I am a Ph.D. from the University of Turku on the field of Computer Sciences, specializing in Interaction Design. During my studies I have completed minor subjects of especially Psychology and Philosophy. I teach basic courses at the School of Computing and do research.
My academic interests are:
I work in Business Center North Savo -activities as a representative of UEF dealing with various services related to entrepreneurship and commercialization of innovation.
In a nutshell, I help students and researchers in commercialization of their business ideas. I also aim to develop the local startup culture.
Activities include e.g., running idea accelerator programme called “Havuja Bootcamp”, promoting our commercialization services among students of the University, and miscellaneous cooperation with companies and other stakeholders.
In addition, I am involved in YUFE (Young Universities for the Future of Europe) -activities in workpackages related to entrepreneurship.
Adjunct Professor of digital consumer behavior and quantitative market research, Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, University of Helsinki
Associate Editor, International Marketing Review
Professor Laukkanen’s research contributes to marketing analytics, innovation adoption and resistance, consumer behavior, sensory research, and international marketing. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed international scientific articles and is globally among the leading scholars in electronic banking. His works have appeared in journals such as Journal of World Business, Journal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management, International Marketing Review, Tourism Management, Journal of Small Business Management, International Journal of Information Management, International Journal of Bank Marketing, and others. He serves in editorial boards of International Journal of Information Management, International Journal of Bank Marketing, and International Journal of Electronic Finance. He is an active member of the scientific community and has presented his research results globally in North America, Europe, Asia and Oceania.
My research is focused around ecological macroeconomic modelling, industrial policy of the sustainability transformation, and sufficiency solutions.
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 & Hanna Varjakoski (2025) Nuoret ja vanhat televiestinnän murroksessa: Kulttuuriset oletukset iästä suomalaisten matkapuhelinoperaattorien televisiomainoksissa matkapuhelimien yleistymisen aikakaudella, Lähikuva, https://journal.fi/lahikuva/article/view/178134
My latest article (in English):
Touko Vaahtera, Aarno Kauppila, Anna-Maija Niemi & Reetta Mietola (2025) Ableist realism and inclusive education: theorising the cultural and atmospheric dimension. International Journal of Inclusive education: https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2025.2596974
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. 2024. Strong and Weak Theories of Capacity: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Disability, and Contemporary Capacity Theorizing, Open Cultural Studies, https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/culture-2024-0003/html
Vaahtera, T. 2020. Empatian kulttuurinen politiikka. Aikuiskasvatus 40:3, 187–190.
“Traumatized Borders: Reviving Subversive Narratives of B/Order, and Other” (TB) is a multidisciplinary research project which investigates oral and written trauma narratives related to various topographic and symbolic borders in Russian, Finnish, Estonian, Ukrainian, and North-American contexts. In the project, traumas are understood as universal, but yet culturally bound narratives and linguistic constructions. Borders, on the other hand, are understood as political and cultural constructions that create traumas and determines the meaning and significance of border related trauma narratives. Geopolitically, TB focuses on the contemporary EU-Russian border, former Soviet internal borders, and the historical Soviet Union border with the West, whose influence reaches even the North-American context. The study covers time period between the 1920s to the present day including some of the most significant historical events that have defined Russia’s and its neighbors’ topographic and symbolic borders.
In the project, methods provided by cultural studies, folklore research, cultural anthropology, literature research and linguistics are applied.
The project is funded by the Academy of Finland.
Research Interests in AI, Computer Vision, and Medical Image & Video Analysis
My research interests focus on the development of advanced artificial intelligence methods for medical image and video analysis, particularly in the context of complex, long-duration visual data. I am interested in computer vision techniques for object detection, localization, and classification, with an emphasis on transformer-based and hybrid deep learning architectures. A core motivation of my work is improving detection accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency under real-world constraints.
EU KDT Projects: MATISSE & H2TRAIN
I am currently involved in two EU Key Digital Technologies (KDT) programme projects: MATISSE and H2TRAIN. MATISSE is a large-scale collaborative project with 30 partners and a total budget of €18.1 million, with a €1.5 million contribution from the CI research group at the University of Eastern Finland. H2TRAIN involves 36 partners with a total budget of €24.8 million, of which €1.3 million is contributed by the CI research group at the University of Eastern Finland. Both projects focus on advancing key digital technologies through international collaboration between academia, industry, and research organizations.
I research various topics and phenomena related to working life. In addition, my research has addressed issues such as environmental crises, nonhuman animals, education, gender and embodiment, as well as other socially constructed differences and qualitative research methods.
I am a social geographer and work as a senior researcher in environmental policy. I have a title of docent in University of Lapland (sociology/sustainable natural resources policy). I have been involved in agri-food research in social sciences since 1994 and mining research since 2009, and I am a head of CEMMS (Research center for Mining, Minerals, and Society). My academic interest covers food issues (especially development, meanings and actors of organic production), food policy, food security, rural research and actor networks. In mining research my interests cover societal issues of mining industry, community experiences and impacts of mining, activism, social movements, actor-networks, green transition, CRMs, and environmental justice.
I was a chair of the Finnish Society for Rural Researchers and Developers in 2008-2013, member of Finnish Rural Policy Committee in 2008-2011, member of National Rural Network in 2012-2013, and the member of the board of Finnish Society for Social Scientific Environmental research in 2014-2015.
I have been a member of Scientific Committee of Nordic conferences for Rural research since 2011 and a representative of Northern Europe in International Sociological Association’s RC 40 (Sociology of Food and Agriculture) in 2017-20.
In addition to refereed articles and edited books, I have also written numerous popular texts and given interviews in national media. I am familiar with food, rural and mining research networks globally.
