The Academy of Finland’s Research Council for Culture and Society selected 16 new Academy Research Fellows at its meeting on 23 April. The new Academy Research Fellows will start their term in August 2010. The Research Council granted a total of 6.2 million euros for the salaries of Academy Research Fellows.
The Research Council for Culture and Society received a total of 147 applications for Academy Research Fellowships by the call deadline of 30 October 2009. In the review of applications, special attention was placed on the scientific quality and innovativeness of the research plan, the competence of the applicant and the feasibility of the research plan.
The term of an Academy Research Fellow is five years. The funding granted covers the salary of the researcher, and those selected for a research post as Academy Research Fellow can apply for Academy funding for their research costs. Decisions on the funding will be made separately.
Examples of research topics of the new Academy Research Fellows:
Reetta Toivanen (University of Helsinki) investigates how minority rights are discussed and negotiated in municipalities where the inhabitants belong to different majority and minority groups. A special interest is to study how transnational networks and organisations influence the local interpretations of international rights discourses. Toivanen’s project is situated at the interface of anthropology and international law. The anthropological field study will be conducted in Inari (Finland), Laksev (Norway) and Lovozero (Russia), all of which are multiethnic and multilingual municipalities in the Barents Sea area in northern Europe.
Suvi Saarikallio (University of Jyväskylä) studies music-related emotional competence and adolescent mental health. Music has been shown to affect emotional processing and improve wellbeing, and music is an important element in the everyday life of young people. Saarikallio’s project aims to clarify the conceptual understanding of music-related emotional competence, to investigate the development of music-related emotional competence during adolescence, and to explore connections between music-related emotional competencies and general emotional intelligence. The project will also provide knowledge of the psychological principles underlying health-promoting musical interventions in adolescence.
Leena Rouhiainen studies the influence of European contemporary dance on the more traditional tasks of the dancer. Rouhiainen’s project deals with the problems and tensions between first- and third- person processes in dance-making and explores how perception turns into embodied expression on the part of the dancer, both on a theoretical and an artistic level. The project looks into the subject area by the means of performative artistic research, by experimenting and by developing the method in artistic work. In addition to artistic studies, the project will also produce articles on the theories of Merleau-Ponty and Wilhelm Reich. During her term as an Academy Research Fellow, Rouhiainen will be working at Theatre Academy Helsinki.
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