RETHINK - Key Persons
Anna Ahtola's (MA, education) master's thesis examined museums as multisensory learning environments, thus combining the perspectives of museum pedagogy and special needs education. Ahtola's other research interests include lifelong learning and different types of learners. In addition to work in the field of education and teaching, she also has comprehensive experience in working in sales environments.
Erkki Anto (MA, education) works as a Project Researcher at the Department of Teacher Education and has specialized in the use of the eye-tracking methodology in educational research settings. He is preparing a doctoral dissertation about the text-comprehension skills of university students.
Ilkka Lähteenmäki (PhD, philosophy) is a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Oulu, Finland. His research focuses on possibilities and limitations of different forms of historical (re)presentation, including games, social media feed, museum exhibitions, and of course the traditional narrative historical text. Lähteenmäki's PhD thesis discussed the theoretical usefulness of conceptualising different kinds of historical representations as historical worlds instead of informative texts or explanations.
Job Titles:
- Professor of History
- Professor of History and Social Studies Education at the University of Turku
Jan Löfström, PhD, is Professor of History and Social Studies Education at the University of Turku. In 2020-2021, he was Visiting Professor at the Linnaeus University, in a project on the intersections of historical and moral consciousness, directed by Professor Niklas Ammert and funded by the Swedish Research Council. The project resulted in the book, "Historical and moral consciousness in education: Learning ethics for democratic citizenship education", by Niklas Ammert, Silvia Edling, Jan Löfström and Heather Sharp, published by Routledge in 2022. His research interests include uses of history, teaching of controversial and sensitive history, historical consciousness, theoretical foundations of school social studies, economic education, and gender education.
Job Titles:
- Title of Associate Professor
Jonas Ahlskog holds the title of Associate Professor (docent) of Philosophy from Åbo Akademi University (ÅAU). He is Postdoctoral Researcher in Minority Studies at ÅAU, Principal Investigator of the Kone Foundation research project Doing Justice to Experience: Relations to the Difficult Past in History and Memory, and has experience of academic teaching in both history and philosophy as University Teacher (universitetslärare) at ÅAU. Ahlskog has held visiting research fellowships at Harvard University and Södertörn University. Ahlskog's philosophical research is focused on conceptual questions concerning historical knowledge, action, understanding, explanation, testimony, memory, and cultural theory. In history, Ahlskog is primarily doing research about conceptions of nation, class, language and identity in political and ideological movements during the 20th century in Finland. He is the author of The Primacy of Method in Historical Research (Routledge 2021). Outside academia, Ahlskog is adviser (sakkunnig) for Svenska folkskolans vänner r.f., within a project about contemporary challenges for non-formal adult education.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Theory at Åbo Akademi University and of Political History
Kalle Pihlainen is Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Theory at Åbo Akademi University and of Political History and Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland. His research focuses on the theory and philosophy of history as well as literary and historical culture, with particular emphasis on the ethics and politics of historical representation, embodiment and existential phenomenology. He has published extensively on these topics in journals and anthologies, and a book, The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past (Routledge). His current research project, funded by the Estonian Research Council, concentrates on the turn to materiality in recent theory debates. He is active in a number of organizations for the promotion of research in the theory and philosophy of history, including the International Network for Theory of History (INTH), of which he is a co-founder.
Mikko Kainulainen is a PhD candidate at the University of Turku, Finland. With a focus on epistemic practices and conceptual change, his current research is located at the intersection of history education and expertise in history.
Natan Elgabsi's PhD project in philosophy started in 2014 and will be finished in early 2022. In the project, he works mainly on the relationship between epistemology and ethics in the human sciences, particularly on existential questions of responsibility and understanding in the philosophy of historical and anthropological writing. From 2022 onwards Elgabsi will work as a researcher in the project Doing Justice to Experience: Relations to the Difficult Past in History and Memory. The principal investigator of the project is Jonas Ahlskog, and the project is funded by Kone Foundation.
Satu Laitinen (PhD, education) works as a University Lecturer at the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Turku. Her research focuses on motivation and its structure and stability. In her work, Laitinen has specialized in the use of sophisticated statistical tools, such as Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). She has published on motivation and associations between language skills and child's interest in, e.g., Finnish Journal of Education and Research Papers in Education.