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Circular Economy of water in industrial processes

This “Circular Economy of water in industrial processes”, CEIWA project develops solutions for digitalization, technology development, management of different pollutants, and legislative aspects to enhance circular economy of industrial waters. In addition to providing solutions to water intensive industries, the project also serves technology and service providers. This project supports various industries to obtain circular economy of waters as core business. University of Eastern Finland will concentrate on development of multimetal and microplastic analysis.

Commercial and Trade Law Research Group

Research project: FORK- Fraud-Free Food and Regulatory Know-How, funded by the Academy of Finland and UEF 2019-2023

How can consumers be sure that they eat what they think they eat? The FORK project responds to the trends of power consumerism, personalized nutrition services and digitalization of food commerce by developing better regulation for a modified food chain.

International partner: Fighting Food Frauds regarding Foods with Intentionally Added Pharmaceutical Products, funded by the Chinese State Administration for Market Regulation, 2019-2022. The FFF-project aims to identify patterns of food fraud and seek solutions by examining experiences of other jurisdictions. Economically motivated food adulteration adding pharmaceuticals in foods as Chinese traditional medicine is a growing issue in food manufacturing largely contributing to food safety problems in China.

Book project: K Lindroos, L Montagnani and K Klafkowska Wasniowska: Freedom and Responsibility of Online Platforms, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019-2021.European values include upholding free movement in the single market, while ensuring responsibility and accountability in the digital single market. All regulators face the same dilemma: how to strike a balance between these values structuring the role of platforms in preserving fundamental values.

Book project: K Lindroos, L Tammenlehto: Moderni immateriaalioikeus ja alustatalouden innovaatiot, Talentum Publishing 2019-2020.

Hanna Varjakoski (hanna.varjakoski@uef.fi)

I currently work as a postdoctoral researcher in the HAIDI project at the University of Eastern Finland. My background is in the Humanities, and I received my PhD in Media Studies in the University of Turku, Finland. In my dissertation, I examined the Finnish media landscape of the 2000s and what it produces and challenges as regards cultural imageries and understandings of ageing, older individuals and later life. The study focused on analyzing age representations on social media, popular fiction film and selected TV-makeover shows with a gender sensitive approach.

My research interests are in the field of cultural gerontology, in particular, but I have also worked as a researcher e.g. in a project that examined older adults’ neighbour relations and age diversity in the neighborhood.

I teach in courses that address questions related to cultural ageing, media, digitalization and health.

Kalle Kärhä (kalle.karha@uef.fi)

Since 2021, Kalle Kärhä has been a Professor of Forest Technology, especially Digitalization of Forest Operations and Logistics at the University of Eastern Finland. Currently, he also holds a Docent professorship in Forest Technology at the University of Helsinki and a Docent professorship in Forest Technology, especially Forest Energy Supply Systems at the University of Eastern Finland. Previously, he worked in several operational and RDI roles at Stora Enso Wood Supply Finland in 2011–2021.

The total number of his publications is more than 400 consisting of the peer-reviewed scientific articles, non-refereed scientific articles and books, as well as publications intended for professional communities and the general public. His research interests include driver and operator assistant systems, studies on the utilization of novel sensor technologies in forest machines and timber trucks, and energy efficiency and GHG emissions in the value chain of forest industry.

Katja Weckström (katja.weckstrom@uef.fi)

My research focuses on emerging markets and the evolving regulatory framework for commerce. I concentrate on the role of law and trade in shaping the global economy, which directly impacts national and regional economies. My research targets regulation that may enable growth and remove barriers to trade and commercial development. Global transactions impact the regulator’s ability to control actors and digital content as well as reducing risks and preventing harm to consumers. Hybrid governance models and institutions are necessary to govern international distribution chains to detect fraudulent activity and promote innovative entrepreneurship.
Technological development surpasses regulation that is mainly geared towards real world commerce. Digitalization does not replace, but transforms international chains of commerce and creates opportunities for new business innovations. Trade in physical goods remains relevant, yet now trade revolves around digital content and the service economy. My research focuses on grey areas or gaps in commercial regulation. Thematically I focus on the areas of internet, IPRs and food law.
The focus on IPRs relates to policing criminal activity and utilizing protection schemes to further entrepreneurship, especially protecting innovative SMEs in global markets and developing countries and capitalizing on the potential in food innovation to enhance food security and sustainable business models in food development.

