Olli Pyyhtinen (PI) is Professor of Sociology at Tampere University, Finland, and the founder of Relational Studies Hub. His research intersects social theory, philosophically inclined fieldwork, science and technology studies, economic sociology, and the study of art, and he is the author of for example More-than-Human Sociology (2015), The Gift and Its Paradoxes (2014), The Simmelian Legacy: A Science of Relations (2018) and Simmel and the Social (2010), and co-author of Disruptive Tourism and its Untidy Guests (2014) and Tervetuloa jäteyhteiskuntaan! (2019; ‘Welcome to the Society of Waste!’). Currently, Pyyhtinen is also leading two projects on waste and the circular economy, WasteMatters (ERC Consolidator Grant, 2022-2027) and DECAY (Academy of Finland 2022-2026).
Email: olli.pyyhtinen@tuni.fi
Margrit Shildrick, Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at Stockholm University, is known for her research covering postmodern feminist theory, bioethics, critical disability studies, body theory and posthumanism. Her most recent publication – Visceral Prostheses: Somatechnics and Posthuman Embodiment (2022) – traces the significance of the biophilosophical and embodied conjunction of microchimerism, immunology and corporeal anomaly. She is currently doing research for a collaborative project which addresses the gift relation as one of posthumanist entanglement not exchange.
Email: margrit.shildrick@gender.su.se
Alexandra Urakova, docent in North-American Studies at the University of Helsinki and visiting researcher at the Tampere University, is a literary scholar specialising in nineteenth-century American and comparative literature and cultural anthropology. Her recent publications –Dangerous Giving in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2022) and The Dangers of Gifts from Antiquity to the Digital Age (co-edited with Tracey A. Sowerby and Tudor Sala, 2023) – explore the dark side of gift exchange in literature and beyond. Her current research focuses on the meanings of the gift in modernity and postmodernity, from insipient theories of gifting to the language of philanthropy and academic grants.
Email: aleksandra.urakova@tuni.fi
Niilo Rinne is a curator, planner, and multimedia artist, who has degrees in both visual arts and sociology. His cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary professional practice is based on theoretical interest in systems theory, memory, and alternative value creation processes in the interplay of digital media, the physical environment, and social events.
Email: niilo.rinne@gmail.com