Refine your search

A Lost Mitten and Other Stories

The project, Lost Mitten and Other Stories, examines a new sense of neighbour relations that transpires as a result of growing mobility. The project focuses on the ways in which these new neighbour relations or a sense of neighbourliness emerge from stories related to personal items of significance, and the way in which these stories are perceived. Lost Mitten and Other Stories is an interdisciplinary project that seeks collaboration between art and science. The project is carried out in eastern Finland.

The main concern of the project is to find out how the items of personal significance and the stories related to them help establish dialogue and, consequently, new kinds of mobile and cross-border neighbour relations and a sense of neighbourliness. Furthermore, the purpose is to explore how dialogic interaction helps promote, for example, the construction of cultural citizenship and create new, migrating, deterritorial cultural heritages. The items of personal significance as well as the stories relating to them are examined through a materialistic, cultural, linguistic, and narrative point of view and are, additionally, exhibited through artistic, interactive displays. The items of personal significance are understood as a poetic and political medium of various dialogues between past and present, between immigrants and natives, between different generations, between mobile and sedentary people.

The approach and the subject matter of the project are topical: immigration, different mobilities, the encounter of languages and cultures, and thereby, emerging new neighbour relations and a sense of neighbourliness. The multidisciplinary approach, combining different methods of science and art, enables new ways of examining the issue of neighbour relations and a sense of neighbourliness.

The project combines science and art innovatively and, therefore, generates new methods to investigate the current issues of different mobilities, language and cultural encounters, and challenges arising from new neighbour relations.

The project is funded by the Kone Foundation.

Andrew Agbaje (andrew.agbaje@uef.fi)

Prof. Agbaje is an award-winning physician and professor (associate) of clinical epidemiology and child health who currently investigates causal relationships of aerobic fitness, physical activity, sedentary behaviour, body composition, insulin resistance, dyslipidaemia, and metabolic syndrome with arterial, cardiac, liver, and kidney structure and function from childhood through young adulthood.

He discovered arterial stiffness as a novel risk factor for paediatric obesity and insulin resistance, identified adolescence as the critical time to interrupt fat mass-insulin resistance pathologic cycle, and demonstrated light-intensity physical activity as a highly effective antidote for reversing excessive fat deposit induced by childhood sedentariness. Recently, he discovered waist-to-height ratio as a specific surrogate for fat mass but not muscle mass that could replace BMI in assessing childhood obesity. Subsequently, he was interviewed LIVE on BBC World News TV to discuss the novel findings.

As of September/October 2023, two of Prof. Agbaje’s publications were placed in the Top 1% highly cited paper in the academic field of Clinical Medicine, while a third publication was placed in the Top 1% highly cited paper in the academic field of Biology & Biochemistry by Clarivate’s Web of Science.

He has a first authored paper in Nature Communications and was interviewed LIVE on BBC World Service Radio Newsday programme on 15th Dec 2023, BBC Radio Devon on 16th Jan 2024, and BBC World News LIVE TV programme on 14th March 2024. The University of Eastern Finland recently recorded a podcast interview of his latest findings as well as a video.

The Endocrine Society in US, recently recorded a podcast interview of his research and discussed his research in the prestigious Endocrine Magazine March 2024 edition. He was recently interviewed by the European Association for the Study of Obesity, a federation of 36 European countries’ professional associations.

His research has received extensive press coverage, with over 2,000 media mentions in 2022 and 2023 in outlets such as BBC, CNN, The Telegraph, Daily Mail, Mirror, BILD, Infobae, Yahoo Lifestyle, Yahoo Sport, US News & World report, DocCheck, MSN, WebMD, Medscape, The Conversation, Jerusalem Post, Helsingin Sanomat, etc, potentially reaching a global audience of more than 4.5 billion. The equivalent advertising value of these news articles is more than 30 million US dollars.

He is the principal investigator of the urFIT-child research group and has strong collaboration with world-renowned pediatricians, exercise physiologists, epidemiologists, and adult clinicians in Canada, US, UK, Germany, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, etc.

He has received several scientific excellence awards including the prestigious EASO-Novo Nordisk Foundation for New Investigator Award in Childhood Obesity with a 300,000 Danish Kroner (~40,000 euro) prize. Other awards are the American Heart Association’s Elizabeth Barrett-Connor Research Award in Epidemiology and Prevention (once), Jeremiah and Rose Stamler Research Award (twice), and Paul Dudley White International Scholar Award (thrice).

He is a member of the scientific writing group of the Atherosclerosis, Hypertension, and Obesity in Youth subcommittee of the American Heart Association. He was an invited guest speaker to the largest mother and child center in Canada – CHU Sainte-Justine Mother and Child University Hospital Center, Canada in March 2023 to speak on the determinants of carotid intima-media thickness and arterial stiffness in pediatrics.

He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Children’s Health and Exercise Research Centre (CHERC), Department of Public Health and Sports Sciences, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.

He serves on the editorial board of Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology (ATVB), a prestigious American Heart Association Journal, and on the editorial board of Pediatric Exercise Science, the official Journal of the North American Society for Pediatric Exercise Medicine.

In November 2023, he was elected Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology (FESC) and in March 2024 he was elected Fellow of the American Heart Association (FAHA). These titles of honour, symbol of excellence and lifetime achievement recognizes his significant contribution to cardiovascular field in Europe and America.

He is an expert advisor to the World Health Organization’s task force on preventing childhood obesity.

His primary email is andrew.agbaje@uef.fi

His secondary email is a.agbaje@exeter.ac.uk

Anneli Hujala (ritva.hujala@uef.fi)

I work as a researcher of management in the field health and social care. My research focuses on interactional dimensions of management (health management science, social psychology) in the context of integrated care. Cross-boundary collaboration of managers, professionals and clients are the core of our latest research projects.

Arto Koistinen (arto.koistinen@uef.fi)

My duties include e.g. development and coordination of UEF infrastructure program and further, strategic planning, cooperation with other institutes and companies, and decision preparation.

Based on the above mentioned duties, University’s collaboration within innovation ecosystems and companies will be strengthened. Collaboration is carried out e.g. with other educational institutes, local councils and national CLIC Innovation consortium.

 

My expertise in the research include research on biomaterial science, especially on material interactions and chemical analysis. We are one of the leading teams for microplastics analysis in Finland. I will continue leading microplastic research project funded by the Academy of Finland.

Behnam Tajik (behnam.tajik@uef.fi)

A nutritionist and A Postdoc Research Fellow in Health science. My research interests lie primarily in the role of dietary factors on the cardiometabolic diseases, mainly cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes.

Coordinator of UEF/Africa Pilot – Southern African and Finnish Higher Education Institutions’ for Health and Well-being network (SAFINET) for Facilitating collaboration between Southern African and UEF’s academia in Health science.

 

Cloneria Jatileni (cloneria.jatileni@uef.fi)

I facilitate the collaborations between the University of Eastern Finland’s department of teacher education and our partner universities in the global north and south. In this collaboration, we work with the departments of education at the University of Turku in Finland, the University of Namibia in Namibia, and Stadio Higher Education in South Africa. Generally, I am involved in the GINTL  African collaborations with UEF on educational research. My work includes applying for funding on GINTL projects at UEF and identifying possible research areas. Our research areas are teacher education/training, digital learning, early childhood education and educational policies. I am also a doctoral student at UEF. My dissertation focuses on digital learning for Mathematics and policy development in Namibian basic education.