Palmén Colloquium presented by the Geographical Society of Finland.  

 

Schedule Spring 2024

22.3.2024

Destination 90°N: Dimensions and geographies of tourism at the North Pole

Tourism in the Arctic has existed for over 200 years. It is now a mature industry in the region, operating all year round and in all regions of the Arctic, including the North Pole. The North Pole, however, does not constitute a distinct region; it is rather a minuscule point located within a vast and endless white landscape. Therefore, investigating tourism at the North Pole is essentially an inquiry into the logistics of reaching this remote place, and of tourism operations taking place in the central Arctic Ocean. In addition, while the North Pole is located in the middle of an ocean, 700 kilometers from the nearest land, the presence of sea ice facilitates the development and diversification of various tourism operations and products, extending beyond (icebreaker) cruise tourism.

This paper explores the dimensions and geographies of tourism development at the North Pole in terms of modes of tourism, itineraries, and estimated numbers of tourists. It also aims to discuss the future of tourism in the region in light of estimated climate change impacts on the sea ice in order to better plan and adapt to a future seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean.

By: Alix Varnajot, History, Culture and Communications Research Unit, University of Oulu

 

31.5.2024

Long-lived and healthy migrants? A register study on all-cause and cause-specific mortality in Finland, 2002-2020

It is well-known that emigrants are not a random sample of the population in their country of origin. Instead, selection into migration is selective. There is also a health dimension to this, because migrants are often healthier than the population of destination country. This is known as "healthy migrant effect", and it translates eventually to migrants' mortality advantage. However, empirical evidence is far from conclusive. Our study elucidates this topic by examining all-cause and cause-specific mortality among older migrant and non-migrant adults aged 70 and above using Finnish Cause of Death register data (2002–2020). Comparing migrants from diverse geographical regions with the majority population in Finland, we uncover an all-cause mortality advantage among older migrants, challenging assumptions of a diminishing healthy migrant effect with age. This advantage persists across various causes of death, with variations observed among regions of origin groups and between sexes. 

By Dr. Teemu Kemppainen, Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki

 

 

AUTUMN 2023 Schedule.

SMS:n Palmén-kollokvio, Syyskausi 2023

 

The Colloquium takes place 13:00-14:00 on selected Fridays in Zoom (www.bit.ly/Palmen2023) or at a local venue.

Kollokvio pyörii tiettyinä perjantaina klo 13:00–14:00.

 

Friday 27th OCTOBER

Changing cold climate river environments

Despite the polar region is warming faster than any other region on Earth, a thorough understanding of the impacts on northern seasonally ice-covered rivers is presently lacking. The changes in the capacity of river channels (e.g. floods) are dependent on the amount of sediment transported. Even though a significant percentage of the sediments in rivers originate from bank erosion, it is still unknown, especially in Northern rivers how and when exactly river bank erosion and sediment transport takes place. Therefore, new methodological approaches of measuring and modelling are needed to understand river processes (incl. ice, flow, sediment transport and their interactions), also in ice-covered conditions. Two research themes and related projects are presented: 1) The impacts of defrosting sedimentary systems on northern rivers, and on their seasonal river ice and hydro-morphodynamics; 2) Development of technical solutions for observing river and watershed scale processes. The aim is to produce understanding of long-term river dynamics by integrating unique field data, novel chilled flume experiments, remote sensing and new numerical model approaches. Preliminary results and methodological development are presented, and future research needs expressed.

 

Eliisa Lotsari, Academy Research Fellow, Water engineering, Aalto University

Join in Zoom: https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/62840366036

 

Late Nov TBA

 

Friday, 19th JANUARY

Alue- ja yhdyskuntasuunnittelun ympäristökriisi

Vaikka kestävän kehityksen eteen on tehty töitä vuosikymmeniä, ympäristökriisi jatka pahenemistaan: elonkirjo köyhtyy, luonnonvarat hupenevat ja ilmasto lämpenee. Jotta kriisiin voitaisiin vastata, on kestävyystutkimusyhteisö tarttunut ajatukseen niin sanotusta planetaarisesta hyvinvoinnista. Planetaarinen hyvinvointi politiikan tavoitteena merkitsisi paitsi ihmisten ja muiden lajien hyvinvoinnin edistämistä, myös ymmärrystä kaikkea elämää ylläpitävien ekosysteemien merkityksestä. Ympäristön tilaa heikentävistä kehityskuluista ja tuotantotavoista on aktiivisesti irrottauduttava. 

Millaista olisi planetaarista hyvinvointia edistävä alueiden ja yhdyskuntien kehitys, ja millaista muutosta se edellyttäisi suunnittelulta? Esityksessään Jonne Hytönen esittää tulkintansa pohjoismaista alue- ja yhdyskuntasuunnittelua viime vuosikymmeninä ohjanneista keskeisistä periaatteista, ja arvioi miten niiden tulisi ympäristökriisin oloissa muuttua. 

 

Jonne Hytönen, Research coordinator, School of Resource Wisdom, University of Jyväskylä / Postdoctoral researcher, Aalto University

Join in Zoom or live at Tieteiden talo, room 208. 

 

 

 

Previous Colloquium seasons

Spring 2023

 

Friday 3rd & 10th MARCH

Maailma huutaa – Maantiede vastaa

Kevään ensimmäiset Palmén-kollokviot rakentuvat tekeillä olevan maantieteellisen tietokirjan ympärille. Toimitettava teos, Maailma huutaa – Maantiede vastaa, kertoo lukijalleen, mitä maantiede on ja mitä maantieteilijät tänä päivänä tutkivat. Miten maantiede liittyy lukijan elämään tai globaaleihin kriiseihin? Mitä meillä on sanottavaa siihen, miltä maailma näyttää sadan vuoden kuluttua? Kirjaprojektissa on mukana reilut kaksikymmentä artikkelia, joissa pureudutaan maantieteellisestä näkökulmasta ajankohtaisiin ja yhteiskunnallista keskustelua herättäviin aiheisiin kuten kestävyys, kaupungistuminen, koulutus, ilmastonmuutos, sodat ja energiakysymykset. Kirja on suunnattu laajalle yleisölle, ja sillä pyritään innostamaan ympäristöasioista ja yhteiskunnallisista kysymyksistä kiinnostuneita lukijoita maantieteellisen ajattelun pariin. Siksi teos korostaa erilaisten ilmiöiden välisiä kytköksiä. Teoksen keskeinen tavoite on nostaa ja päivittää maantieteen profiilia yhteiskunnallisesti merkittävänä tieteenalana.

Tietokirjaa käsitellään kahtena Palmén kollokvion seminaaripäivänä Tieteiden talolla sekä Teamsissä. Huomaathan, että kyse on erityispitkistä kollokvioista – 12:00-14:30.

Tilaisuuksien alustava ohjelma ja aikataulu:

Perjantai 3.3.

 

Perjantai 10.3.

 

Esiintyjä(-t)

Aihe

Esiintyjä(-t)

Aihe

Joni Vainikka

Ajan maantiede

Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen

Energian maantiede ja väkivalta

Helena Tukiainen ym.

Geodiversiteetin jäljillä

Jemina Lehmuskoski ym.

Katoavat ikiroutasuot

Pia Bäcklund

Sama alue – kenen paikka?

Niko Humalisto

Ilmasto-oikeudenmukaisuus

Terhi Ala-Hulkko ym.

Ekosysteemipalvelut kartalla

Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto

Mun paikka – kokemustieto päätöksenteossa

Juho Luukkonen

Poliittinen vieraantuminen

Johanna Hohenthal ym.

Omavaraistumisen maantieteitä

Jani Vuolteenaho

Poliittinen talous ja maakysymys

Markus Hilander

Median visuaaliset järjestykset

Heidi Mod

Ekosysteemien kvantifiointi

Helka Kalliomäki ym.

