Collective

Leader and founder of Animate, a deputy leader of the General Education unit at the Faculty of Education and Psychology (U Oulu), and a principal investigator of several large-scale research projects. Her research interests include social scientific biodiversity education via multispecies and posthumanist approaches, exploring the roles of other animals in practices of (scientific) knowledge creation, thinking about animals and aesthetics, and developing inclusive citizen science practices. Pauliina volunteers as a wildlife rehabilitator for injured birds (Instagram: @pihalintu), and is a companion human to budgies, chickens, dogs and a horse.

Tuure is a co-founder and co-leader of Animate, an adjunct professor (University of Tampere) and Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education and Psychology (University of Oulu). His research joins the efforts for rethinking education and childhood with more-than-human theories and relational ontologies. He has recently written and co-written on multispecies childhoods with a focus on mold and microbes, complexities of care, unruliness and violence in child-animal relations, and the possibilities of responding to the imagination crisis of modernity. In 2026 he starts to lead two new research projects: “Multispecies Symphonies – Advancing critical and creative attentiveness with children in the Phonocene (MuSes)”, and a sub-project in “From a False Sense of Protein Safety to Protein Resilience: Building Bridges for Protein Sustainability (ResPro)”.

Associate Professor of Sustainable Futures in Education and Ethics (University of Helsinki). Riikka has written about multispecies childhoods, atmospheres, care, materiality and temporality. She has developed participatory and post-qualitative methodologies at the intersections of childhood studies and human-animal studies and education. She is a researcher in the AniMate research group (University of Oulu), and leads the projects Children of the Anthropocene (2022-2025, Kone Foundation) and Figurations of the child and more than human politics of childhood for the post-Anthropocene: The fossil, the microbe, the weather (2023-2027, Research Council of Finland).  

Vladimirova is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Oulu. She is an environmental education scholar whose work integrates relational ontologies, environmental ethnography, place-responsive pedagogy, and multispecies inquiry. She is leading one of the work packages in the HOMINGS: More than just human homes (RCF 2024-2028) project (PI Prof Pauliina Rautio). Together with photographer Inkeri Jäntti and sound artist Elle Kokkonen, Vladimirova visits abandoned houses with the aim to document the biodiversity of these houses, envision homes as more-than-human infrastructures and contribute to policy dialogues that recognize urban ecologies beyond human habitation. Vladimirova has been a member of the transdisciplinary research group AniMate since its establishment in 2016. Vladimirova co-hosts and co-produces mosscast: A multivoicED podcast that explores multispecies (justice) education, art, research and practice.

Vladimirova’s main areas of interests include place-responsive pedagogy, materialities of places, embodied ways of knowing, and the creative inquiries through which humans and more-than-humans co-create meaning in precarious environments. In 2025, she received a grant for the Place-Responsive Pedagogy: Education for Climate Resilience project, funded through the University of Oulu International Strategic Partnership Development Scheme. Through this project, she collaborated with Dr. Jamie Mcphie (University of Cumbria, UK) and supervised ten pre-service teachers working with methods that enhance attentiveness to inequalities, discriminatory practices, and anthropocentric patterns within the places they inhabit. The results of their shared work are available at the project’s website. 

Assistant Professor in Science Communication (Biodiversity & Society) at Leiden University, Academy Research Fellow in the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences at University of Helsinki and Adjunct Professor in Science Education in University of Oulu. Tuomas is an award-winning rat and parasite connoisseur whose interests include interdisciplinary biodiversity research, disease ecology, science education and science outreach, including citizen science. Tuomas leads the Helsinki Urban Rat Project [https://www.helsinki.fi/en/projects/urban-rats] and is starting a research program on Dutch home biodiversity.

Anttoni works as a teacher at the Viikki Teacher Training School and as a visiting researcher at the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences in the University of Helsinki. Anttoni’s research interests include science education, outdoor learning, citizen science, role of technology in learning and teacher professional development.

Assistant Professor of Educational Research at Augusta University, USA. Brandon’s research is at the intersections of EcoJustice Education, Multispecies Justice, and Critical Podcast Research Methodologies. He is also one of the cohosts of the Animate affiliated podcast: MOSScast.

Doctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Education & Psychology at the University of Oulu. Her research interests include, very broadly, human-animal relationships, animal ethics, multispecies methodology, posthumanism, and citizen science. She is fascinated with Donna Haraway’s concept of killability, particularly how insects become killable in scientific and educational practices. Besides contemplating the questions of killing and dying, Marina enjoys spending time with her multispecies family, knitting, birdwatching, and more.

Doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Education and Psychology at the University of Oulu (Finland) and a plant listener cycling with the rhythms of tides. I am fascinated by encounters between humans and animated nonhumans. My PhD takes as point of departure indigenous thinking to explore and develop plant-human educational relations grounded in the animated and relational aspects of the world. My thesis builds on an original one-year multi-site participatory research with 30 adults and their plant-teachers. My interests include multispecies participatory methods, education as healing, and human relations with an animated wider-than-human world.  

Doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Education and Psychology at the University of Oulu. Kristina’s research interests include Indigenous, posthumanist, and new materialist ways of thinking with multispecies and material childhoods, postqualitative inquiry, research-creation and arts-based methodologies, and children’s geographies. A theme threading through all of her research is her interest in the “darker sides of childhood” both metaphorically and literally. In her PhD thesis, she is exploring childhood multispecies secret places. Her favorite AniMates include a sheep called Otto and hamsters Doris and Elmo. 

Doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Education & Psychology (University of Oulu). Joffy’s research explores how we might incorporate ecocentric perspectives into critical thinking. He is an AniMate collaborator and his more-than-human household includes a cat called Harmi.

Anna is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Biodiverse Anthropocenes research programme and the Faculty of Education and Psychology (University of Oulu). Anna’s research interests include more-than-human relations with resource extraction, post-industrial transformations, and digitalisation in the North. Since 2021, she has served as Secretary of the Social and Human Working Group at the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC). Anna is fascinated by Northern landscapes and loves exploring Arctic diversity.

Fariha is a Doctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Education & Psychology at the University of Oulu. Her research interests include posthumanist and critical approaches to environmental education, relational perspectives on childhood and multispecies coexistence, intercultural and decolonial pedagogies, and participatory research methodologies with children. She is particularly fascinated by how children from vastly different socio-ecological settings make sense of their relationships with more-than-human surroundings and companions, and what their stories reveal about coexistence and environmental justice. Her work centers children’s voices, especially those of marginalized and vulnerable children whose experiences often remain unheard. Besides research she loves exploring stories in all their forms. Folk tales, different oral traditions, children’s literature, graphic novels, podcasts, and the everyday narratives people weave about their worlds especially intrigue her.

Veera Kinnunen is a lecturer of Sociology at University of Lapland, and is currently affiliated with the University of Oulu’s transdisciplinary research program Biodiverse Anthropocenes (ANTS), and she is the Co-PI of More than just human homes (HOMINGS, RCF 2024-2028). In her academic work, Veera explores naturecultures of everyday life and dwelling, focusing on living-in-common with unwelcome beings such as clutter, waste, and microbes. She examines naturecultural infrastructures and metabolisms, and engages with more-than-human ethics of care. She develops an ethnographic imagination to inquire into more-than-human concerns. Starting from 2026, she is the editor-in-chief of Sosiologia-journal published by the Westermarck Society.

(photo credits: Birgitta Vinkka)

Maaria Hartman is a Doctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University and a Project Researcher at the Faculty of Education and Psychology at the University of Oulu. Maaria’s research interests include youth cultures, embodiment and embodied knowledge, youth and adult play and art in urban spaces, creative and art-based research methods, and researching animal and environmental relationships with young people. Maaria’s closest more-than-human teacher is a dog called Lila.

Kristiina is a doctoral researcher (Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Oulu) studying home education in Finland. Her research focuses on understanding the everyday lives and experiences of children in home education, while also taking into account the broader social, institutional and legal contexts in which home education takes shape, as children’s everyday lives unfold within these frameworks. By studying a marginal and alternative form of learning, she also examines the Finnish education system more broadly: its assumptions, boundaries and points of tension. Approaching a marginal practice offers a way to see how educational systems respond, adapt, or fail to engage with children’s everyday lives and needs.

Kristiina also approaches the topic from within the phenomenon. Her own experience as a home education parent offers insight into the complexity and tensions of the field, many of which remain poorly understood in research and public debate. She approaches the research as relational and negotiated. Sensitivity and trust are essential for this kind of work to be even possible.