PhD student, Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki
Inkeri is a PhD student of philosophy of science at the University of Helsinki, and belongs to the Finnish Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. She will soon defend her doctoral thesis on changing research communities, objectivity and relativism in contemporary cultural research. Her research interests include philosophy of anthropology, philosophy of the humanities, social epistemology, objectivity and the use of extra-academic knowledge in academic research. She is particularly interested in the epistemic challenges related to contemporary endeavors to democratise scientific and academic knowledge production.
It is common today to integrate extra-academic knowledge with scientific or academic knowledge, and to give extra-academic agents more active roles in research than has been customary. In participatory, collaborative and transdisciplinary projects, researchers use artistic knowledge, tacit knowledge, indigenous knowledge or the knowledge of 'experts by experience'. Often the aim is to produce policy-relevant results. It is thus important that the results can be trusted. However, it is not obvious how objectivity is ensured when the research is partly based on knowledge acquired through extra-academic means. In her post-doc work Inkeri wishes to focus on normative epistemic questions related to the use of extra-academic knowledge in academic knowledge production. Her aim is to outline a way for assessing the objectivity of research in which extra-academic knowledge is used.