Lasse Eronen (lasse.eronen@uef.fi)

RESEARCHER

Title of Docent (Research in mathematics education)

I am Lasse Eronen, a Finnish researcher in mathematics education, with a wide range of studies, particularly focused on innovative learning environments, motivation, and sustainable development. My research has targeted various educational levels, ranging from primary school to university level. I am particularly interested in how the design of learning environments and teaching methods can impact students’ motivation and well-being. My research interests also include digitalization in mathematics education, and taking into account students’ emotions and opinions in mathematics teaching. I have researched, for example, the emotional reactions activated by mathematical problem-solving and how to facilitate these in teaching. (ChatGPT, based on 2020-2022 published articles)

TEACHER

Excellent Teaching Practitioner Award

Lasse Eronen: Eronen has years of experience in research-based development of teaching both in collaboration with his closest colleagues and across faculty boundaries. Eronen uses learning analytics to develop his teaching, and he has been in charge of developing self-assessment on the Arviointimaa (Reflection Landscape) platform. Besides utilising student feedback, he also involves students through Master’s theses dealing with the development of teaching. Research-based activities and sharing of practices are highlighted in Eronen’s teaching, and they also constitute part of transferable skills development. (UEF, 2023 Excellent Teaching Practitioner Award statement)

Laura Aivio (laura.aivio@uef.fi)

I work as an inhouse lawyer of the University. My area of responsibility is especially all questions related to IT law and digitalization (e.g. information management, digital services, IT contracts, legal issues related to information security and data protection, electronic operating environments and other digitalization).

Mikko Laitinen (mikko.laitinen@uef.fi)

I am Professor of English Language at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu and an elected member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. My research focuses on the social network theory in language variation and change in English and on the study of world Englishes in Finland and in the Nordic region. I am interested in computational and data intensive digital methods in the humanities. As empirical material, my research uses both traditional text corpora and born-digital societal big data. As for administrative duties, I was elected as the chair of the University Collegiate Body for 2022–2025.

 

Currently, I am PI of two externally funded projects. FIN-CLARIAH (2022–23) is currently funded by the Research Council of Finland, and this national consortium develops tools and datasets for digital humanities research (https://www.kielipankki.fi/organization/fin-clariah/). The work of the UEF group focuses on collecting, preprocessing and analyzing born-digital social media data and metadata for research. We are particularly interested in human-centered AI and concentrate on using societal big data in ethically sustainable ways. In addition, I run a project funded by the Finnish Government’s joint analysis, assessment and research activities. This project provides research-based information for decision makers on the role of English in Finland today. The project investigates the scope of using English in civil administration, in business life and in higher education. As empirical material, this project uses large-scale survey data and data collected from social media. The project report is expected by the end of 2023.

 

I started my university studies in a college in Texas in the 1990s after which I have been a student and post doc researcher at the universities of Helsinki and Jyväskylä. In 2012, I was appointed as Professor of English at Linnaeus University in Sweden where I helped establish an interdisciplinary research unit of Center for Data Intensive Sciences and Applications (DISA). This interdisciplinary unit brings together computer scientists, visualization experts, social scientists and linguists for data intensive research.

 

Together with Prof. Jukka Tyrkkö, I am the general editor of a new book series (Bloomsbury Academic). This series (Language, Data Science and Digital Humanities) sets out from the assumption that language use is at the heart of the ongoing digital revolution, and that more interdisciplinary collaboration is need to understand both digitalization and language in use in the digital era. The series specifically invites proposals that seek to utilize computational and data intensive methods and explore novel digital solutions to analyze digital data of various sizes and forms.

Mikko Vastaranta (mikko.vastaranta@uef.fi)

Dr. Mikko Vastaranta is a professor in digitalization and knowledge leadership in forest-based bioeconomy at the University of Eastern Finland’s School of Forest Sciences. He earned his M. Sc (2007) and PhD (2012) in forest resource science and technology from the University of Helsinki, where he also holds an adjunct professorship in remote sensing of forests. He has held positions as a research scientist at the Centre of Excellence in Laser Scanning Research, university lecturer in forest planning (University of Helsinki), visiting research scientists at the Pacific Forestry Centre (Canadian Forestry Service, Natural Resources Canada), and visiting professor at Shinshu University (Japan). His research focuses on examining nature-human-technology interactions using geoinformation science-based technologies and methods. Vastaranta has authored over 150 peer-reviewed scientific articles, and his recent publications can be found on Google Scholar.

Touko Vaahtera (touko.vaahtera@uef.fi)

From 1.9.2023 to 31.8.2027, I work as an Academy Research Fellow on my project Cripping Digital Capacity (funded by The Research Council of Finland).

The project explores the recent history of the idea of digital capacity. In this way, it provides new perspectives for understanding the current powerful idea, in which citizens are assumed to develop digital skills. From the perspectives of critical disability studies and crip theory, the project both interrogates the centrality of capacity around digitalization and explores how disability has played a part in the history of digital capacity.

Previously, I have interrogated the centrality of capacity and capability in the cultural meanings of bodies in my book “Biopolitics of Swimming and the Re-articulation of Able-Bodiedness: Bodies of Latent Potential” (2022, Palgrave Macmillan).

