Annalisa Sannino is Professor at the Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University. Her research focuses on collective learning and transformative agency formation processes in educational settings, workplaces and communities. Her work is increasingly recognized as a substantive contribution to the fields of research on transformative agency, cultural-historical activity theory and formative intervention methods. The settings of her empirical interventionist research have included schools, university libraries, municipal home care services and a hospital. Changes in these contexts were triggered by the introduction of new technologies and by emerging new needs among students, clients and patients. Her analyses trace how actors in these contexts collectively created and took into use their own designs to shape transformations. Her research since 2018 has focused on cross-sectoral and cross-hierarchical settings, as in the work toward eradicating homelessness in Finland. Results of her research have appeared in numerous publications including three edited books, by Cambridge University Press (2009, 2023) and Routledge (2013). She has an extensive record of mobility across international and interdisciplinary borders with long periods and appointments in American, French, and Italian universities. She has held visiting appointments at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, University West, Sweden and at Rhodes University, South Africa among others.
Hannele Kerosuo is Researcher at the Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University. She is also Docent in Organizational Pedagogy at University of Helsinki since 2011. She has been actively involved in the development of formative interventions and the Change Laboratory method since 2000 in the Centre for Research on Activity, Development and Learning CRADLE at University of Helsinki. She has published extensively on transformative agency, boundary crossing and expansive learning in organizations, particularly in health care, social welfare and construction industry. Kerosuo has worked in and led several major research projects and has extensive experience in doctoral and post-doctoral supervision.
Yrjö Engeström is Professor Emeritus of Adult Education at University of Helsinki, Finland and Professor Emeritus of Communication at University of California, San Diego. He is Director of the Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning (CRADLE) which applies and develops cultural-historical activity theory in studies of transformations and learning in work and organizations. He has received an honorary professorship from University of Birmingham in UK and honorary doctorates from University of Oslo, Norway, and University of Ioannina, Greece.
Pauliina Rantavuori is graduated from the Doctoral Programme Education & Society in 2025. Prior to her research career, she worked for 20 years as a special education teacher and special planner in the Education Division in the city of Helsinki. Her dissertation was part of the research project “In search for the significance: Fostering movement across the five worlds of adolescents” funded by the Academy of Finland (PI: Professor Emeritus Yrjö Engeström). Her research focuses on ways to counteract experiences of school-related alienation and marginalization among adolescents with the help of conceptual tools from activity theory and the Change Laboratory method.
Mattia Favaretto is an activist-researcher in Social Pedagogy. During his PhD at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, he joined RESET to contribute to developments of the Fourth Generation of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory. His doctoral research applied CHAT to analyse and intervene in the learning processes of civic movements in Venice and other endangered urban ecosystems. Currently, his work seeks to integrate formative interventions with socio-ecological research, focusing on how collective learning can support equitable and sustainable transformations in vulnerable communities. Particularly, he collaborates with civic and institutional networks advocating for the recognition of the legal personhood of ecosystems, exploring how new forms of ecological governance can be co-created through expansive learning processes.
Pilar Orrego-Gañán joined RESET during an doctoral research period at the Faculty of Education and Culture at Tampere University in 2024. She is part of the research group Human Activity Laboratory-Identity, Health, and Social Change and is writing a doctoral dissertation in the PhD programme in Psychology at the University of Sevilla, Spain. Her research focuses on processes of identity reconstruction among refugees with the aim of producing instruments in support of their their psychological well-being.
Esa Jokinen (D.Soc.Sc, Social Psychology, 2017) joined RESET as Postdoctoral Researcher in the project “Collective Professional Agency in Finnish Housing First Work” funded by the Finnish Work Environment Fund in collaboration with the City of Tampere and Y-Foundation. His article-based doctoral dissertation focused on evaluation and local government personnel amidst organisational change.
Dimitrios Prokopis is an educator and recently completed a Master’s thesis at the Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University titled “Toward a new beginning: Expansive learning in a youth housing unit.” The main results of his research were published as an article in the Journal of Workplace Learning
Emma Kärki joined RESET as Research Assistant in the RESET project on the Fourth Generation of the Change Laboratory method, in collaboration with the MTT research group and supported the Faculty of Education and Culture Strategic Funding 2021. She was subsequently employed by the City of Jyväskylä on behalf of RESET to research the uptake and further development of the Multi-Professional Mobile Support Innovation originally designed in a Change Laboratory conducted in our faculty and which became part of the official policy of the City of Tampere. Currently a Master’s student at the faculty, she is inspired by continuous learning and her academic interests include psychology, organizational learning, knowledge management, personnel management and personnel development. She has previously worked in personnel support services in the construction industry.
Hien Dinh joined RESET while working on her Master’s thesis at the Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University. The thesis includes the first a first diagnostic toolkit whiten the paradigm of cultural-historical activity theory to explore the viability of the Change Laboratory implementation. Prior to that, she was a language instructor at the University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University in Hanoi, where she acquired an interest in teacher education and professional development. Inspired by the conceptual and methodological framework of Transformative Agency by Double Simulation, she has obtained a full scholarship to pursue a doctoral dissertation at the University of Technology Sydney. Her contributions to RESET agenda continued in the aftermath of the GINTL China collaboration project and the European DiversHUBility project.
Saara Pitkälä holds an MA in Education and has worked as part of GINTL China project of RESET in collaboration with the College of Elementary Education, Capital Normal University, Beijing.
Joona Moberg joined RESET as Research Assistant in the project “Collective Professional Agency in Finnish Housing First Work” funded by the Finnish Work Environment Fund in collaboration with the City of Tampere and Y-Foundation.
Heli Norolahti joined RESET when working on her Master’s student in Social Work at Tampere University. Her thesis is an ethnographic study of the professional culture of recovery in a supported housing unit for clients with a history of homelessness. She has previously worked with young offenders in the Criminal Sanctions Agency (RISE).
Terhi Esko (M. Soc. Sc. Sociology), defended her PhD in Education in 2020 at the University of Helsinki with a thesis on “Societal Problem Solving and University Research: Science-Society Interaction and Social Impact in the Educational and Social Sciences”. Her previous research themes include science, technology and innovation policy, comparative studies of research organizations, and public service production. Terhi Esko has skills in qualitative content analysis, framing, and narrative methods. She has published in journals including Science and Public Policy, Minerva, and International Journal of Contemporary Sociology.
Felipe Sanches Lopez is Professor at the University of São Paulo, São Carlos campusa Brazil. He joined RESET as part of one year doctoral fellowship to finalize his dissertation. His interests focus on science teaching, addressing issues related to power relations, the history of science education, and science communication from the perspective of CHAT, Freire and Gramsci frameworks. His collaboration with RESET pertains to the development of conceptual and methodological tools for investigating power, building on the CHAT framework of transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS).
Anne Laitinen has been a key contributor to the data collection during the first replication of the Vygotskian “waiting experiment”. Her Master’s thesis on transformative agency by double stimulation received the University of Helsinki Faculty of Behavioural Sciences Master’s Thesis Award in June 2011. In 2012 she obtained a Licentiate degree, with distinction, with the thesis “Double stimulation and agency in the experiment of the meaningless situation.” She has been involved in several Change Laboratory intervention studies since 2008.
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