2024 CO-LAB IN HELSINKI
SAGA research is being conducted in a host of collaborations, co-hosted laboratory style workshops, or co-labs, that bring together different actors in different settings and cities to spark new research and understandings related to sustainability across languages.
The Helsinki co-lab kicked off with a More-than-English Green Transitions workshop offered by the SAGA Team at the Sustainability Research and Innovation / Sustainability Science Days international conference, which took place in Helsinki in June 2024. The workshop introduced translanguaging in relation to sustainability, demonstrated through project members’ insights into this work from different interdisciplinary starting points.
SAGA researcher Veera Uusitalo, supervised by Salla Jokela, presented her undergraduate thesis research in the sustainable urban development program at Tampere University. The research relates to Finnish sauna, as a Finnish term that evokes a rich and culture-specific history and set of practices, built forms, and relationships to place and people. The sauna tradition has more recently taken off in Finnish cities, with the City of Tampere, Finland’s second-largest city, declaring itself “the sauna capital of the world.” Together with Finnish SAGA researcher Annika Airas, Veera and Salla investigated the urban policy, place-branding and communications, and critical sustainability dimensions of urban sauna in Finnish urbanism.
SAGA researcher Annika Airas took up the opportunity of the Helsinki co-lab to investigate talkoot, a Finnish term that roughly translates as common work for a shared goal. Annika searched archives, museums, and civic and government organizations in Finland to explore the meanings and uses of talkoot across time, and applications to sustainability challenges in particular. Nathan Mascaro, PhD student in urban studies at Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), joined the project with a case study of the Oranssi youth and housing organization in Helsinki, and its radical inclusionary approach to housing provision and maintenance, and reclaiming urban spaces for youth, mobilizing the spirit and shared expectations of talkoot.
