AniMate - Becoming and being human with other animals

Education, childhoods and multispecies justice

Research group information

Unit and faculty

Teachers, Teaching and Educational Communities

Research group description

The AniMate team was established in 2016 to speak for children and significant animals in their lives. We have since grown to include several senior and junior researchers spanning disciplines from human and social sciences to natural sciences. We collaborate with young citizens as well as artists working on for example speculative fiction and biological arts. Through these transdisciplinary approaches we currently explore processes of becoming and being human with other animals – focusing on the unloved, the unseen and the unrepresented others, and highlighting multispecies justice as an integral part of education. In our funded projects we combine ecological citizen science with education, human-animal studies, childhood studies and the arts, utilising post-qualitative and multispecies (non-anthropocentric) methodologies.

Research group

Members

Research projects

Fellow Feelings
Co-creating biodiverse communities with young people, science, and bioart
(Eudaimonia institute, 2022-2025)

Fellow Feelings is a flagship project of human sciences at the University of Oulu. In it we explore the relation between knowledge and feelings about biodiversity through a citizen science project with young people. Combining ecological inquiry with education and biological art, the project will combat biodiversity loss by exploring how someone becomes a ‘fellow’ who we recognize as in need of protection. The flagship species of the project are insects. Fellow Feelings proceeds in two empirical stages based on two paradigmatic shifts: DNA barcoding in taxonomy and multispecies thinking in education. The long-term impact locates in progressing environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive education. The project will be conducted at the Faculties of Education and Science.

Project members: Pauliina Rautio, Marko Mutanen, Tuure Tammi, Marina Pliushchik, Niina Kiljunen, Antti Tenetz

Citizens with Rats
From citizen science toward non-anthropocentric education with young people and difficult urban companions
(Academy of Finland, 2020-2024)

CitiRats combines natural sciences and education in a project with young people. The main objective is to study and to develop arts of attentiveness towards multispecies communities and for imagining multispecies futures while rethinking exclusive human agency in society and in education. This is needed because the problems of sustainable co-living are part of young people’s everyday lives here and now. Education is, however, said to be among the slowest of disciplines to address these concerns. CitiRats produces new knowledge and solutions with a state-of-the-art three-tier approach, based on collaboration between researchers, young people (ages 13-15) and selected experts. The research design comprises three progressive research stages with methods from natural sciences, human sciences and the arts. This produces new knowledge of urban communities as shared between many species, as well as knowledge about how young people best come to learn about sustainable co-living.

Project members: Pauliina Rautio, Tuure Tammi, Riikka Hohti, Maria Saari, Tuomas Aivelo, Anttoni Kervinen, Mika Simonen – featuring Johanna Sinisalo

AniMate
Significant others – The meaning of animals in children’s everyday life
(Emil Aaltonen Foundation & Eudaimonia institute, 2017-2021)

The objective of this project is to produce knowledge of the ways in which child–animal relations are significant in order to accommodate their existence in a rapidly urbanising world. In studies that map important individuals in children’s everyday lives, children themselves repeatedly include animals. Systematic in-depth studies on how significant child–animal relations form and evolve on children’s own terms thus contributing to their experienced wellbeing, are still missing however. At the same time there is a growing concern in urbanising societies of the diminishing of direct, spontaneous contact between children and animals. If societies respond to this challenge by fostering child–animal relations animals and children can form strong bonds, meaningful ‘networks of learners’ and ‘communities of knowers’. Such communities exemplify ’common worlds’ in which the human actors are intensely aware of their interconnectedness with the environment. Fostering such worlds will not be possible, however, before we know how significant child–animal relations form and are sustained by children and the animals as part of their everyday lives.

Project members: Pauliina Rautio, Riikka Hohti, Tuure Tammi, Riitta-Marja Leinonen

Recent publications

Aivelo, T. (2022). School students’ attitudes towards unloved biodiversity: insights from a citizen science project about urban rats. Environmental Education Research, doi:10.1080/13504622.2022.2140125

Hohti, R. & MacLure, M. (2022). Insect-thinking as resistance to education’s human exceptionalism: relationality and cuts in more-than-human childhoods. Qualitative Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004211059237

Rautio, P., Tammi, T., Aivelo, T., Hohti, R., Kervinen, A., & Saari, M. (2022). For whom? By Whom? Redefining participation in citizen science. Cultural Studies of Science Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-021-10099-9

Rautio, P., Hohti, R., Tammi, T. & Ylirisku, H. (2022). Multiple Worlds and Strange Objects: Environmental Education Research as an Additive Practice. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 1-13. Doi: 10.1017/aee.2022.29

Saari, M.H. (2022) Sustainable futures for whom? Towards an education for interspecies sustainability, Blog SHIFT: Environment, Territory and Society Research Group of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon.

