People

About me

Andrea Schaffař works as a Post-Doc Researcher: She is part of the Austrian TRAVIS team at the Department of Communications at the University of Salzburg. Her second work affiliation is with the University of Applied Arts Vienna at the department for Cross-Disciplinary Strategies. Her work focuses on the use of qualitative methods and methodologies at the intersections of different disciplines. Complimenting this her research and teaching areas include media studies and media pedagogy, urban studies and housing, and social dynamics. She published recently ‘Digital dynamics and change’ in GIO, about Grounded Theory in Analyzing Group Interactions and is currently working on a book chapter for ‘Wohnen erforschen’ (Researching housing) about group discussions and how research findings can be used within design processes of housing projects. Additionally, she works as a trainer and consultant in the field of organizational development and group dynamics. Find out more: Mastodon https://sciences.social/@aschaffar, Twitter SocioKommunik, Google Scholar Andrea Schaffař 

About me

Asko Lehmuskallio serves as Professor of Visual Studies at Tampere University and until May 2023 as Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. He is co-founder and -director of the Visual Studies Lab.

In his research, Lehmuskallio focuses particularly on the intersection between visual studies and media studies, with a special interest in media anthropology and digital cultures. He leads two research projects, one on Banal Surveillance, funded by the Academy of Finland, another one on Image/Knowledge, funded by C.V. Åkerlund Media Foundation, and is additionally involved in the Speculative Camera project. During the autumn 2022, he will start as PI in two consortium projects, one on Visions of the City (Academy of Finland) with PL Markus Laine, and another on Trust and Visuality (EU CHANSE) with PL Katrin Tiidenberg (Tallinn) and PI’s Maria Schreiber (Salzburg) and Gillian Rose (Oxford).

Lehmuskallio studied cultural anthropology at Philipps-Universität Marburg, and image science (Bildwissenschaft) at the Dept. of Art History and Media Theory, Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe. He received his PhD (YTT) at the School of Communication, Media and Theatre in Tampere, and was awarded in 2016 the Title of Docent in Visual Studies. After his PhD, Lehmuskallio has held several fellowships abroad, including as Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley, US, at the Sussex Humanities Lab, UK, and as Rudolf Arnheim Guest Professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.

Among his publications are the co-edited works Digital Photography and Everyday Life (2016, Routledge) and Mobile Digital Practices (2017, Digital Culture & Society) and the Finnish-language Entanglements between Bodies and Documents: A History of the Finnish Passport (2020, Finnish Museum of Photography), co-authored with Paula Haara. In addition, he has published in a variety of journals and edited books, including in Visual Communication, International Journal of Communication, IEEE Pervasive Computing and Journal of Aesthetics and Culture.

Lehmuskallio has also co-curated two well-received exhibitions at the Finnish Museum of Photography, #snapshot (2014-15) and Documenting the body: A history of the Finnish Passport (2020).

ORCID ID 0000-0002-8271-9830, Twitter handle @verlook

About me

Elina Alatalo is an architect and doctoral researcher in Environmental Policy of Tampere University, Finland. Her recent research has concentrated on new forms of urban activism, getting vacant spaces back into use and developing sustainable urban neighbourhoods. She is specialized in creating experiments with citizens such as building a community sauna or facilitating network of self-organized coworking places. Currently she teaches in and coordinates Climate University in Tampere that offers multidisciplinary courses on sustainability. She is an active member of COST Action called Writing Urban Places that looks into the possibilities of narrative and other creative methods for urban research. She is also a co-founder of Insurgent Spatial Practices -collective that explores the valuable knowledge that alternative cultures develop.

About me

Eva Purkarthofer is a researcher in the field of urban and regional planning. Her research centres around issues related to territorial governance, strategic and non-binding planning policies and the role of actors in planning processes. Her current research interests include European spatial development and EU Cohesion Policy, planning cultures and planning systems, soft spaces and soft planning, and the role of actors in the sustainability transition.
She currently works as postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Built Environment, Aalto University, Finland, funded by the Academy of Finland through a 3-year postdoctoral project entitled “SUD-TRIP: Sustainable urban development as travelling idea in spatial planning: Substantiating a vague concept by investigating actors, organisations and institutions” (338335).

