Great success: Two 2025 research prizes from the Aue Foundation go to Oulu

The first Aue Research Prize goes to Dr Maarit Leskelä (University of Oulu, in the picture). Her dissertation shows that education export – in this case, a digital learning platform – is a commercial process, but also a complex cultural encounter: she examined interactions between participants from Finland, Germany and Austria, and at the same time between IT professionals and educational specialists. It becomes clear how agency (the ability of actors to act), multilingualism and cultural negotiations influence the course of German-Finnish education export negotiations, providing valuable impetus for education stakeholders and companies.

This year, the qualification award is shared: In her master's thesis on the use of social media, Suvi Aaltonen (University of Oulu) uses the example of Instagram communication by German university hospitals to show how narrative strategies can contribute to building trust and promoting health education in society in times of information overload and medical uncertainty. Jyväskylä also has reason to celebrate: Suvi Porkola (University of Jyväskylä) impresses with a technically and linguistically outstanding, high-quality master's thesis on the construction of womanhood on election posters of selected parties in the first democratic elections of the Weimar Republic from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis, achieving exciting results against the backdrop of relevant literature. The jury thus honours three works that exemplify the goals of the Aue Foundation Helsinki and provide highly relevant impetus for society.

The interdisciplinary jury consisted of the following members:

- Political scientist Dr Anna-Maija Mertens is currently a board member at the German Institute for Compliance (DICO).

- Prof. Dr Christian Breyer teaches and conducts research in the field of solar energy at Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (LUT).

- The research committee of the Aue Foundation.