Dr. Olli Pyyhtinen is Professor of Sociology at Tampere University, Finland, and the founder of RS Hub. His research intersects social theory, philosophy, science and technology studies, economic sociology, and the study of art, and he is the author of for example The Simmelian Legacy: A Science of Relations (2018), More-than-Human Sociology (2015), The Gift and Its Paradoxes (2014), and Simmel and the Social (2010), and co-author of Disruptive Tourism and its Untidy Guests (2014) and Tervetuloa jäteyhteiskuntaan! (2019; ‘Welcome to the Society of Waste!’).
Email: olli.pyyhtinen(at)tuni.fi
Dr. Natàlia Cantó Milà is Associate Professor in Social Sciences at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) in Barcelona. She gained her PhD at the University of Bielefeld (Germany) with a work on Simmel’s relational sociology and theory of value. Thereafter she went to Leipzig, where she taught sociological theory, social policies, and qualitative methodologies. At the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya she is responsible for social theory and qualitative methods. She is the editor-in-chief of the Journal Digithum, an indexed journal specialized in relational sociology. With her research group she leads a research project on the imaginaries of the future of the youth. Her main research interests are relational sociology and social theory.
Email: ncantom(at)uoc.edu
Dr. Scott Eacott is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of School, Research in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Educational Administration at the University of Saskatchewan. He has developed a distinctive relational approach, best captured in Beyond Leadership: a relational approach to organisational theory in education (Springer, 2018), that has led to invitations to run workshops and give talks in Norway, Canada, the USA, Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico, and throughout Australia. Scott has authored over 100 publications, including a recent tribute to François Dépelteau in a Special Section of the journal Digithum (https://doi.org/10.7238/d.v0i26.374154). Further details of his work can be found at www.scott.eacott.com and you can connect with him on Twitter @ScottEacott
Email: s.eacott(at)unsw.edu.au
Dr. Jean-Sébastien Guy lives in Halifax, Canada, where he teaches as Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology. He is a specialist in classical and contemporary social theory, most notably Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. He has written in Current Sociology, European Journal of Sociology, International Review of Sociology, Systems Research and Behavioral Science and Cybernetics and Human Knowing on a wide variety of topics: from globalization to sexuality, from digital culture to relational sociology. His book Theory Beyond Structure and Agency: Introducing the Metric/Nonmetric Distinction has been recently published in the Palgrave Studies on Relational Sociology.
Email: jean-sebastien.guy(at)dal.ca
Dr . Thomas Kemple is Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. His recent books include Simmel (2019) and Writing the Body Politic: John O’Neill Reader (2020; co-edited with Mark Featherstone). He is currently working on a book on the reception of Marx’s Capital among classical sociologists, and an ethnographic study of summer field schools in Vancouver and Guatemala.
Email: kemple(at)mail.ubc.ca
Dr. Kaisa Kuurne is a social scholar whose work has tackled various themes of relationality and belonging, including family and personal relationships, intimate matters, relational selves, urban neighbourhoods, biographical disruptions, and the material mediation of belonging. She has published theoretical articles on relationality and developed figurational methodology for qualitative analysis. She currently works on three projects: 1) a cross-cultural ethnographic project on emerging bonds and boundaries of belonging in neighbourhood-based communities in Helsinki, New York and Madrid, 2) on current battles over birth and the changing culture of care in Finland, and 3) on a special issue on intimate matters beyond ‘the familiar’ (with Andreas Hendrikson and Tara Mehrabi). She leads two research groups entitled ‘Belonging Today’ and ‘Battles over Birth’ at the University of Helsinki. Currently Kaisa divides her time between part-time parental leave and part-time teaching as an Adjunct Professor.
Email: kaisa.m.kuurne(at)helsinki.fi
Dr. Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Tampere, Finland. His present work centres on two different topic areas, one of which is insurance and the management of uncertainty, and the other the role of waste in the contemporary way of life, more specifically practices of dumpster diving, which he studies in a joint project with Associate Professor Olli Pyyhtinen (Tampere University). In addition, Lehtonen has written extensively on social theory. Lehtonen’s recent publications include papers in the journals Res Publica, Political Theory, Cultural Studies, Distinktion, and Theory, Culture & Society.
Email: turo-kimmo.lehtonen(at)tuni.fi
Dr. Mianna Meskus is a sociologist of science and technology, working at the intersections of biomedicine, gender, and power. Her research centres on biomedical shaping of reproduction and ageing in Finland and the EU, historical reconfigurations of gendered biopolitics, and theoretical questions about knowledge production, value and materiality. Meskus currently works as Associate Professor in Sociology at Tampere University, where she leads two interdisciplinary research projects that look into the relationships between reproductive justice, successful ageing, ecological sustainability, and speculative futures.
Email: mianna.meskus(at)tuni.fi
Dr. Davide Ruggieri is Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. Ruggieri holds a PhD in Sociology of cultural processes (University of Bologna) with a dissertation on Georg Simmel’s relational sociology. His main research field covers the history of sociological theory and the relation of culture(s) and individualization in social processes, and his scholarly outputs generally deal with Georg Simmel’s sociology, Critical Theory, and relational sociology. Ruggieri’s has also done research and archival work abroad at the universities of Mainz, Frankfurt, Bielefeld, and Munich.
Email: davide.ruggieri3(at)unibo.it
Dr. Peeter Selg is Professor of Political Theory at Tallinn University. He has published on different topics ranging from semiotic theory of hegemony, political sociology of science, political philosophy of agonism and liberalism, social science methodology and on the relational turn in studies of power, governance and wicked problems. He is currently finishing a book with the title Political Semiotics as a Theory and Method: An Introduction to a Relational Political Analysis (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan, co-authored by Andreas Ventsel). He is also an editor (with Nick Crossley) of the book series “Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology”.
Email: pselg@tlu.ee
Dr. Juha Suoranta is Professor of Adult Education in Tampere University, Finland. He has published in sociology of education, public sociology and critical pedagogy, and worked as Visiting Scholar in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996–97 and UCLA in 2003–2004, and as Visiting Professor in University of Minnesota in 2005–6. His latest books include Artistic Research Methodology (2014), Rebellious Research (2014, in Finnish), C. Wright Mills’s Sociological Life (2017, in Finnish), and Paulo Freire, A Pedagogue of the Oppressed (2019, in Finnish).
Email: juha.suoranta(at)tuni.fi
Dr. Boris Traue is a welfare and social work researcher and sociologist currently appointed as a Professor of Social Work and Social Pedagogy at the University of Luxemburg. He became involved in relational thought through his contributions to advancing social constructivism in the Schutzian tradition towards a ‘communicative constructivism’ as well as through his research on networked communication technologies. As a welfare and social work researcher, he is committed to understanding aspects and effects of participatory practices, institutions, and technologies in a relational vein.
Email: boris.traue(at)posteo.de