Meet our project members
This transdisciplinary research collaboration is sponsored by the Research Council of Finland and involves many international collaborators.
Karin Murris
Oulu, Finland
Amsterdam-born, Karin Murris (PhD) is Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Oulu (Finland) and Emerita Professor of Education at University of Cape Town (South Africa). Her disciplinary background is philosophy in/of education, posthumanist child studies, democratic pedagogies and picturebooks. Karin is Principal Investigator of the Small Matters project.
Inka Laisi
Oulu, Finland
Inka is a doctoral researcher on the Small Matters project with a background in sociology, and a long-lasting interest in death studies. Her doctoral research explores everyday practices and the politics of multispecies death and dying. Small matters in Inka’s work, both in and outside academia, and is driven by the will to recognize injustices and a motivation to change them.
Renske Visser
Oulu, Finland
Renske Visser is a Medical Anthropologist and Death Studies scholar. She is a postdoctoral researcher in the Small Matters project. She is co-host of the Death Studies Podcast and writes book reviews on her blog Dead Good Reading. Renske teaches Dutch-Finnish children Dutch language and culture and also works as a Consular Officer at the Embassy of the Netherlands in Helsinki.
Tuure Tammi
Oulu, Finland
Tuure Tammi, PhD, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, is a researcher in the intersections between education and child-animal studies. His research focuses on child-animal relations and multispecies assemblages with ethnographic methods (e.g, mould and microbes in education, care, touch, humour and violence).
Riku Välitalo
Oulu, Finland
Riku Välitalo, PhD, is Principal of basic education of the Teacher Training School at Oulu University. He has used enquiry based and dialogue-focused pedagogy in his research and work as teacher and lecturer and has published a teachers’ guide to teaching thinking.
Katja Castillo
Oulu, Finland
Katja Castillo, is a university teacher and an aspiring philosopher in education, whose primary interests are ethics of teaching, childhood studies, early childhood education and worldview education. Her research has rooted in Levinasian ethics and been inspired by postcolonial thought. She’s currently also working on the concept of existential resilience in the Child in Time -project at the University of Helsinki.
Anna Vladimirova
Oulu, Finland
Anna Vladimirova is a Russian PhD Researcher (UO). Her research focuses on developing place-responsive pedagogy through conceptualising the body as a place. Her interests include body-place relations, ethics in multispecies encounters, the role of embodied movement in environmental sustainability and multispecies research. Her role will be collection data from non-Finnish-speaking families in Oulu, including Ukrainian families in Finland, for whom discussion of death can be important but highly sensitive. Anna’s role will also be to organise multispecies ethnography and data transcription.
Soern Finn Menning
Agder, Norway
Soern Finn Menning, PhD, Associate professor at the institute of education, University of Agder, Norway, has a background in film and video studies. His role is to work closely with other project members facilitating filmic philosophical enquiry, analysing moving images in educational processes and supporting children in making video clips.
Joanna Haynes
Plymouth, UK
Dr Joanna Haynes is Associate Professor at Plymouth University Institute of Education. Her background is in philosophy and her research interests are in democratic and community education, intra-generational relations and philosophy with children. Her books include Children as Philosophers (2002) and, with Karin Murris, Picturebooks, Pedagogy and Philosophy (2012) and Literacies, Literature and Learning: Reading Classrooms Differently (2018). She co-edited The Routledge International Handbook of Philosophy for Children (2017). With Jocey Quinn, Joanna coordinates the Adventures in Posthumanism Research Network
Christine Pascal
Birmingham, UK
Professor Christine Pascal OBE is Co-Director of CREC, an independent research centre, based in Birmingham. She was a teacher before moving into the university sector and specialising in early childhood research and evaluation projects. She has written extensively on early childhood development and the quality of early education services. She has worked internationally to support numerous national early childhood policies and strategies and is the current President of EECERA. She was awarded an OBE in 2001 and Nursery World Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012.
Tony Bertram
Birmingham, UK
Professor Tony BERTRAM, PhD, MEd, BEd Tony is a Director of CREC, an independent Early Years education research organisation; co-Founder of the European Early Childhood Education Research Association (EECERA); and Editor-in-chief of its SSCI rated, peer reviewed journal. He has visiting roles at several universities and has advised governments on Early Years matters including curriculum development and qualifications.
Jennifer Ann Skriver
Aalborg, Denmark
Jennifer Ann Skriver is a PhD Researcher (University of Aalborg, DK). Her research focuses on how arts-involving pedagogies can facilitate playful learning, rendering students response-able. She has developed the material intra-view methodology and a posthumanist approach to working with child audiences in the context of the art museum and gallery. Her role as Postdoctoral Fellow will involve using walking methodologies as provocations for philosophical enquiries, arts-based methods to engage materially with children’s caregivers, and supporting a PhD researcher to conduct intra-views, organising and facilitating community pop-up events and engaging collaboratively with data analysis.
John Wall
New York, USA
John Wall is Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Childhood Studies, and Director of the Childism Institute, at Rutgers University Camden. He is a political philosopher best known for his critical theory of childism or children’s empowerment and his advocacy for ageless suffrage. His recent books include Give Children the Vote and the co-edited Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies.
Pauliina Rautio
Oulu, Finland
Pauliina Rautio is a Senior Research Fellow at University of Oulu. Her research interests include multispecies education, inclusive ecological citizen science and co-creative methods. Rautio leads a transdisciplinary research group AniMate (est. 2016) and is a PI of three funded projects on multispecies everyday lives. She is an Editor-in-Chief of Trace, a journal for human-animal studies, and a board member of the Finnish Society for Human-Animal Studies.
Brandan Reynolds
Cape Town, South Africa
Brandan Reynolds is South Africa’s most prolific editorial cartoonist. His role is to collaborate with the children and project members and create an animated hand-drawn cartoon. See, e.g., Posthuman Child Manifesto (co-created with PI Murris).
Joanne Peers
Cape Town, South Africa
Dr Joanne Peers is a Researcher at the Origins Centre at The University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. She holds a PhD from The University of Oulu in Environmental Humanities and Education Research. Her dissertation focussed on relationality through thinking with bodies, water, time, memory and spirituality. Joanne has over twenty years experience in education in both early years and higher education.
Imara Felkers
Utrecht, the Netherlands
Imara Felkers, PhD, is a play philosopher at the University of the Arts, Utrecht (NL). Her expertise lies in the knowledge of the ontology of play. This allows her to clearly identify which elements of play can be utilized in any given project. Personally, imitation (mimesis) is the play element she finds the most joy in. Imitation is much more than mere representation; the exaggeration within imitation makes any abstract or complex subject more engaging and inviting to reflect upon.
Tracy Young
Melbourne, Australia
Tracy Charlotte Young is a Senior Lecturer/Researcher in the Faculty of Education, Southern Cross University, Australia. Tracy is sustained by a commitment to animal activism and ecological justice and seeks to understand how power relations and material-discursive effects between children, families and education, influence multispecies childhoods. Her research aligns three disciplines: early childhood education, environmental education, and human-animal studies to explore connections and disjunctions of children’s multispecies relations.