TRANSIT
TRANSIT is Tampere University’s first ever Collaboratory merging interdisciplinary collaboration and experimentation (collaborate / laboratory). Its aim is to to work through matters of concern arising from keen societal observations that are transnational in nature and relate to transformations at the global, regional, national, and local scales.
TRANSIT adopts the approach of slow science and works through collaboration, dialogue and public engagement across geographical and disciplinary borders. It brings together knowledges and different onto-epistemologies and methodologies for the explorations of transnational processes such as exchanges and interactions between policies, people, organizations, ideas, technologies, or resources, and their implications for societal transformations. It aims to build a shared intellectual space and create supporting services for participants from diverse scholarly and public domains particularly interested in extending interdisciplinary and innovate collaborations and addressing the challenges and opportunities of transnational activities.
The broad research questions in the core of TRANSIT’s intellectual focus are: How is the world constituted by transnational (im)mobilities of humans, ideas, planetary forces, policies, technologies, experiences and other processes?
- How do these define the unequal experiences of transnationalism and its derivates, such as nationalism, populism, poverty, inequality, climate change and other?
- What constitutes the core of social, political, economic and environmental transformation in diverse local, national, regional, and global contexts?
- How do we grasp the past, present and future manifestations of transnational interdependencies and how can we affect their possible shapes and directions, particularly for more sustainable and just futures for all co-inhabitants?
- How are processes of knowledge production, valuing and dissemination entangled with the political, technological, organizational and societal unfoldings of transnationalism?
- In what ways do societal transformations call for and may lead to transformations and innovations within key sectors in the knowledge-based society, such as university, industry and government as well as renewed ways of citizens’ engagement?
- How can we shape knowledge production in ways that critically address transnationalism as a field of hierarchical knowledge production and what responsibilities can universities assume to intervene in this unequal condition?
TRANSIT facilitates unique forms of collaboration within and across disciplinary fields, research foci and scientific, societal, political and artistic engagements. Bringing together individual researchers, research groups and projects, as well as a wide range of practitioners and citizens from Finland and across the globe, TRANSIT initiates new forms of encounter, reflection and action processes to devise new frames of reference and education programs, publications, resource archives, debates, and stakeholder engagements in physical and virtual spaces.
Director
Nelli Piattoeva is Professor (sociology of education) at the Faculty of Education and Culture.
Her research looks at how forms of digitalisation, quantification and surveillance integrated into national large-scale assessments of education quality act as technologies of education governance at a distance. She is also a co-investigator on a research project that seeks to re-narrate socialist and post-socialist histories in general and childhood and schooling under socialism and post-socialism in particular through memories of cultural insiders and research produced in the region. Her previous works have been published, among others, in Critical Studies in Education; Journal of Education Policy; Comparative Education Review; and Learning, Media and Technology. Nelli has recently joined Critical Studies in Education as Associate Editor. Nelli’s primary geographical focus of research is Russia and the post-Soviet space.
Vice director
Anni Kangas is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Management and Business.
In her research, she has examined political and economic phenomena across scales and contexts–from the formation of Finnish foreign policy toward Russia, to the social reproduction of migrant labour, and most recently, the global political economies of critical raw materials. She is particularly interested in the ontological, temporal, and spatial assumptions that shape how political‑economic processes are understood and governed. Methodologically, her work is driven by a commitment to probing and pushing the established boundaries of social science knowledge production through experimental, and at times speculative, modes of inquiry. She often works across disciplinary lines to illuminate the forces that structure power, extraction, and transformation in the contemporary world.
Chair of the Steering Group
Saara Särmä is a visiting researcher in International Relations at the Faculty of Management and Business.
She is a feminist writer, part-time academic, sometime artist, and occasional activist; creator of “Congrats, you have an all male panel!” and co-founder of the Feminist Think Tank Hattu, which is known for School of Daring and Cursing Soirées. Currently her academic work focuses on militarization of entertainment and reality-tv; her other academic interests include memes, politics of visuality, arts-based methods and laughter in world politics. She is committed to making both academia and the world kinder and better places.
Members of the Steering Group
Zsuzsa Millei is Professor of Early Childhood Education at Tampere University and a member of the TRANSIT research group.
Her research investigates how childhoods and education are shaped through social, political, material, and more-than-human relations. Drawing on interdisciplinary, arts-based and slow research approaches, her work challenges settled assumptions about children, learning, and society by developing innovative theoretical and methodological perspectives. Current projects explore how microbial life can reconfigure educational thinking and human-environment relations in times of social and ecological change.
Riikka Era is a PhD researcher of Social Anthropology at the Faculty of social sciences.
Riikka’s PhD research is an ethnographic dive into everyday life of children in a reception centre: how do young children navigate in the adult led environment? How does their liminal status as not-yet-permitted, or waiting-for-the-war-to-end affect their daily lives?
