Current research projects
TalkGreen - Youth Climate Activism and the Interaction Practices of Democracy
TalkGreen (2025-2029), funded by the Kone Foundation, explores the anatomy of collective decision-making with and among young climate activists in Finland and Sweden. The project applies theories and methods from social psychology, applied linguistics, and intercultural communication to analyze data from both natural and experimental decision-making contexts. Agenda is to gain a better understanding in the interactional mechanisms that foster or hinder joint decision-making in the inherently dilemmatic climate and environmental issues. The project is done as a Nordic collaboration. See more on the website.
SHADOW - Intervening in trouble at work: Navigating power and social threats in the shadows of interaction ideals
SHADOW (2025-2029) consortium project, funded by the Research Council of Finland, produces information on which problems are considered to require intervention, who is expected to intervene and when, how the intervention occurs, and what impacts and social consequences it has at work. We use the interaction research approach and other qualitative and quantitative methods to explore cultural ideals related to intervention at work, institutional intervention processes and the concrete interaction practices used in interventions. The project is done in co-operation with Finnish Institute of Occupational Health. See more on the website.
Threats to social recognition in interaction: Evaluation and interpretation, narration and silence
Threats are not limited to large-scale societal crises, risks to physical safety, or overt interpersonal conflict. In everyday social interaction, people may also experience their social recognition as being threatened when they are ignored, their views are dismissed, or their sense of belonging in the group is questioned. Although such situations are often subtle and ambiguous, they can have significant consequences. At the same time, their ambiguity makes them difficult to recognize, interpret, and address.
Henri Nevalainen’s dissertation, funded by the Finnish Work Environment Fund, examines how threats to social recognition are evaluated and interpreted, how they are responded to in interaction, and how these experiences are later narrated or remain unspoken. The study combines two complementary datasets. The first consists of an experimental survey study (n = 1680), in which participants evaluate video vignettes depicting problematic interactional situations. The second consists of thematic individual interviews (n = 11), in which students in a female-dominated field describe their experiences of problematic interaction. Together, these datasets enable a broad and nuanced understanding of this subtle and complex phenomenon, from the evaluation of interactional situations to subsequent narration.
The study approaches threats to social recognition as a process that unfolds from the interpretation and evaluation of situations to interactional responses, and further to the narration or silencing of experiences. In this way, it highlights how subtle and often ambiguous social threats are not confined to single interactional episodes but are shaped and acquire meaning across different levels of social interaction. This perspective deepens understanding of social interaction, social recognition, and psychological safety, and helps explain why such threats often remain difficult to recognize and address.
Refugees and immigrants accounting for interactionally troublesome exchanges: Social interaction as a source of support and stress
Due to war, conflict, and humanitarian crises in various parts of the world, the current numbers of refugees and other forcibly displaced people have reached record heights. In addition to the difficult, even traumatic experiences that refugees and other migrants face as they leave their home countries, discrimination and problematic social encounters in their new countries contribute to their post-migration stress, with potentially further detrimental effects on their well-being. While the possibility to later account for such experiences could counteract their negative effects, they may be difficult to verbalize in ways that warrant affiliation and social support.
Annika Valtonen’s dissertation, funded by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation, utilizes datasets of 24 single-person interviews and 10 focus group conversations collected in 2022-2024 among refugees, immigrants and majority population Finns to examine how refugees and immigrants account for their negative experiences in Finland. More specifically, it considers the common patterns of telling (contextual features, content, and composition) in interactionally troublesome exchanges, the ways in which people with differing cultural backgrounds receive, respond, and react to each other’s narratives of interactionally troublesome exchanges, and how the narratives represent concerns and dilemmas of self-presentation. In so doing, the study sheds light on the potential inequalities that refugees and immigrants face in accounting for their negative experiences. As a result of the study, intervention materials will be created and distributed to workplaces, organizations, and public service providers to help combat these inequalities.
Past research projects
SITES - Accounting for interactionally troublesome exchanges: Paradoxes, biases, and inequalities in storying, perceiving, and countering problematic social experiences
SITES (2021-2025), funded by the Academy of Finland, explored telling about problematic interaction experiences. Such storytelling was examined under the assumption that people are not equal in their opportunities to resist problematic interaction experiences that burden their everyday lives. By drawing on a conversation-analytic approach to the details of interaction, narrative theory, as well as qualitative and quantitative research methods, it was investigated how people recounted problematic interaction situations and responded to such accounts, how they presented themselves in these narratives, and how different individuals perceived and explained interaction problems. See more on the website.
VOIS - Participation, joint decision making and social interaction deficits
VOIS (2018-2020), funded by the Academy of Finland, studied interactions, where one or more participants had a mental health problem, targeting the issue of social inclusion. More specifically, the experiences of empowerment in interaction, participation in joint decision-making, and social obstacles in the way to employment for individuals with mental health problems were studied. The insights gained from the research may be applied in the field of mental health psychosocial rehabilitation and in the design of programs to enhance the chances of employment and social inclusion for partially able-bodied individuals. See more on the website.