Dr Tuuli Lähdesmäki (MAs in Art History and Art Education; PhD in Art History; DSocSc in Sociology) is Adjunct Professor and Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Lähdesmäki currently leads a research project ‘Legitimation of European Cultural Heritage and the Dynamics of Identity Politics in the EU’ (EUROHERIT), funded by the European Research Council. She is the Co-PI in the University of Jyväskylä research profiling area ‘Crises Redefined: Historical Continuity and Societal Change’ (CRISES). Lähdesmäki’s interdisciplinary research focuses on reception studies; meaning-making processes in contemporary culture; identity and heritage policies and politics; and cultural aspects of the EU’s European project. She will bring this expertise to DIALLS, specifically to the analysis of policy documentation (WP2 and WP7) and cultural artefacts created by young people (WP7). Lähdesmäki’s track record includes over 100 publications. She has edited several volumes and special issues related to her area of expertise. In 2015, Lähdesmäki was awarded with the Academy of Finland Award for Scientific Courage.

Aino-Kaisa Koistinen (PhD, Contemporary culture studies) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä. She defended her thesis on the re-imaginations of humanity in science fiction television in 2015 (University of Jyväskylä). Koistinen’s expertise lies in feminist media and cultural studies, posthumanism, speculative fiction and crime fiction, transmediality, affect, and representational analysis. She has worked in projects such as TRANSMEDIA LITERACY: Exploiting transmedia skills and informal learning strategies to improve formal education (H2020), Uses of Fantasy – The World Hobbit Project in Finland (Finnish Cultural Foundation), and Abusive Sexuality and Sexual Violence in Contemporary Culture (Kone foundation). Koistinen is active in many national and international networks. She is currently the Chair of Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research (FINFAR), and an editor-in-chief of Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research (2016–2018). She is also one of the coordinators of the international Monster Network that studies monsters and monstrosity in cultural practices. Moreover, Koistinen is part of the international Game of Thrones research project dealing with the reception of the popular television series.

Susanne C. Ylönen holds a PhD in Art Education and is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä. Her doctoral dissertation The Fighting Crab Monster (2016, in Finnish) explored the field of child cultural horror and delineated how different aesthetic choices such as aesthetic sublimation (fear and awe inspiring renditions), aestheticization (beautifying approaches) and aesthetic sublation (disgust inducing, possibly humorously degrading interpretations) are used within discourses such as risk speech, cute talk, psychologization and peer cultural meaning making in order to achieve particular performative aims from spreading horror to containing and ridiculing it. Currently she works on the subject of aesthetic sublation as a form of pop cultural meaning making, tracing convergences of, for example, disgust and cuteness in diverse case studies from Hodor doorstops to zombie picturebooks and violent clowns. Her research is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

Dr Katja Mäkinen (MAs in Political Science and Art Education; DSocSc in Political Science) is a Post-doctoral Researcher at the MACS, JYU, Finland, in Lähdesmäki´s ERC project EUROHERIT. Her previous projects include ‘Politics of Participation and Democratic Legitimation in the European Union’ (Kone Foundation) and ‘Muddy Waters – Democracy and Governance in a Multilateral State’ (Academy of Finland). Previously she has worked as a junior lecturer in political science and a senior lecturer in cultural policy at the University of Jyväskylä. Mäkinen specializes in citizenship; citizens’ participation and identities; cultural heritage; spatiality and territoriality, democracy and power questions related to citizenship and culture; EU’s participatory governance; ethnography; EU programs on citizenship and culture; policy documents; and language, concepts, conceptual changes and histories, and this experience will be an asset to the DIALLS project. Mäkinen was the governor of the Standing Group on Citizenship in the European Consortium for Political Research (2016-2017) and a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy (2018). She is a co-editor of Shaping Citizenship -  A Political Concept in Theory, Debate and Practice