Reviews:

“This wonderfully written book subjects swimming to a much-needed queer and disability analysis. Vaahtera asks us to reconsider the innocence of the question— can you swim?—and to explore together wider societal assumptions that we hold over ourselves and others associated with capacity, capability, and ability.” (Dan Goodley, Professor of Disability Studies and Education, University of Sheffield)

“Tackling urgent questions regarding the biopolitics of transnational and local bodily ‘capabilities,’ Touko Vaahtera challenges us to examine how we oriented towards able-bodiedness. Focusing on a wide range of cultural texts, and challenging what we might understand as both culture and text, this book offers a queercrip methodology for analysing the intersectional politics of embodied, collective living. It opens up how we read, understand and experience collective bodily norms and their contexts, whilst offering specifically queercrip ways of imagining alternative modes of being.” (Donna McCormack, Author of Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing; School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde)

My latest article (in Finnish):

Touko Vaahtera & Sirpa Lappalainen (2023) Vammaistutkimus koulutuspoliittisia ja antikapitalistisia kyvykkyysoletuksia haastamassa – Digitalisaation ajan ihmisteollisuus, Kulttuurintutkimus, https://journal.fi/kulttuurintutkimus/article/view/122782

My latest article (in English):

Touko Vaahtera & Sirpa Lappalainen (2022) Able-mindedness and citizenship in education policy discourses on digital skills, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, DOI: 10.1080/14681366.2022.2156583

Selected publications

On disability studies and ableism:

Vaahtera, T. 2022. Biopolitics of Swimming and the Re-articulation of Able-Bodiedness: Bodies of Latent Potential. Palgrave Macmillan.

Honkasilta, J. & Vaahtera, T. 2022. Vammaistutkimuksen teemanumero. Oppimisen ja oppimisvaikeuksien erityislehti NMI-Bulletin E/2022. https://bulletin.nmi.fi/2022/02/03/vammaistutkimuksen-teemanumero-2022

Vaahtera, T. & Savallampi, M. 2020. Kulttuuriset valtasuhteet ja antihierarkkiset mahdollisuudet koronaepidemian aikana / Cultural power relations and anti-hierarchical possibilities in the epidemic era. In Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 2. Berlin: Archive Books, 127–139.

Vaahtera, T. & Lappalainen, S. 2018. Bodies of latent potential: abled imaginary and national belonging in Finnish cultural texts about swimming. Pedagogy, Culture & Society 26:4, 593–607.

Vaahtera, T. 2016. ‘We swam before we breathed or walked’: able-bodied belonging in popular stories of evolutionary biology. Disability & Society 30:5, 591–603.

Vaahtera, T. [E.] 2016. Biopolitics and the repressive hypothesis of the body. The case of swimming training in Finland. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 18:2, 142–153.

Vaahtera, T. [E.] 2012. Compulsory able-bodiedness and the stigmatised forms of nondisability. Lambda Nordica 17:1–2, 77–101.

On digitalization:

Vaahtera, T. & Lappalainen, S. 2023. Vammaistutkimus koulutuspoliittisia ja antikapitalistisia kyvykkyysoletuksia haastamassa – Digitalisaation ajan ihmisteollisuus, Kulttuurintutkimus, 40:2, 27-40.

Vaahtera, T. & Lappalainen, S. 2022. Able-mindedness and citizenship in education policy discourses on digital skills, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, DOI: 10.1080/14681366.2022.2156583

On education:

Mononen-Batista Costa, S. (Eds. A. Paakkari, H. Guttorm, E. Ikävalko, T. Kurki, M. Pyykkönen & T. Vaahtera). 2022. Yrittäjyys tyhjänä merkitsijänä – Tiedon ja subjektiuden tuotanto yrittäjyyskasvatuksessa. Helda Open Books.

Juva, I. & Vaahtera, T. 2017. Getting along – social skills required to be normal in the Finnish school. In T. Vaahtera, A-M Niemi, S. Lappalainen, and D. Beach (eds.) Troubling Educational Cultures in the Nordic Countries. London: The Tufnell Press, 52–67.

Vaahtera, T.; Niemi, A-M; Lappalainen, S. & Beach, D. 2017. Troubling Educational Cultures in the Nordic Countries.The Tufnell Press.

Guttorm, H.; Arvola-Olander, A.; Niemi, A-M; Vaahtera, T. [E.], et. al. 2014. Akateeminen kapitalismi ja kollektiivisuuksien paradoksaalisuudet tohtorikoulutuksessa. Aikuiskasvatus 34:2, 121–128.

On affect studies:

Vaahtera, T. 2020. Empatian kulttuurinen politiikka. Aikuiskasvatus 40:3, 187–190.