifically, drawing from social representations theory, he explores how topical debates about climate change, public health and animal ethics contest the established social representations of eating meat.
Information on my current research activities can be found here.
Wolfgang Wagner. Wolfgang Wagner is professor of social psychology at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and formerly at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria. His interests are in theoretical and empirical work on societal psychology, social and cultural knowledge, popularisation of science, intergroup relationship, Social Representation Theory and political discourse. He authored and edited several books. “El discurso de lo cotidiano y el sentido común. La teoría de las representaciones sociales” (2011) is a Spanish language standard on the Theory of Social Representations. His latest contribution is in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology on the history of Social Representation Theory (2020). He is associate editor and board member of several scholarly journals. He took short term positions at several foreign universities, including in Mexico and Brazil. Read more about Wolfgang Wagner’s research from these links: