This month we have a deeply interesting conversation with social anthropologist, Dr. Avi KBH, who is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the project Animal Crosslocations, which is resourced through the Resilient and Just Systems (RESET) Network at University of Helsinki. We talked about his new project, “Mosquito Crosslocations and Participatory Evaluations of Mosquito Interventions,” and the trajectory that led him to be interested in these topics. In this conversation we think through the complex we...
Jan 30, 2024•59 min
This month we were absolutely delighted to be joined by Joonatan Ala-Könni, for a super interesting conversation that connects natural sciences and extractivisms. Joonatan Ala-Könni is a doctoral researcher in Atmospheric Science at the Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research (INAR) at the University of Helsinki. Joonatan’s work is all about climate change and using insights gained from the processes of carbon binding in aquatic environments. The work looks at the physical world – in...
Jan 26, 2024•44 min
To round out 2023, we wanted to release a brief episode to celebrate (over) four years of the EXALT Podcast and give a sneak peak at some exciting new happenings in 2024! We apologize for not being able to get a full anniversary special to you this year. We have had a lot on our plates with our respective research, as well as some major (positive) life changes. However, we are excited to announce some upcoming projects which will be crossing over with the EXALT Podcast feed! Don’t worry! We will...
Dec 29, 2023•9 min
This month we are ecstatic to bring you the second part of our conversation with the creators of From the Cubby. We are once again joined by the same wonderful trio of guests, Joe Spence, Nick Chamberlain, and Avi Betz-Heinemann. From the Cubby , is a three-part documentary film series, which draws on six years of ethnographic fieldwork in Canterbury, England. The first film follows Martin, a man who was sleeping rough on the streets of Canterbury as a tuberculosis outbreak was about to spread t...
Dec 29, 2023•36 min
This month we were delighted to be joined by three amazing guests, Joe Spence, Nick Chamberlain, and Avi Betz-Heinemann (whose name you might recognize from last month’s episode). All three of our guests have been involved with the documentary film series From the Cubby , which draws on six years of ethnographic fieldwork in Canterbury, England. The film series draws its name from a makeshift encampment that was a geographical epicenter implicated in an outbreak of tuberculosis. This was a wide ...
Nov 24, 2023•48 min
This month we were delighted to be joined by Niti Bhan, who is a part-time doctoral researcher focusing on trans-disciplinary innovation at Aalto University in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Niti came to research after almost 30 years of situated practice. Niti specializes in human-centered design/innovation planning. This field asks question like, how can we understand people in their own lives, the way they live and operate as a starting point for design and innovation. In practice ...
Sep 29, 2023•1 hr 4 min
This month we are happy to welcome Ossi Ollinaho, a lecturer in Global Development Studies at University of Helsinki, on the podcast. In the conversation, we talk with Ossi about his journey from studying math and physics, to a Doctorate in Industrial Engineering and Management, to the experiences and questions which brought him to work in Global Development Studies. We also dive into how transitions to agroforestry techniques can turn out good, bad, and ugly, as well as how the systemic concept...
Sep 06, 2023•49 min
This month we are thrilled to be joined by Eija Ranta, University Lecturer at University of Helsinki in Global Development Studies. Eija leads two Academy of Finland research projects, 'Social Justice and Raciality in Latin America’ (2021-2026) and 'Citizenship Utopias in the Global South: The Pursuit of Transformative Alternatives in Times of Disillusionment' (2019-2023). Eija’s current focus is on societal activism and particularly how people can live a good and decent life in the face of soci...
Jul 28, 2023•35 min
This month we were honored to be joined by Toni Ruuska , who is a University Researcher and Adjunct Professor of Sustainable Economy at the University of Helsinki. His research focuses generally on alternatives to capitalism, agrarian political economy, and the skills of self-provisioning. In this captivating conversation, Toni lays out some of the issues with the perpetual growth model that is part and parcel of capitalist systems. Endless growth and accumulation are a nightmare; however, degro...
Jun 30, 2023•54 min
This month we go back to Zambia for an enlightening conversation with Kumbutso Phiri, a development specialist. Kumbutso works with a wide range of topics, but in this conversation, we explore the topic of street kids who live on the streets of Lusaka, Zambia’s capital city. Kumbutso gives us insight into the demographics and societal infrastructure of the street kid population. While the exact number of street kids is difficult to estimate due to a lack of effective ways to definitively count t...
May 26, 2023•52 min
This month on the podcast we are really excited to try something new…by revisiting something old! Christopher and I open the podcast with a short chat and some life updates. Then we turn our attention to one of the first EXALT podcasts, “Exploring the Pluriverse” featuring Maria Ehrnstrom-Fuentes, an associate professor at Hanken School of Business. In this amazing conversation she explores themes of decoloniality, degrowth, and reflections on what researchers do and raises questions about how w...
Apr 28, 2023•40 min
This month we are delighted to be joined by Patience Mususa from The Nordic Africa Institute. She is an anthropologist with a background in architecture working on mining and urbanization in Southern Africa. She is particularly interested in place and the ways in which people interact in the face of the large scale mining industry and the influence and ramifications of economic downturn and socio-economic transformation. In particular, she is interested in how space is produced, for example why ...
Mar 31, 2023•46 min
This month we are thrilled to be joined by University of Helsinki doctoral researcher Mariam Khawar. Mariam is in the Doctoral Programme in Political, Societal and Regional Change, which is part of the Faculty of Social Sciences and is affiliated with Helsinki Centre for Global Political Economy. Mariam’s work focuses on Islamic economic philosophy, specifically through a Marxist lens. Her work is highly interdisciplinary drawing on feminist political economy, economics, and feminism in Islamic...
Feb 24, 2023•1 hr 5 min
This month we are delighted to be joined by Barış Can Sever who is Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. He is currently doing a 9-month research period at Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki. Barış gives us an exciting insight into the agricultural geography in Turkey, including pressure from changing socio/ecological systems and the increasing dependency on imports. There have been dramatic changes in the countr...
Jan 27, 2023•50 min
This month on the pod we are delighted to be joined by Mariko Frame , who is Assistant Professor of Economics at Merrimack College in Massachusetts. Dr. Frame is a political economist who focuses on ecological imperialism, which occurs when one country subjugates another country by controlling the resources, politics, labour, military, and the very ideology or ways of worlding. This dynamic is often found between countries in the global North and global South due to the history of colonialism th...
Dec 30, 2022•56 min
This month we are super excited to be joined again by friend of the podcast Alexander Dunlap, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. This conversation is a high energy journey through Alexander’s own trajectory into academic spaces, and the realities on the ground he has encountered in the course of his work. We talk about the violence that accompanies extractivism and reflect on direct impacts to those living at extractive frontiers. ...
Nov 25, 2022•1 hr 14 min
Ksenija Hanaček is a researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA, UAB), Spain. Ksenija works for the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas). Recently, she has collaborated with Markus Kröger at the University of Helsinki, looking at extractive projects and resistance to extractive projects in the Arctic. We talked about extractive economies in the Arctic, particularly investments that are coming from outside the Arctic i...
Oct 28, 2022•33 min
This bonus episode of extractivism in pop culture is in honour of the three-year anniversary of the EXALT podcast. We are very excited to be joined again by Jesse Barber from the University of Helsinki Folklore Studies. In this bonus episode we explore J. R. R. Tolkien’s series, Lord of the Rings (LoTR) and how it relates to themes like modernity, industrialism, capitalism, war, and of course extractivism. We talk across the various iterations of LoTRs, including the books, Peter Jackson’s movie...
Oct 28, 2022•55 min
This month on the podcast we are excited to present a conversation that is a bit outside our normal topics! This conversation is with Jesse Barber, a doctoral researcher in Folklore Studies in the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki. His research explores the continuity between pre-Christian Scandinavian religions and the folklore written later in Scandinavian countries. He specifically pays attention to similarities in cosmological timelines, i.e., conceptions of the past, pres...
Sep 30, 2022•1 hr 8 min
This month we were delighted to be joined by fellow University of Helsinki, Global Development Studies doctoral researcher, Usman Ashraf. Usman moved from the natural sciences to the social sciences and his research focuses on Chinese investment in Pakistan’s forestry sector. In particular we talked about the Billion Tree Tsunami Afforestation project and the subsequent 10 Billion Tree Tsunami Afforestation project. We touched on the landscape changes that attend this kind of project and the imp...
