Emerging technologies such as affordable smart phones with 4G access, broadband internet, and interactive interfaces employing gestures or speech, are revolutionizing the ways we access information, learn new skills and interact with the world around us. However, developing world communities - who stand to benefit from such technologies - were, until recently, largely neglected. Interactive technologies provide a means to address learning challenges such as functional illiteracy and information access barriers, and can improve learning and education, health and wellbeing, and agricultural practices.

Team

Markku Turunen, Jaakko Hakulinen, Mikko Ruohonen, Sumita Sharma, Pekka Kallioniemi, Juhani Linna

Building on the successes and outcomes of the previous FinCEAL and FinCEAL Plus projects, the FinCEAL Plus Continuation project aimed to provide strategic support to enhance the cooperation between research and science policy communities in Finland, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean. The specific objectives of the project were to: 1. Strengthen Finnish participation in the EU STI policy dialogues with the target regions; 2. Support Finnish participation in joint research projects with partners from the target regions; 3. Enable Finnish expertise and know-how to be better known in the target regions; and 4. Gather and disseminate information on Finnish cooperation towards the regions within Finland as well as new cooperation possibilities with the target regions.

Team

Eva Kagiri, Kajsa Ekroos, Jarkko Mutanen, Melissa Plath

The project analyses the ways that fragile cities are dealing with societal security, environmental vulnerability and representative justice in the spaces of multi-scale governance. The dimensions to be analysed are: 1) governance of insecurity and creation of accountable institutions; 2) authoritarian legacies and political-representation efforts; and 3) governance of environmental vulnerabilities and claims for justice. The research aims to develop a revised theory of urban political ecology and urban justice to better understand the interlinkages and scalar complexities of societal security, environmental vulnerability and representative justice.

Team

Anja Nygren, Florencia Quesada, Mauricio Romero, Elisa Tarnaala, Kjell-Åke Nordquist

This project, funded by the Academy of Finland (2013–2016), provided theoretically innovative and empirically new and valuable knowledge of the complex dynamics between governance and resistance in the context of the dominant, neoliberal development paradigm. It studied social and political struggles in three countries in South Asia – Nepal, Bangladesh and India – by examining social movements that fight against forced displacement and slum demolitions – all caused by development projects. The project engaged critically in the debate on neoliberal development by analyzing problems related to it, charting possibilities for addressing hem, and offering alternative visions for socially, culturally and politically more sustainable models of development.

Team

Visual exploration of data enables users and analysts observe interesting patterns that can trigger new research for further investigation. With the increasing availability of Linked Data, facilitating support for making sense of the data via visual exploration tools for hypothesis generation is critical. Time and space play important roles in this because of their ability to illustrate dynamicity, from a spatial context. Yet, Linked Data visualization approaches typically have not made efficient use of time and space together, apart from typical rather static multivisualization approaches and mashups. We developed ELBAR explorer that visualizes a vast amount of scientific observational data about the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest. The core contribution is a novel mechanism for animating between the different observed values, thus illustrating the observed changes themselves.

Team

Tomi Kauppinen, Suvodeep Mazumdar

Marketing channels of agricultural surplus is important for improving food security in most African countries. The cooperative business form offers one way for smallholder and intermediate size farmers to sell their surplus. Twelve Tanzanian cooperatives were studied by semi-structured interviews to find out if the cooperative business model can reduce poverty and address food security. Four types of cooperatives were identified: traditional cooperatives, reforming cooperatives, new cooperatives and co-operatives with some innovations. Both cases of poorly working unions and more recent success stories were found. Features characterizing good cooperative work in Tanzania were identified. Recommendations on policy level how to support cooperative action is given.

Team

John Sumelius; Faustine K. Bee; Suleman A. Chambo; Shimelles Tenaw; Stefan Bäckman,

Estimating how well existing conservation units represent different habitats and their species is necessary for the long-term preservation of biological diversity and for sustainable use of forest resources. The task is especially challenging in Amazonia, which is both extensive and largely unexplored. Therefore, exact enough maps of the distribution of biodiversity are not available. We aim to solve the problem by combining the efforts of two teams that have approached biodiversity-related questions from different points of view. Attention will be given both to the current distribution of biodiversity in Amazonia and to the geological history that has shaped it. This will invove a combination of novel remote sensing methods, exceptionally extensive and internally consistent field data, and a thorough understanding of the geology of the Amazon basin and the ecology of selected indicator plants.

Team

Hanna Tuomisto, Kalle Ruokolainen, Samuli Lehtonen, Jasper Van doninck, Gabriela Zuquim, Gabriel Moulatlet, Glenda Cárdenas

This research project approached one to three-year-old children’s everyday life and well-being from a multidisciplinary perspective (childhood geographies, sociological childhood studies, and developmental psychology). The main objective of the project was to address the dynamic interplay in between the culturally constructed meanings, ideals and expectations of (good) toddlerhood, the local level of practices, and the toddlers’ construction of places (lived-through-experiences). The project was based on a qualitative case study approach. In addition to analysis of Finnish curricula and guiding documents for ECEC, the project included ethnographic fieldwork in one daycare centre. The questions were: how are (good) toddlerhoods and the 'best interest of the child' narrated and materialized in everyday practices, and how do toddlers engage in construction of lived spaces (places)? In addition, with a comparative qualitative data from Brazil, two different cases were investigated to interpret how the commitment to the 'best interest of the child' was translated into local, culturally diverse practices in child care institutions.

Team

Professor Katia de Souza Amorim and research group CINDEDI (Centro de Investigação sobre Desenvolvimento e Educação Infantil); Elisa Tanner; Kaisa-Reeta Laitila; Sirja Hannula; Salla Jokinen

Urban poverty in developing countries is fuelling the rapid growth of informal settlements which the UN defines as ‘slums’. Governments want to redevelop valuable slum land in the city centre for official and commercial purposes and to resettle slum dwellers to modern high-rise condominiums outside the city center, but target populations (former slum dwellers) are not always being reached by these programs. We focus on the cities of Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam and ask: What are the exclusionary processes and forms of political economy that give rise to urban poverty in both of these cities? What are the best methods for understanding the lives of the highly mobile poor and elucidating the often hidden and invisible processes of resource flows, networking, and creation of privilege? More specifically, we investigate the reasons for why the poor are not being resettled in condominium housing, and whether the mismatch between the government’s original plan and the actual outcome arise from (a) policies and decisions which have, intentionally or unintentionally, excluded the urban poor, or from (b) the choices made by the poor themselves, because the new condominiums do not meet their needs (for livelihoods, social networks, access to services, etc. Our research methods are ethnographic: primarily in-depth, semi-structured interviews, including life history interviews.

Team

Prof. Laura Stark, Prof. Elias Yitbarek, Dr. Tiina-Riitta Lappi, Dr. Susanna Myllylä, MS Yonas Alemayehu, MS Imam Mahmoud, MA Jyri Mäkelä

The project examines indigenous and Afro-American peoples’ ways to create new cognitive models for producing power. People from these backgrounds have been active in designing new education systems, engaging in politics, and creating new religious intersubjectivity in Latin America. We stress a ‘not-yet’ consciousness, modes of attention to the fact that something has still to happen or become. The proposed project focuses on agency constructions in different social, cultural, religious, and political contexts and the ideas of imagined (home)places and spaces based on indigenousness, ethnicity, and religion as they may affect people’s future transformation. We examine agencies including both human and non-human subjects. The global influences, technology, new contacts, new knowledge, and state policies are important factors in creative processes the actors can use for their agency construction.

Team

Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen, Eleonora Riviello, Anna Vohlonen