Alueellinen resilienssi

Petteri Muukkonen ym.

Arjen geomedia

Noora Pyyry & Lauri Jäntti

Nuorten maantiede ja koulu

Ari Lehtinen

Kohtuuden maantiede

Eerika Virranmäki ym.

Maantieteen opetus ja tulevaisuustaidot

Tuomo Alhojärvi

Utopiat

Kirsi Pauliina Kallio ym.

Kestävä, älykäs ja myötätuntoinen kaupunki

Noora Pyyry

Eksymisen maantiede

Venla Bernelius

Näkymättömät naapurustot

Salla Jokela

Suhteiden kaupunkitila

Risto Kalliola

Aika ja mittakaava Amazoniassa

  

Janne Alahuhta ym.

Pinnanalainen maailma

 

Friday, 24rd MARCH (rescheduled)

The (changing) geography of innovation in times of the COVID-19 crisis

Innovation is the key to growth. Thus, the geographical distribution of innovative activities, including research and development (R&D), is a major factor explaining differences in regional development. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent public health restrictions led to a significant slump in economic activities around the globe. This slump has been met by various policy actions to cushion the detrimental socio-economic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis to eventually bring the economy back on track. The results of the Business Finland funded COSPIN project provide an ex-ante evaluation of the effectiveness of one such policy action in Finland, namely a massive increase in public R&D funding allocated though the novel R&D instrument for firms in disruptive circumstances granted in 2020 via Business Finland. The evaluation started by estimating the structural link between R&D funding and economic growth for Finnish NUTS-3 regions using pre-COVID-19 data. These estimates were used to forecast regional recovery growth out of sample and to quantify the growth contribution of R&D funding. Depending on the chosen scenario, the forecasts point to a mean recovery growth rate of GDP between 2–4% in 2021 after a decline of up to ‑2.5% in 2020. R&D funding constitutes a significant pillar in this recovery process with mean contributions in terms of GDP growth of between 0.4% and 1%. At the same time, by using firm- and municipal-level panel regression analyses, the COSPIN project identified key differences and temporal changes in R&D funding patterns across different region types. The empirical results show that firms located in urban regions have been generally more successful in applying for competitive public R&D funding than firms located in rural regions. However, rural firms have caught up to their urban counterparts during the COVID-19 pandemic. This narrowing of the rural–urban R&D funding gap 1) shows that easy and flexible access to R&D++ funding during the COVID-19 pandemic (in 2020) appears to be especially attractive for small rural enterprises, 2) points to the strategic flexibility of small rural enterprises in times of crisis, and 3) indicates that the innovation capacity of these firms/regions is more resilient to economic shocks than typically thought.

Teemu Makkonen, Professor of regional science and economic geography, University of Eastern Finland, teemu.makkonen(AT)uef.fi

 

Friday, 21st APRIL

Endings in refuge – time and temporality in refugee research.

One of the most urgent issues related to forced migration and refugeehood is how to end it. But does refugeehood ever end? If so, how, when, and where? With the up-coming Kone Foundation-funded Endings project (2023-2026 at the Migration Institute of Finland), we seek answers to these questions by combining research and arts through four case studies, on 1) the end of refugeehood as an experience, 2) the end of refuge as a legal status, 3) the end of reception centres, and 4) the end of life in refuge. The Endings project addresses both theoretical and empirical gaps connected with refugeehood, time, and endings. Through research and arts, this project explores possible closures, ends, finishes, cancellations, afterlives, ‘post-’s, ‘no more’s, or terminations – and the spaces related to them. To do so, Endings draws on critical research into spatio-temporal facets of forced migration, with emphasis on emotional, legal, and material aspects of the endings. In this talk, we will introduce the project, and discuss time and temporality in refugee research.

Room 207 at Tieteiden talo

Camilla Marucco, Doctoral Student, University of Turku, cammar(at)utu.fi

Eveliina Lyytinen, Senior Research Fellow, Migration Institute, eveliina.lyytinen(AT)migrationinstitute.fi

 

Friday, 12th MAY

Economic geography perspectives on internationalization, trade, and trade policy negotiations:

Asia, palm oil and multi-stakeholder bargaining

Instead of analyzing company strategies solely, economic geography research often casts attention to the interplay between the company and its surrounding environment. It also aims to understand international trade as a multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder phenomenon. The questions posed could concern, for example, the impact of trade policies on firms in a specific institutional environment, or the participation of companies in global production networks as a constituent to international trade. The relationship between firms and the state, as well as sustainable development issues and responsible business are more and more in the core of this research. An example are the trade policy negotiations between the EU and Asian countries, such as Indonesia, with which free trade talks became difficult due to the palm oil issue.

Palm oil is a commodity used in the production of food ingredients, non-food consumer products and biofuels. Most of the world’s palm oil is produced in Indonesia where oil palm cultivation gives a living to 16 million smallholders and workers. At the same time, oil palm monoculture farming results in deforestation, biodiversity loss, climate change, and social problems arising from violations of human rights and indigenous land rights – all of which the EU has strongly criticized. The Russian attack to Ukraine and the ensuing global food crisis have, however, turned the attention to global food security. The problem is multifaceted. In our Kone Foundation funded project “Good and bad palm oil: Food security, paradigm shift and bargaining among stakeholders in Indonesia and the EU” (2023-2027), we study the contested issue of palm oil production, policy, and ethics. We will explore the “good and bad” of palm oil in the arguments and negotiations of key stakeholders, and aim to 1) contextualize the paradigm shift in the palm oil narrative, 2) understand its impacts on the power relations and negotiations between the stakeholders, and 3) analyze the impacts on primary producers in Indonesia, and more broadly, on global food security.

Erja Kettunen-Matilainen, Senior Research Fellow in Economic Geography, University of Turku, erja.kettunen-matilainen(AT)utu.fi  

 

 

 

Autumn 2022 Schedule

 

Friday 16th SEPT

Traces of Linné: The genealogies of Finnish geographers

Every doctor has a supervisor or two and, usually, the acknowledgments of a dissertation mention these supervisors. Thus, it is possible to construct scientific family trees, or hierarchical networks, that on a whole start to reveal how a discipline is constructed and conditioned and how old and new ideas are circulated or brought into scientific practice. The Mathematics Genealogy Project has since the 1990s listed such relations of scholars hundreds of years back and has enabled scholars to distinguish “mathematical families”. This paper discusses a charting of Finnish geographers for the past 140 years. While the 19th-century geography in Finland was advanced by scholarly giants AE Nordenskiöld and Z Topelius, the inception of Finnish geography is within plant ecology. The institutional university geography grew from the analysis of the spread of flora and lichen, and plant ecology itself was a ‘leftover’ of fast-evolving medicine. Thus, the first academic seat holder in geography, Ragnar Hult, was supervised by ecologists supervised by physicians, whose ‘lineage’ goes back to natural philosopher Carl Linné. Going through over a hundred dissertations yields information on the origins, institutions, titles, and research areas reveal trends, protégées, successions, transitions, and new branches in Finnish geography and how international trends have contributed to new research ideas. There are elements of difference and repetition in the field, but more than Deleuzian analysis, understanding disciplinary histories allow the geographical community to reflect what geographers do and how they impact science.

Joni Vainikka, Post-doctoral researcher, University of Helsinki, President for the Geographical Society of Finland, joni.vainikka(AT)helsinki.fi

 

 

Friday 30th SEPT

Human geographical perspectives on knowledge creation and creativity in the era of AI

