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
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 | Doctoral Researcher (sociology)
Ella Lepistö works as a Doctoral Researcher 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 | Doctoral 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
Yunhee Choi | Ph.D. (International Studies)
Yunhee Choi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the WasteMatters project. Her research focuses on nuclear waste governance, and her doctoral dissertation examined high-level radioactive waste (HLW) management with particular attention to public participation, trust, and social acceptance. She completed a Master’s degree in International Policy Studies in the USA, concentrating on nuclear nonproliferation issues. The Fukushima nuclear accident further deepened her interest in nuclear governance and Japanese society, leading her to pursue a PhD at Waseda University in Tokyo, where she also participated in research on Fukushima’s recovery and reconstruction. In her current work, she attempts to examine how HLW—both spent fuel and vitrified HLW—poses unprecedented challenges across deep time and reshapes human–environment relations beyond policy frameworks.
Email: yunhee.choi@tuni.fi
Aleida Luján-Pinelo | Ph.D. (Law)
Aleida Luján-Pinelo is a Mexican interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the WasteMatters project, with a background in philosophy, gender studies, and law. Her research brings together relational theories—such as epistemologies of the South, new materialism, and posthumanism—to study and co-create practices that address complex social challenges. During her PhD she integrated academic and activist research on femi(ni)cide in Europe. She is also co-founder of the independent project Feminizidmap, a database on femi(ni)cides in Germany.
Email: aleida.lujanpinelo@tuni.fi
Previous members:
Ulla-Maija Sutinen | D.Sc. (2022-2025)
Ulla-Maija worked as Postdoctoral Research Fellow and the project coordinator at WasteMatters. Ulla-Maija has her background in the discipline of marketing and consumer research and her prior work has focused on sustainable consumption, food waste, social practices and social marketing. Besides taking on coordinating responsibilities, she contributed to the project especially by way of publications and by doing ethnography at people’s homes to study how different waste flows are managed within the household. In the research that she did, Ulla-Maija was particularly interested in looking at the mundane, everyday practices of consumption and how they change from the theoretical perspectives beyond the individual.
Francisco Martinez | PhD (Anthropology) (2023-2024)
Francisco is an anthropologist and he worked at WasteMatters as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Now he is a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the University of Murcia, Spain. He contributed to the project for example in the form of edited special issues, the forthcoming book The Future of Hiding (Cornell University Press), numerous journal articles and book chapters as well as curating exhibitions. Francisco convenes the Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation (EASA Network).
Stylianos Zavos | PhD, MSc, MEng (2022-2024)
Stelios worked for WasteMatters as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. He contributed to the project for example by producing a series of publications, giving several talks and presentations and by conducting fieldwork. 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)