The Lively Lab
is a group of researchers from diverse disciplines. We feel that the dominant ways of making knowledge about and acting in the world are no longer working. Whether we think of this as the Anthropocene condition, the arrival of Gaia, or the de-colonisation of ontology, we come to the same need for new methods and paradigms, both in academic research and in social action.
In order to respond to this challenge we are interested in:
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Thinking about the consequences of this "new human condition" for knowledge-making, sense-making, and action at all scales and in all areas of social activity.
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Reimagining what kind of agents and entities comprise society and what it means to act.
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Ways of noticing, sensing, and communicating with the other-than-human elements of the world.
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Expanding the sensing and sense-making capacities so that we can notice and appropriately respond to the materialities, temporalities, and the inherent value of other-than-human entities.
As a consequence, we critically and imaginatively approach issues of methods and methodologies, narratives and modes of description, imaginaries and discourses, practices and identities.
The Team
Anna Krzywoszynska
Associate Professor, Lab Director
A voracious interdisciplinarian. Mainly working at the intersection of more-than-human studies, food and agri-environmental sustainability, and science studies. I use mainly ethnographic and qualitative research methods. I like to know why and how people know nature. I like to dream about a more connected, emplaced, and slower Anthropocene.
Veera Kinnunen
Postdoctoral Researcher
I have a background in sociology (and cultural history) from University of Lapland, Rovaniemi. I’ve been interested in everyday life and dwelling, and different boundary-making logics of exclusion, and neglect within dwelling. In my doctoral dissertation, I investigated complex everyday negotiations with overflow of clutter and “stuff”, and got hugely interested in issues of living with waste. Since then I have been exploring ways of cohabiting with waste – and microbes and other neglected lively materialities that we share our lives and bodies with. My main method has been different forms of ethnographic method: I tend to be the hands-in-the-dirt type of researcher, very literally in my case. I’m currently finalising my research project on bokashi composting and there’s about 10 new project ideas brewing in my head…
Anatoljis Venovcevs
Postdoctoral Researcher
I am Anatolijs Venovcevs and I like long walks through beautiful landscapes devastated by modernity. As an archaeologist, I have worked with a wide spectrum of the human past - from the Stone Age to Euro-Canadian settler-colonialism to the legacies of the mining industry to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a postdoctoral researcher, I am exploring how fungi remember the past through the interactions with human remains and, in so doing, turn the human past into spaces for more-than-human liveablity in the future. I am specifically interested in the post-human interactions within ruins - what happens after the end.
Selen Eren
Postdoctoral Researcher
In my doctoral project, I studied how the loss of biodiversity (enacted in the case of rapid decline of the Dutch national bird) is scientifically made known to be managed and how to contribute to its underlying knowledge infrastructure. So my work is mainly inspired by the interventionist science and technology studies approaches. I work with ethnographic methods but has also been exploring how knowledge exchange and travel in various formats participate in my knowledge production process. I dream of contributing to transdisciplinary collaborations that aim to question and, if necessary, transform the narratives, practices and norms of scientific knowledge-making that tackle various forms of the environmental crisis, so that they can build not a better future for human societies, but polycentric and multispecies liveable futures.
Paula Palanco
Doctoral Researcher
My research is about humans and microbes. More concretely, about how can we address the tensions that arise between us in a way that is not a 'war', but a negotiation. My interests are wide, but range between communication-related matters (especially within more-than-human relations) to STS, soil, biodiversity and global health. As a trained anthropologist, my sharpest tools are ethnographic and other qualitative methodologies, but I am keen on methodological innovation that might include: arts and audiovisual approaches, literature and creative writing, and/or practical experimentation, such as what can be found in a lab or food garden.
Erich Berger
Doctoral Researcher
I am Erich Berger, a doctoral researcher, artist and curator. My research intersects cultural anthropology with posthumanities, geology, ecology and the arts to look into how artistic practices approach temporalities beyond human-centred time with the aim to show how art can contribute to a cultural imagination capable of connecting the present with geological deep futures. I am particularly interested in the nuclear contemporary and do extensive work on sites with natural radioactivity, potential uranium mining sites and nuclear infrastructure in Finland and abroad. I am also part of a team of palaeontologists, as an enthusiastic amateur, researching the pre-cambrian first animals in sub-arctic Kilpisjaervi area.