Their research interests are entangled with questions of inequalities that are attached to global (im)mobilities and their unfolding in the everyday lives of migrants. Transdisciplinary approach is needed when the aim is knowledge production that enables a just society, and developing collaborative methodologies is one of their aims.
Kirsi Pauliina Kallio works as Professor of Environmental Pedagogy at the Faculty of Education and Culture.
Broad themes in her research are contextual political agency and subjectivity, spatial socialization and subject formation, lived citizenship, critical environmental pedagogy based on strong sustainability, democratic and sustainable urban development, and positive recognition. Her multidisciplinary work situates at the nexus between critical political geography and childhood and youth studies, with links to other thematic fields such as refugee studies, planning studies, international political sociology, and environmental education. Kallio’s ongoing research has three foci: refugeeness and humanitarian governance, decolonizing climate change education , and arts-based methodology.
Jaana Palander is a university lecturer of public law at the Faculty of Management and Business.
In her career, Palander has been interested in transnational law including international human rights law and European Union law. Her specific research area is immigration law focusing on family reunification and transnational family life. She has participated in interdisciplinary research projects as well as used multi- and interdisciplinary research methods. Through her research, Palander has closely followed the transformation of Finland and other European countries to more diverse and multicultural societies. Also, the legal system has transformed significantly due to strengthened influence of transnational law. She seeks to contribute to ethical and humane policies and governance in the field of migration.
Tahani Aldahdouh is a Palestinian-Finnish Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University.
She is currently the Principal Investigator of GazaRISE (2026–2031), a Kone Foundation-funded project exploring resilience, resistance, and sumud among Gazan academics across war and diaspora. She also works in the Doctoral Education Pilot Project within the Professional Growth and Learning (PGL) research group. Previously, she worked at the Tampere Institute for Advanced Study (2024–2026), investigating resilience in higher education in war contexts at both institutional and learner levels. She has wide expertise in advanced quantitative research methods and is currently expanding her methodological expertise in qualitative and mixed-methods research. She is firmly committed to promoting quality education and knowledge production with and for marginalised communities.
Prabhat Kiran Thakuri is a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Management and Business.
His research examines circular economy and sustainability transitions in industrial contexts, particularly how different actors understand, negotiate, and pursue sustainability-related change. He is especially interested in developing actor-sensitive explanations of how transition processes emerge, encounter tensions, and translate into organisational practices. Alongside, Prabhat engages with the philosophy of Pragmatic Constructivism, exploring its conceptual implications and seeking to contribute to its development. His interests resonate with TRANSIT’s commitment to supradisciplinary engagement with societal transformations, and to the careful, creative, and meaningful inquiry encouraged by slow science.
Elina I. Mäkinen is Professor of Science, Technology, and Organization at Tampere University’s Faculty of Management and Business.
Her research lies at the intersection of organization studies and science and technology studies, focusing on how knowledge is produced, shared, and governed in knowledge-intensive fields, including academia. She has examined interdisciplinary research, academic entrepreneurship, and ethics in science. Her current research explores the emergence of non-animal research methodologies in biomedical science and their implications for the possible futures of ethical science. She is also investigating responsible AI adoption and emerging accountability infrastructures in the Nordic energy sector.
Valeriia Smirnova is a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Education and Culture.
Valeriia’s research focuses on the intersections of education policy, nationalism, eco-nationalism, and geopolitics, exploring how political, cultural, and environmental narratives are embedded in curricula and textbooks, and how these narratives contribute to processes of national identity construction.
In her PhD dissertation, she examines how nationalist discourses shape English language education in Russia. Her work highlights the societal significance of foreign language education as a space where ideas of culture, identity, the national and the global, belonging and otherness are continuously negotiated.
Sofi Perikangas is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Management and Business.
Their research focuses on the co-production of public services, community-led initiatives, and the role of local governments in fostering community wellbeing and sustainable futures. Sofi studies how locally embedded practices emerge, institutionalize, and travel across contexts, and how trust, reciprocity, and power relations shape collaboration between communities and public administrations.
Sofi’s current work examines community-based social enterprises and the collaborative provision of public services in Finland and Japan, exploring how such innovations can be translated across settings to generate both locally grounded and globally relevant insights that can help in the current polycrisis.
Angel Iglesias Ortiz is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the Tampere Peace Research Institute, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University
Angel´s current work focuses on human mobilities along the Mexico–US border, the Guatemala–Mexico border, and the Canary Islands. In this work, he examines the violences produced by contemporary border regimes, including exclusion, precarity, and the unequal conditions imposed on people in mobility. As part of this work, Angel is especially interested in how transnational mobilities influence experiences of belonging, exclusion, and inequality across different contexts. In this way, Angel’s work closely aligns with the aims of TRANSIT, providing an important platform for critically examining these dynamics while connecting local experiences of (im)mobility to broader transnational processes.