About me

Frank is a docent and adjunct professor in political science at the University of Jyväskylä and a docent in peace and conflict research at Tampere University. He serves as co-convenor of the ECPR Standing Group on Politics and the Arts. He is the author of two monographs on the visualization of peace: Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Violence (2013) and Peace Photography (2019) as the co-editor of Art as a Political Witness (2017). His work has appeared in, for example, Review of International Studies, International Studies Perspectives, Alternatives, Security Dialogue, Global Society, Arts and International Affairs, Global Discourse, Peace & Change, Peace Review, Cooperation and Conflict, Journal for Cultural Research, Critical Studies on Security, and New Political Science. E-mail: frank.moller@tuni.fi

About me

Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Social Sciences; she has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Pretoria and Karlstad. She is the author of Feminism and Geography (Polity, 1993), Doing Family Photography (Ashgate, 2010) and Visual Methodologies (Sage, fifth edition 2022). Edited collections include Women Writing Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (with Alison Blunt, Guilford, 1994), Visuality/Materiality (with Divya Tolia-Kelly, Ashgate, 2012) and most recently, Seeing the City Digitally, available open access from Amsterdam University Press here. She has also written many papers on images, spatialities, visualising technologies and ways of seeing in urban, domestic and archival spaces. Her current research interests focus on contemporary digital visual culture and how cities are seen and experienced. Find out more about her work here https://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/grose.html and follow her on Twitter @ProfGillian. She is also trying to restart her blog here.

About me

Helena Leino is associate professor in Environmental Policy at the faculty of Management and Business in Tampere University. She is also adjunct professor at Aalto University, department of Built Environment, in Helsinki. She received her PhD in Environmental Policy 2006. Her research has focused on diverse aspects of sustainable urbanisation, participatory knowledge production in urban planning and co-creative urban experiments. She has acted as a PI in several multidisciplinary research projects in land use planning, urban regeneration, and use of urban space. Leino has published widely in diverse scientific refereed journals, including Planning Theory, International Planning Studies, Policy & Society, Environment and Planning C, and Planning Theory & Practice.

About me

About me

I’m a postdoctoral researcher working in the field of urban studies and planning. My research concerns the role of urban planning and politics in shaping the possibilities for sustainable and equitable urban living. It relates to three overlapping themes:

1) Urban planning as a practice of meaning making and visual storytelling about the future

2) The micropolitics of the planning processes, expertise and everyday practices of doing planning

3) Everyday life in urban spaces, including social infrastructures and social life of (sub)urban neighbourhoods, practices of urban walking, and housing

I’m also interested in innovative methodologies for urban research and in developing solutions to practical policy problems. I hold a PhD in Environmental Policy and my research draws on literature and approaches from the fields of urban studies and planning as well as environmental social sciences and human geography. I work in the Politics of Nature and the Environment (PONTE) research group at Tampere University and at Aalto University, the Department of Built Environment.

About me

Jenni Niemelä-Nyrhinen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Research Centre COMET located at the Communication Sciences Unit at Tampere University in Finland. Her research interests include philosophy of photography, social uses of photography, visual journalism, and politics of aesthetics. In past few years she has written articles on such issues as phatic photographic communication, photography as play, epistemologies of the photographic image and aesthetic practices in the climate crisis.

ORCID 0000-0001-5025-1578

About me

Josie Hamper is a postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the embodied experiences, knowledge and practices that emerge at the intersection between new technology, health and medicine. Her previous work, which was funded by the ESRC and Wellcome Trust, has explored how digital visualisations (including fertility monitoring data and prenatal imagery) travel through people’s social worlds. She has published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Social Science & Medicine and Culture, Health & Sexuality, among other journals.

About me

About me

Maria Schreiber is a Post-Doc Researcher at the Department of Communications at the University of Salzburg, Austria. Her work focuses on visual and digital media cultures and qualitative methods. Previously, she worked at the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna, investigating ‘Visual Biographies in a networked lifeworld’. Maria was a visiting researcher at the University of Potsdam’s center on ‘Visuality and Making Visible’ and at the Digital Ethnography Research Center at RMIT in Melbourne. She held a scholarship of the Austrian Academy of Science as part of the DOC-team ‘Pictorial Practices’. She is part of the interdisciplinary DFG-network ‘Transformative Visuality’ (https://bild-netzwerk.net/ ).
Find out more here: https://www.plus.ac.at/kommunikationswissenschaft/fachbereich/mitarbeiterinnen-2/post-doc/schreiber-maria/, Twitter, academia.edu

About me

Marius Liedtke is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Communications at the University of Salzburg. He holds a Masters degree in Socio-Cultural Studies from European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). He is co-author of the study “Learning from Influencers: YouTube & Co. as playgrounds for left-wing politics and educational work” (2019, in German) and part of the research project “STICK & FLOW: A Critical Framework for investigating bot engagement on social media”. Marius research interests include digital cultures, political activism and (audio-)visual communication. Find out more: Research Gate, Twitter

