In my research, "child", "children" and "childhood" become conceptual tools, metaphors, and ways of thinking that engender novel understandings of what it means to live in a complex world. This broad ambition brings together several aspects of my work:
Speculative thinking and philosophy
Theoretically, I draw on creative conceptual approaches across disciplines, under labels like speculative geography, speculative philosophy, speculative realism, speculative ethnography, and postphenomenology. What these resources have in common is the emphasis they put on understanding the connections between lived experience on the one hand and its material, societal and political conditions on the other hand. I work with the hypothesis that childhood as both an existential fact (everyone is/used to be a child) as well as a socially and culturally defined category can open new ways of understanding those connections.
Existential questions of our time
Empirically, I employ case studies connected to some of the complex phenomena of our time like technology and the ecological crisis. My focus is on the existential implications of these phenomena on human lives and lived experience. I use case studies like AI and microbes to explore how childhood as a conceptual tool could offer us new ways of relating and new opportunities for action regarding complex 21st century problems.
Intergenerational relations
My work has a strong intergenerational dimension, emphasising childhood’s place in the generational order and its purchase in making sense of the reach across generations of phenomena like the ecological crisis. My work on intergenerational relations builds on my background in educational philosophy towards a more human geography -inspired perspective on intergenerational spaces and their existential import.
Much of my work is done in collaboration with colleagues from Tampere University in the research groups and .