Prof. Olli Pyyhtinen (PI) | PhD, docent (sociology)
Olli Pyyhtinen (PI) is Professor of Sociology at Tampere University, Finland, and the founder of Relational Studies Hub. His research intersects social theory, philosophy, 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!’).
Email: olli.pyyhtinen@tuni.fi
Ulla-Maija Sutinen | D.Sc. (Business Administration and Economics)
Ulla-Maija is Postdoctoral Research Fellow and the project coordinator at WasteMatters. She has her background in the discipline of marketing and consumer research. Her work has focused on sustainable consumption, food waste, social practices and social marketing. Her doctoral dissertation conceptualised the potential of socio-cultural perspective for social marketing when fostering food waste reduction. She has experience in working in national and international projects revolving around the topics of food waste and consumption. In her research, Ulla-Maija is highly interested in looking at the mundane, everyday practices of consumption and how they change from the theoretical perspectives beyond the individual.
Email: ulla-maija.sutinen@tuni.fi
Francisco Martinez | PhD (Anthropology)
Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic experiments. In 2018, he was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Currently he works as a postdoctoral researcher at WasteMatters and convenes the Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation (EASA Network). Francisco has published several books, including Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia (UCL Press, 2018); Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough (Berghahn, 2019); and Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects (UCL Press, 2021). Also, he has curated different exhibitions.
Email: francisco.martinez@tuni.fi
Alma Onali | Doctoral Researcher (sociology)
Alma is a Doctoral Researcher at Tampere University. Her academic background is in media studies and cultural studies. Before joining the WasteMatters team, Alma worked as a journalist in one of the biggest newspapers in Finland. Specialising in foreign news, current affairs podcasting, feature writing and business journalism, she covered topics ranging from energy to retail to food production. Alma’s theoretical interests revolve around posthumanist and new materialist theories, and she has a special interest in methodology building in these fields. In her research, Alma takes a closer look at human-plastic relationships, aiming to find out what kind of becomings these affective, material-discursive encounters bring forth.
Email: alma.onali@tuni.fi
Ella Lepistö | Researcher (sociology)
Ella Lepistö works as a researcher and substitute project coordinator in the WasteMatters project. She has a master’s degree from Tampere University, where her main subject was sociology. In her master’s thesis, she studied trash activism in Finland, focusing especially on how the phenomenon reveals an alternative relationship with waste, that is based more on open and corporeal encounters than on external morality. In her doctoral thesis, she continues to explore the affective, aesthetic, and embodied dimensions of human-waste-relations. In her research, Ella is especially interested in posthuman perspectives and finds waste an endlessly fruitful perspective for research settings that go beyond the human, providing insights into how the material remains of our contemporary lifestyle impact and intersect with various forms of life and more-than-human worlds.
Email: ella.lepisto@tuni.fi
Sonja Lampinen | Researcher (sociology)
Sonja Lampinen is working in the WasteMatters project on her doctoral dissertation on the disposal of nuclear waste. She is particularly interested in the spatiotemporal complexities that different forms of waste evoke, as well as the processes of exclusion and inclusion, and the systems of ordering, knowing, and governing involved. In addition to having a Master’s degree in Sociology from Tampere University, Sonja also holds a Diploma in Screen and Media from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and has a background in audio and video production. She has a keen interest in these mediums and in combining them with her research. She is inspired by wastelands, ruins, imperceptible forms of waste, borders and boundaries, and everything that challenges them. Her PhD research explores the spatiotemporal and sociomaterial dynamics of nuclear waste disposal and their intertwinement with capitalist relations.
Email: sonja.lampinen@tuni.fi
Previous members:
Stylianos Zavos | PhD, MSc, MEng (2022-2024)
Stelios worked at WasteMatters as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Before joining the team at Tampere University, he was Research Associate at the University of Manchester. Stelios’ research is transdisciplinary: situated within the social sciences and scrutinising through empirics, it borrows from contemporary philosophical currents and feminist technoscience. His research aspires to bring conceptual approximations slightly closer to the situatedness of everyday experience, while problematising our ways of thinking and knowing about habitats, their relationality, and their associated ethicopolitics.
Collaborators:
- Prof. Natália Cantó Milà (Open University of Catalonia, Spain)
- Prof. Gay Hawkins (Western Sydney University, Australia)
- Prof. Pekka Jokinen (Tampere University, Finland)
- Prof. Thomas Kemple (University of British Columbia, Canada)
- Prof. Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen (Tampere University, Finland)
- Prof. Elina Närvänen (Tampere University, Finland)
- Prof. Jussi Parikka (Aarhus University, Denmark)
- Prof. Sarah Pink (Monash University, Australia)
- Prof. Peeter Selg (Tallinn University, Estonia)
- Prof. Jarno Valkonen (University of Lapland, Finland)
- Prof. Steve Woolgar (Linköping University, Sweden)
- Dr. Maria José Zapata Campos (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)