My work is concerned with the relationship between power and knowledge, reflected in the dynamic between science and politics. I study the role of science and technology in global development projects, through multidisciplinary historical analysis. My current research focuses on the epistemic and political mechanisms underlying the use of pesticides in Mexican agriculture during the 20th century.

After my retirement I'm on professorial contract continuing to conduct research and supervise PhD students in Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki. My own research areas include histories of global development, Finnish development cooperation and Tanzanian long-term development history. I supervise students whose topics are in some way related to any of these.

University Researcher in Youth Work and Youth Research at Tampere University, and in Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki. For more information: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/onodera/

I am a doctoral researcher from the Univerisity of Helsinki (Social Science, Global Development Study) and hold two master's degrees in Political Sciences.

I work as Communication Specialist in Aalto Global Impact and Aalto University School of Business. I'm a PhD student in the University of Helsinki.

Academy Fellow and Principal Investigator of Global Development Studies, focusing on development, politics, and state formation in Latin America and Africa.

Saila-Maria Saaristo is a doctoral researcher and lecturer in Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki, and a member of Urbaria (Helsinki Institute of Urban and Regional Studies). Her current research project focuses on studying inequalities and discriminations, which are approached through the case of inequalities in access to housing, with a particular focus on homelessness and forced evictions. The study investigates especially gendered, classed and racialised housing exclusions. In addition to the academic career, Saaristo has worked extensively as a consultor, manager and coordinator of different kinds of international cooperation projects financed by the European Union and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland, in the areas of urban development and housing, civil society, good governance and democracy, human rights, and gender. She has worked and lived in many countries, including Cape Verde, Tanzania, Mozambique, Brazil, Bolivia and Portugal.

Projects

Transformative Actions? Occupations and Evictions in Lisbon Metropolitan Area, Portugal

Dr. Tiina Seppälä is a university lecturer in Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki and adjunct professor of International Development Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She has engaged with women’s rights and slum activists in Nepal and Bangladesh, anti-eviction movements in India, asylum seekers in Finland and anti-war activists in the UK. She is interested in development, displacement, social movements, post/decolonial and feminist theory, ethnographic research and arts-based methods.

Projects

Governance, Resistance and Neoliberal Development: Struggles against Development-Induced Displacement and Forced Evictions in South Asia

I have had a background in International Relations with bachelor's and master's degrees as I wrote my MA thesis on the role of local non-state actors in the integration of refugees. Currently, I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Middle East Technical University and a visiting doctoral researcher in the Discipline of Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki. My major research area is the sociology of migration, and my minor is environmental sociology. At the nexus of these two main areas, I have specifically focused on the nexus of the climate crisis, neoliberal governance, and migratory movements along with the urban-rural dynamics, socio-ecological and political-economic transformations in the web of life. In addition to that, I have an interest in decolonial philosophy, which lead me to investigate each phase of climate crisis and migration processes through the relations of power, capital, nature, and coloniality.

Doctoral student at the Faculty of Social Sciences, specialising in humanitarian photography, colonial legacies in visual communication, and ethics of representation in digital media. My research explores how aesthetics, power, and human rights are intertwined, with a particular focus on the role of the viewer in processes of meaning-making and complicity.