Projects

Ongoing research

I am conducting research on digital cultures and cultural engagement, cultural journalism and criticism, as well as media literacy. More specifically, as part of my current work I am studying the following topics:

  • Cultural journalism: Changes in journalistic professionalism among art and cultural journalists in the Nordic countries. I have conducted a longitudinal study in 1978–2023 in Finland, and examined new and emerging forms of professional arts criticism.
  • Reviewing and platformized cultural production: User-generated cultural content with a focus on vernacular reviewing; the production of content, cultural consumership and cultural engagement by ordinary users. I have studied online reviewing on user platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and Goodreads.
  • Media and information literacy (MIL): MIL policy and local policy implementation, media production pedagogy (especially the role of spatiality in the media production pedagogy), genre pedagogy (especially the signature pedagogies of reviewing cultural products), media education/news literacy education conducted by media organizations. I am interested in both macro-structures such as the policy work and micro-structural issues such as MIL practices and pedagogies, especially in the context of informal and non-curricular learning.
  • Pedagogies and structures of journalism education: The values and conceptions of journalism educators in terms of journalism, including the journalistic coverage and practices related to artificial intelligence (AI). I have studied the educational structures of journalism education, such as the educational systems and curricula in the Nordic countries, as well as examined the pedagogies applied in training newsrooms.
  • Learning resources and digital pedagogies: Media texts as pedagogical texts and learning resources, journalism’s public pedagogies, and formal pedagogies related to the use of so-called authentic texts.

For already published work, see my list of publications. For descriptions of some previous lines of research, see the following:

Media education projects

Youth-centered social media literacy: In 2007, I started a media literacy network Mediaskooppi with media-savvy young people (16–18 years) who functioned as educators for teachers and other professionals willing to learn about the young people’s uses of the media. In 2007–2013, we organized workshops and other educational events on the digital lives of young people and the pedagogical uses of digital tools in over 120 venues around Finland.

Audience work of media and journalism: I have organised the production of exhibition videos of Finnish social media developers and users for the media museum Rupriikki in Tampere. Treduka 2015 was an educational event for primary school teachers with 2,500 participants in November 2015 at Tampere Hall. It was re-arranged in November 2018 in the same venue, and in 2017 I was involved in Vasu-päivä that was a similar event to 1,500 pre-school teachers.

Pedagogical projects related to media literacy: I have been in the board of media education projects of different organisations, e.g. the city of Tampere and the Finnish Children and Youth Foundation. We, for example, created the award-winning Expert Network, now taken over by Economic Information Office, which delivers video lecturers from different professional fields to Finnish schools. We also developed a model of wiki pedagogy and a leaflet on critical media literacy for Finnish schools.

Jury memberships: I have been a member in the juries of the European Journalist Award by the European Council, MEDEAnet Award by the European Council, YAJA Young Art Journalism Awards by the Australian Art News Portal, Psaroloco Children’s Film Festival in Greece, and a journalist competition by the Chemical Industry Federation of Finland. I have also launched a thesis competition on the national minority of Sweden-Finns in Sweden and evaluated upper secondary school media diplomas according to the guidelines set by the Ministry of Education in Finland.