Tammi, T. & Rautio, P. (2022). ”It was funny at first”. Exploring tensions in human-animal relations through Internet memes with university students. Environmental Education Research. Doi: 10.1080/13504622.2022.2073972

Tammi, T. & Rautio, P. (2022). Kysymmekö oikeita kysymyksiä? Lyhyt johdanto Yleisen ihmisen seikkailuihin Nuorisobarometrissa ja maailmassa, joka meiltä jää. [Are we asking the right questions? Introduction to the adventures of ’The General Man’ in the Youth Barometer, and in the world that we leave behind]. in: Nuorisobarometri [National Youth Barometer]. Helsinki: Valtion nuorisoneuvosto ja Nuorisotutkimusseura.

Vladimirova, A. (2022). Treat me as a place: On the (onto)ethics of place-responsive pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory. DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2022.2130755

Hohti, R., Rousell, D., MacLure, M., & Chalk, H. L. (2021). Atmospheres of the Anthropocene. Sensing and rerouting dis/inheritances in a university museum with young people. Children’s Geographies, 1-14.

Rautio, P., Tammi, T. & Hohti, R. (2021). Childhood after the “animal turn” – child-animal relations and multispecies inquiry. In Yelland, N. et.al., (Eds). Sage Handbook of Global Childhoods.

Saari, M.H. (2021) Animals as stakeholders in education: towards an educational reform for interspecies sustainability, A doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Oulu for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Doctoral Degree Programme in Educational Sciences). http://jultika.oulu.fi/Record/isbn978-952-62-3151-8

Vladimirova, A. (2021). Caring In-Between: Events of Engagement of Preschool Children and Forests. Journal of Childhood Studies, 46(1), 51-71. doi: https://doi.org/10.18357/jcs00202119326

Vladimirova, A. &… (2021). Multilogues with a Weather-Making Dragon of the North. In J. Armstrong, A. Lakind, C. Adsit-Morris, R. Sæter (eds.), becoming-Feral. Scotland, UK: Objet-a Creative Studio.

Hohti, R., & Osgood, J. (2020). Pets that Have “Something Inside”: The Material Politics of in/Animacy and Queer Kin within the Childhood Menagerie. Genealogy, 4(2), 38. MDPI AG. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4020038

Hohti, R., Tammi, T., Saari, M.H. & Rautio, P. (2020). Ihmiskeskeisyydestä kohti monilajisuutta. Yhteiselon hankalat kysymykset myötätunnon perustana? Ympäristökasvatus.

Rautio, P. & Saari, M.H. (2020) Minkälainen karhu koulussa asuu? (Ja tulisiko se häätää sieltä?), Natura 3/20, http://www.naturalehti.fi/2020/09/25/minkalainen-karhu-koulussa-asuu-ja-tulisiko-se-haataa-sielta/

Saari, M.H. (2020) Näkymättömistä näkyviksi: eläimet tulevaisuuden koulujärjestelmässä [From invisible to visible: animals in future schools], in Wahlberg, B. & Aaltola, E. (Eds.) Me & Muut Eläimet: Uusi Maailmanjärjestys [Other animals and us: towards a new world order], Tampere: Vastapaino, 121-138.

Tammi, T. & Hohti, R. (2020). Touching is Worlding. From Caring Hands to World Making Dances in Multispecies Childhoods. Journal of Childhood Studies. https://doi.org/10.18357/jcs452202019736

Tammi, T., Hohti, R., & Rautio, P. (2020). Child-Animal Relations and Care as Critique. Journal of Childhood Studies, 1-6.

Hohti, R., & Tammi, T. (2019). The greenhouse effect: Multispecies childhood and non-innocent relations of care. Childhood, 26(2), 169–185. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568219826263

Saari, M.H. (2018) Re-imagining the human-nonhuman animal relationship through humane education, in A. Cutter-Mackenzie, K. Malone, E. Barrat Hacking (Eds.) International Research Handbook on ChildhoodNature: Assemblages of Childhood and Nature Research, Springer, 1-11.

Tammi, T., Rautio, P., Leinonen, R-M. & Hohti, R. (2018). Unearthing Withlings: Children, Tweezers and Worms, and the Emergence of Joy and Suffering in a Kindergarten Yard. In Young, T. & Rautio, P. (Eds) ChildhoodNature Child–Animal Relations. Springer Nature.

Vladimirova, A. & Rautio, P. (2018). Unplanning Research with a Curious Practice Methodology: Emergence of ChildrenForest in the Context of Finland. In Hart, P., Payne, P. & Cutter-Mackenzie, A. (Eds), ChildhoodNature Research Methodologies. Springer Nature.

Rautio, P., Hohti, R., Leinonen, R-M. & Tammi, T. (2017) Reconfiguring urban environmental education with a ‘shitgull’ and a ‘shop’. Environmental Education Research Vol 23 (10), 1379-1390.

AniMate - Becoming and being human with other animals

Research group information

Unit and faculty

Research group description

Research group

Members

Research projects

Recent publications

News and events

AniMate online

Postal address

Street address