Professor Adrian Blau (King’s College London) did his PhD on normative aspects of electoral systems, and still works on democratic theory and practice. Much of his research is on rationality and irrationality, including the work of Thomas Hobbes and of Jürgen Habermas. He has also published 10 articles and chapters on the methodology of history of political thought, and edited the first ever textbook on political theory methods: Methods in Analytical Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His current work involves bringing the social sciences and humanities closer together, partly by focusing on the logic of inference of philosophical thought experiments.
Annastiina Kallius is finalizing her PhD in social anthropology at the University of Helsinki. The ethnographic monograph explores politics of knowledge in late 2010s Hungary and traces a process of ‘an epistemic collapse’ among the Budapest liberal milieu. Her earlier work has dealt extensively with topics of migration and borders, and in recent years she has turned her focus on liberalism, epistemology and authoritarianism. Annastiina holds a BA degree in Politics and Development studies from School of Oriental and African Studies in London, UK, and an MA degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.
Kari Karppinen is a university lecturer of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki. His research interests include media and communication policy, media freedom and pluralism, theories of democracy and the public sphere, and questions about digital rights and internet governance. He has authored the book Rethinking Media Pluralism (Fordham University Press, 2013), and his work has also appeared in journals like the European Journal of Communication, Information, Communication & Society, Journalism Studies, The Information Society, Journal of Information Policy and First Monday. Karppinen has also worked as a visiting research fellow at the University of Sydney, Westminster University and Fordham University.
Michiru Nagatsu is an associate professor at Practical Philosophy, Faculty of Social Sciences, and Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science, University of Helsinki. He uses a range of empirical approaches to study conceptual, methodological and ethical questions in economics, cognitive science and sustainability science.
Sinem Kavak is a postdoctoral researcher at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and a research affiliate in Center for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS) at Lund University. She holds a PhD in Political Science and International Relations earned at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris Saclay in France. Her research areas are in fields of critical political economy, extractivism, migration and refugee studies. She also carries research on themes related to critical agrarian studies and rural/environmental movements. Her research cuts across human rights issues around decent work, child labor, refugee experiences as well as macro-level issues of democratic backsliding, authoritarianism, cronyism, extractivism. Her publications appeared in New Perspectives on Turkey, Journal of Agrarian Change among others and she co-edited the volume on Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Resistance in Turkey: Construction, Consolidation and Contestation published by Palgrave McMillan (2022). Geographically, she focuses on Turkey, Lebanon and Colombia.
Ossi I. Ollinaho works currently as a University Lecturer at the Global Development Studies of University of Helsinki, Finland. In his research Dr. Ollinaho has applied Alfred Schutz’s social theory on topics such as environmental predicament, digitalization, extractivism, agroecology, agroforestry, and economics. He has focused on conceptualizing an insidious or accretive type of social change, which he calls cumulative sociomaterial change. In his empirical work, Dr. Ollinaho has studied agroforestry and renewable energy, mostly in Brazil. To date, Dr. Ollinaho has published articles in Environmental Sociology, Review of African Political Economy, Human Studies, Journal of Peasants Studies, Journal of Rural Studies, Sustainability, Revista NERA, and Autrepart.