Aug 26, 2022•59 min
This month we are excited to present an in-depth conversation with Professor Sérgio Sauer , who works at University of Brasilia in Brazil and is a visiting scholar at University of Helsinki in Finland. We explored the landscape of land struggles in Brazil and how extractivism and social conflict has shaped Brazil. He started his career on the ground at an agricultural frontier and has worked extensively with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and questions of justice for rural inhabit...
Jul 29, 2022•57 min
This month we were joined by two exciting guests, Syed Mustafa Ali from The Open University in the UK and Dan McQuillan from Goldsmiths, University of London. They are both interested in AI, technology, and applying a critical lens to the development of digital infrastructures and applications. They met at the Histories of AI Seminar at Cambridge University and found common ground through what could be described as Luddite orientation. It was this connection over Luddism that brought them togeth...
Jun 24, 2022•1 hr 17 min
This month we are thrilled to be joined by Tim Oakes , who is a Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is a human, social, and cultural geographer and his research focuses on Southwest China and the techno-political effects of infrastructural urbanism in China’s ‘new area’ urban zones. Needless to say, there have been a lot of developmental changes in China since Tim visited for the first time in the 1980s. Tim gives us insight into his career trajectory and his roots i...
May 27, 2022•1 hr 12 min
This month we are joined by Gediminas Lesutis , a Marie Curie Fellow at University of Amsterdam. This rich and wide-ranging conversation starts with how Gedis got started in fieldwork driven research in Sub-Saharan Africa, and especially in Mozambique. We discussed land-grabbing, precarity, and the destructive, real-life impacts of dispossession in the epicenter of the extractive boom in contemporary Mozambique. Specifically, we got insights into the on the ground experience of being with people...
Apr 29, 2022•54 min
This month we were delighted to be joined on the podcast by Tania Murray Li . Dr. Li is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto (). Her work explores questions of land, labor, class, capitalism, development, resources, and indigeneity. In this episode she gave us insight into her most recent co-authored book, Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation of Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone , which was published in 2021 by Duke University Press. The conversation centers on the impacts to existenc...
Mar 25, 2022•45 min
This month we are super excited to be joined by University of Helsinki World Politics professor Teivo Teivainen ( researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/…i-teivainen ). In this vibrant and wide-ranging conversation, we talked with Teivo about his recent turn as a documentary film maker. Teivo has recently been in the Finnish Arctic and in Uruguay traveling along planned railway lines while reflecting on the concept of Finnish colonialism. The broader world might not immediately connect Finland an...
Feb 25, 2022•1 hr 5 min
This month on the EXALT podcast we were joined by Janne Salovaara from the Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies Programme (DENVI) at University of Helsinki. His research looks at the discipline of sustainability science from the perspective of how it is educated at the University level. Janne’s first degree is in graphic design and his idea of design was that it was the path to change the world. He thought a lot about what are moral, ethics, and societal responsibility of a design. His frustr...
Jan 28, 2022•55 min
This month the EXALT podcast was delighted to welcome University of Helsinki, Global Development Studies doctoral researcher Anna Marjaana Heikkinen . In her doctorate Anna Marjaana focuses on the role of water and climate change in the Peruvian Andes. She works with communities of peasant farmers, who are trying to hold onto traditional ways of working with their land and water in the face of pressures from globalized supply chains and the incursion of extractive industries. She highlighted a c...
Dec 31, 2021•51 min
This month we were delighted to be joined by Antti Tarvainen, a fellow doctoral candidate in Global Development Studies at University of Helsinki . His work examines the innovation economy (think Steve Jobs, apps, smart everything, etc.) and the colonial violence that that underpins its expansions. We started the discussion talking about the colonial utopia history of California and by extension in Silicon Valley. We explore some of the myriad colonial imaginaries that play out in the mythology ...
Nov 26, 2021•1 hr 1 min
In honour of the 2-year anniversary of the EXALT podcast we brought back our very first guest, Professor Barry Gills from Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki . We talk about the development and activities of the EXALT Initiative over the last few years. We touch on how the COVID crisis has raised awareness of the global system as a whole, which has highlighted the impact and knock-on effects of the extractivist logic. In this the changing consciousness around human relations...
Oct 29, 2021•1 hr 5 min