About me

Markus Laine is university lecturer and the lead teacher in the Bachelor’s Degree Programme in Sustainable Urban Development at Tampere University, Finland. He has a PhD in environmental policy from the Tampere University (2003). Laine has worked as a university lecturer in regional studies, administrative sciences, and environmental policy as well as a research professor in the urban research unit in the City of Helsinki Urban Facts department. His research has focused on sustainable urban development, collaborative land use and planning and urban politics studies. He has led several research projects in the field of sustainable urban development funded by e.g., the Academy of Finland and Business Finland. Laine has published widely in diverse scientific refereed journals, including European Planning Studies; Journal of Planning Education and Research; Planning Theory; International Planning Studies; Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning; Journal of Urban Design; Housing, Theory and Society; Housing Studies and International Journal of Innovation and Regional Development.

About me

Rasmus holds a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from the University of Münster, Germany, and an M.A. in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research from Tampere University. He worked as a research assistance in the OSCE Network Project Cross-Regional Corridors of Dialogue and the Center for International Peace Operations, Berlin. Conference presentations at, for example, Popular Culture and World Politics, Finnish International Studies Association, and Helsinki Photomedia. E-mail: rasmus.bellmer@tuni.fi

About me

Salla Jokela is University Lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University. She is leading the Social Science stream in a multidisciplinary and international Bachelor’s degree programme in Sustainable Urban Development. She has completed her PhD in human geography at the University of Helsinki in 2014. Her research has focused on visual identity politics of urban landscapes, the role of tourism images in nation-building, city branding as a policy, urban discourses, and platform-mediated tourism as a driver of urban transformation. She has served in key roles in development of teaching in collaboration with city organizations and stakeholders, e.g. in the Urban Academy Network, Master’s Programme in Urban Studies & Planning (University of Helsinki & Aalto University) and Nordic City Challenge coordinated by the Hanasaari Swedish–Finnish Cultural Centre. She is also an active member of the Finnish Society for Urban Studies.

About me

Tobias Schmid is a researcher at the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University. He holds a Masters degree in Art and Visual History from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Tobias has two years of project based work experience in political consulting with stations at polisphere, Bernstein Group and PRLX. He is part of the Image/Knowledge research project led by Asko Lehmuskallio. His research focusses on the visual transformation of health on platform services and mobile devices.

About me

Ariel Caine (PhD) is a Jerusalem born London based Artist and Researcher. His practice focuses on the intersection of spatial optical imaging, modelling and survey technologies and their operation within the production of cultural memory and national narratives. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London and since 2016 was a project coordinator and researcher at Forensic Architecture Agency. His works have been exhibited widely in museums and galleries such as Tate Britain (turner prize nomination with Forensic Architecture), Kunsthal Charlottenburg (Copenhagen), MACBA (Barcelona), and the CCA (Tel-Aviv). Ariel is currently a Gerda Henkel Stiftung post-doctoral researcher as part of the speculative cameras and post visual security projects at Tampere University.

About me

Lisa is an artist, peacebuilder and currently a doctoral researcher working in her PhD project “Visual Peacetech: Digital Visual Images as Security-Building Tools”. Lisa’s research is inspired by her grassroots peacebuilding work, in particular the visual art-for-peace project she founded in 2016 – Color Up Peace. Lisa now researchers the potential of employing digital visual images as tools to enhance security as a state of being during grassroots peace processes. In her PhD project, Lisa is interested in digital visuality of images, virtual reality image-creation and image-transformation technologies, augmented reality artistic image-layering, and development of short animated videos. Her research is accompanied by creation of original artistic media pieces meant as tools for peace work and pace education.

About me

Yanai Toister (Ph.D.) is an artist, writer, and educator serving as Associate Professor at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art in Tel Aviv (where he also chaired the unit for History and Philosophy between 2017-2022). Toister’s artworks have been exhibited in numerous exhibitions (including: Sandroni.Rey; Dvir Gallery; Kunstahalle Luzern; Bolsky Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design; Maison Europèenne de la Photographie; the 11th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale; Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Haus Lange; Israel Museum). Toister’s scholarly writing has been published in various books and journals (including: Digital Creativity; Flusser Studies; Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts; Philosophy of Photography; Photographies; Ubiquity). Toister’s recent book Photography from the Turin Shroud to the Turing Machine was published by Intellect/University of Chicago Press.