AniMate - Becoming and being human with other animals

Multispecies Symphonies
Advancing critical and creative attentiveness with children in the Phonocene.
(Eudaimonia Institute of Human Sciences, 2026-2028. PI Tuure Tammi)

MuSes considers sound as a modality of being and knowing in the world and thus as a powerful route for exploring and transforming our relationships with human and non-human others amid the current crises. Combining multispecies ethnography with sonic methodologies and philosophy for children, MuSes develops arts of attentiveness towards multispecies communities as resilient and critical survival skills towards sustainable co-living. The project unfolds in three progressive stages in two schools with 50 children – LISTENING, QUESTIONING, and REMIXING – producing a range of fieldnotes, audio and visual materials. The combined effect of MuSes advances understanding of our multispecies communities in their complexity, critical examination of the political and environmental consequences of our ways of listening and hearing, and possibilities for creative responses. Through this it contributes to conceptual and practical developments of non-anthropocentric education.

ELOTILA
Inclusive co-creation model for shared agency and sustainable future imaginaries in formal education.
(Research Council of Finland, Proof-of-Concept, 2025-2026. PI Pauliina Rautio, Co-PI Tuomas Aivelo.)

Young people in Finland, as well as elsewhere in Europe, generally view their future with optimism. However, they feel they have little influence over major environmental changes. When public attention is focused on individual activists or large-scale events, it can seem as though changing the world requires one to be exceptionally brave, knowledgeable, and skilled. ELOTILA is a development project where researchers from various fields, artists, and students come together to share what matters to them about nature and living beings. The project creates space and methods for enabling change collectively and as part of everyday shifts in thinking. The project will be implemented in two schools in the Helsinki metropolitan area during the 2025–2026 school year. The developed model will be further advanced by partner organizations: Luontoliitto (The Finnish Nature League), the Children and Youth Foundation, the Young Academy Finland, and the Finnish Environmental Education Institute SYKLI.

HOMINGS - More than just human homes
Creating new storylines of co-habitation to drive everyday life sustainability transitions.
(Research Council of Finland, 2024-2028. PI Pauliina Rautio, Co-PI Veera Kinnunen.)

HOMINGS is a transdisciplinary project, commencing from the proposition that sustainability transitions are not driven by humans alone, but by humans in alliance with more-than-human beings. Aiming to create new knowledge of how sustainability transitions are rooted in everyday life storylines, HOMINGS collaborates with citizens, exploring sites of perceived human mastery par excellence: human homes. Homes are studied as productive sites of everyday life negotiations between humans and more-than-human beings, bringing forth possible new accountabilities – forms of compassionate action generated in co-habitation. Through exploring the past, present and future storylines of more than just human homes, HOMINGS aspires to contribute to a culture of societal conversation and scholarly practice where everyday life sustainability transitions are understood as co-created with other species and are culturally, rather than only individually enacted.

MUST - Enabling multispecies transitions
A paradigm shift to unlearn the framework of human mastery over nature.
(Strategic Research Council (RCF), 2023-2029. Consortium PI Christopher Raymond / Work package PI Pauliina Rautio, Co-PI Maria Helena Saari.)

MUST is a research project funded by the Finnish Strategic Research Council. Our vision is to enable multispecies transitions in which humans and other species can adapt to a new way of life that supports their mutual well-being, without high levels of suffering or inequality between different groups of people, other species or populations. Work package Unlearning with other species is led by Animate. Previous learning frameworks highlighting the interests of other species have focused on theory-building. We now crucially need experiential ways for unlearning human mastery over nature. During MUST we will create multispecies pedagogies to move away from previous patterns of thinking and to better recognize the agencies, representation and interests of other species especially in urban planning.

Fellow Feelings
Co-creating biodiverse communities with young people, science, and bioart
(Eudaimonia institute, 2022-2025)

Fellow Feelings is a flagship project of human sciences at the University of Oulu. In it we explore the relation between knowledge and feelings about biodiversity through a citizen science project with young people. Combining ecological inquiry with education and biological art, the project will combat biodiversity loss by exploring how someone becomes a ‘fellow’ who we recognize as in need of protection. The flagship species of the project are insects. Fellow Feelings proceeds in two empirical stages based on two paradigmatic shifts: DNA barcoding in taxonomy and multispecies thinking in education. The long-term impact locates in progressing environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive education. The project will be conducted at the Faculties of Education and Science.

Project members: Pauliina Rautio, Marko Mutanen, Tuure Tammi, Marina Pliushchik, Niina Kiljunen, Antti Tenetz

Citizens with Rats
From citizen science toward non-anthropocentric education with young people and difficult urban companions
(Academy of Finland, 2020-2024)

CitiRats combines natural sciences and education in a project with young people. The main objective is to study and to develop arts of attentiveness towards multispecies communities and for imagining multispecies futures while rethinking exclusive human agency in society and in education. This is needed because the problems of sustainable co-living are part of young people’s everyday lives here and now. Education is, however, said to be among the slowest of disciplines to address these concerns. CitiRats produces new knowledge and solutions with a state-of-the-art three-tier approach, based on collaboration between researchers, young people (ages 13-15) and selected experts. The research design comprises three progressive research stages with methods from natural sciences, human sciences and the arts. This produces new knowledge of urban communities as shared between many species, as well as knowledge about how young people best come to learn about sustainable co-living.

Project members: Pauliina Rautio, Tuure Tammi, Riikka Hohti, Maria Saari, Tuomas Aivelo, Anttoni Kervinen, Mika Simonen – featuring Johanna Sinisalo

AniMate
Significant others – The meaning of animals in children’s everyday life
(Emil Aaltonen Foundation & Eudaimonia institute, 2017-2021)

The objective of this project is to produce knowledge of the ways in which child–animal relations are significant in order to accommodate their existence in a rapidly urbanising world. In studies that map important individuals in children’s everyday lives, children themselves repeatedly include animals. Systematic in-depth studies on how significant child–animal relations form and evolve on children’s own terms thus contributing to their experienced wellbeing, are still missing however. At the same time there is a growing concern in urbanising societies of the diminishing of direct, spontaneous contact between children and animals. If societies respond to this challenge by fostering child–animal relations animals and children can form strong bonds, meaningful ‘networks of learners’ and ‘communities of knowers’. Such communities exemplify ’common worlds’ in which the human actors are intensely aware of their interconnectedness with the environment. Fostering such worlds will not be possible, however, before we know how significant child–animal relations form and are sustained by children and the animals as part of their everyday lives.

Project members: Pauliina Rautio, Riikka Hohti, Tuure Tammi, Riitta-Marja Leinonen