Appointment of Arctic Five Chairs – Osmo Kauppila and Anna Krzywoszynska to represent the University of Oulu

The Arctic Five is a partnership between Luleå University of Technology; UiT The Arctic University of Norway; Umeå University; the University of Lapland; and the University of Oulu, whom together aim to lead the way on key Arctic issues. The mission of the alliance is to advance and share knowledge, develop education, and create innovations for the advancement of our region and a sustainable Arctic.

As part of the Arctic Five’s flagship Chairs & Fellows programme, the Chairs initiative represents a group of scholars with the will and capacity to form original research and education alliances. Thus today, the Arctic Five institutions have collectively appointed 16 Arctic Five Chairs – all of whom are highly ranked scholars from across the human, social, natural and technical sciences.

The new Arctic Five chairs from University of Oulu are:

Osmo Kauppila, Director of the Industrial Engineering and Management degree programme and University Lecturer in Process and Quality Management. Adjunct professor of Quality Technology and Logistics (LTU Luleå). His research and teaching interest include Quality Management, Supply Chain Management, Lean Six Sigma, Operations Research and Data Science.

Anna Krzywoszynska, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Faculty of Humanities. Her research concerns the role of different forms of knowledge in the transformation to more sustainable and truly just agri-food and land relations. She has published widely in the following fields: human geography, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, rural sociology, and anthropology. She works hard for the integration of social sciences, humanities, and the arts into environmental research in her role as a member of the Board for the Horizon Europe Mission "Soil Deal for Europe", and as a scientific officer of the International Union of Soil Science.

The position as Arctic Five Chairs is held for two years with the possibility of prolongation for one year. An Arctic Five Chair is granted 20 percent of his or her working hours and a budget of 10 000 EUR per year for travels and workshops related to the position. An Arctic Five Chair is obliged to follow the project plan in his or her application and to contribute to activities related to The Arctic Five within his or her home university.

Comments from the newly appointed chairs

Osmo Kauppila's comments about his new Arctic Chair position:
"Healthy industrial sector and functioning logistics are vital for the sustained success of the Arctic area. One of the key factors for achieving these is the ability to harness data to manage and improve performance, not only financially, but also from a broader sustainability viewpoint. The focus on my Arctic Chair position relates to this, and particularly is on Quality Engineering (QE); the study of tools, methods, and techniques for developing and producing products and services that meet and exceed customer and other stakeholder requirements. In particular, the topic is “How to utilize modern quality engineering technologies to ensure the sustained competitiveness of the Arctic five area”.

QE and subsequent management decisions require multiple perspectives: engineering, economic and human. Therefore, a multidisciplinary approach is adopted in the project, although the focus is twofold between engineering and statistics. In the project, joint quality engineering knowledge in the Arctic Five universities is consolidated, disseminated through education, and research collaboration beyond the duration of the chair position is created. My hope is that the results will contribute to sustaining a lively Arctic area in the future, improving local competitiveness in the global economy, work well-being, and quality of infrastructure and public services."

Anna Krzywoszynska:

"To respond to the crises the Arctic is facing, we need a much greater role for strategies and knowledges rooted in specific places. As the Chair, my aim is to strengthen the incorporation of place-based knowledge in the framings of and action on Artic sustainability transitions with the project Artic Place.

This project will produce a new, interdisciplinary, social sciences and humanities-led approach to addressing sustainability transitions research in the Artic with place-based knowledge as the starting point. It will build bridges between understandings rooted in indigenous approaches and non-indigenous ones, as well as between SSH disciplines and natural sciences.

Arctic Place aims to propose a coherent and robust strategy for making place a key concept and method for Artic sustainability research. It will also engage place-based communities in the process of developing a large funding proposal on place based sustainability transformations in the Arctic"

See all of the chairs from here:
https://www.arcticfive.org/arctic-five/news/news-archive/2024-06-14-new-arctic-chairs-appointed