Knowledge and creativity are key concepts, and knowledge creation and creativity are key processes in human geographies, specifically in economic, creative and digital geographies. Current era is characterized by fast developing digitalization, robotization, and self-learning AI-technology. Humans across public and private sectors increasingly create knowledge and are creative with AI. Introducing a non-human learning actor alongside the human actor into these processes challenges the existing human-centered understandings of knowledge and creativity, and transforms the processes of knowledge creation and creativity. More-than-human approach is needed to understand such a change. Despite increasing literature on robots and AIs in human geography, empirical research remains thin – particularly in the context of everyday spatial creativity and knowledge creation processes with robots and AIs. In the presentation, I ask: (i) whether knowledge and creativity need redefinition in the era of AI, and (ii) how humans create knowledge and are creative with AIs and robots? I present spatial process perspective to empirical study of creativity and knowledge creation. I present results of our projects Co-Creativity in the Era of AI of Finland-based artists and scientists who create with AI (Kone Foundation 2020-23), and Second Machine Age Knowledge Co-Creation Processes in Space and Time (Academy of Finland 2018-23) of university students, researchers, and experts in business companies who work with AI and robots in Finland and Singapore. Materials include nearly 100 interviews, video demonstrations of work, diaries of creative moments, and mobility-mapping of spatial creativity processes.

Johanna Hautala, Associate Professor of Regional Development and Innovation Policy, University of Vaasa, johanna.hautala(AT)uwasa.fi

 

Friday, 14th OCT

Exploring the geographies of interest in sustainability topics using digital data

Ensuring the success of global sustainability efforts requires broad societal engagement and a suitable framework for monitoring relevant progress towards the targets defined in the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Yet, our capacity to track progress in space and time is hampered by difficulties related to data availability, accuracy, and timeliness. In this context, the use of digital data is an emerging prospect to help overcome these limitations. Specifically, the availability of temporal and spatial information in data mined from social media, search engines and other digital platforms provides opportunities to assess the spatial and temporal dynamics of how people engage with sustainability topics. Using examples from recent research, I will aim to highlight the some of the prospects of using of digital data to track interest in a broad range of sustainability-related topics across time and space. I will also outline some of the challenges associated with using digital data in this context, including issues of interdisciplinarity, ethics, data biases and validation, and discuss potential research avenues that can help in addressing these challenges.

Ricardo Correia, Academy Research Fellow, University of Helsinki, ricardo.correia(AT)helsinki.fi 

 

Thursday – Friday 3rd-4th NOV

GEOGRAPHY DAYS, University of Tampere

 

Friday, 18th NOV

Sensing place-based landscape values for more inclusive, resilient and sustainable urban development

How to direct urban development towards a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable direction? Among others, geographers strive to respond to this question. Systems thinking can help to understand interactions and dependencies between people, the urban landscape and technology, which together drive, for examples dynamics in our cities. Recent years have seen a massive development of sensing systems allowing capturing and monitoring human presence, action and even intention both passively and actively. In particular, real-time passive sensing seeks to explain society through big data and computational capacity. However, to balance this, we also need data carefully and deliberately collected by and with the people. Participatory mapping approaches, the voluntary contributions of people to create spatially explicit data that communicate their knowledge, experience, and aspirations, aims to support consultation, engagement and empowerment of diverse stakeholders in urban and land use planning. In this presentation, I focus on place-based landscape values that emerge in human-landscape interaction. I will share examples on how participatory mapping of landscape values reveals the contributions of urban nature to subjective well-being. Furthermore, I will highlight how virtual landscapes act as platforms for provoking place-based values. In conclusions, I discuss messages for green infrastructure planning that supports urban resilience and human well-being.

Nora Fagerholm, Associate Professor of Human-Nature Interactions and Sustainability, University of Turku, nora.fagerholm(AT)utu.fi

 

Friday, 15th DEC

The (changing) geography of innovation in times of the COVID-19 crisis

Innovation is the key to growth. Thus, the geographical distribution of innovative activities, including research and development (R&D), is a major factor explaining differences in regional development. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent public health restrictions led to a significant slump in economic activities around the globe. This slump has been met by various policy actions to cushion the detrimental socio-economic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis to eventually bring the economy back on track. The results of the Business Finland funded COSPIN project provide an ex-ante evaluation of the effectiveness of one such policy action in Finland, namely a massive increase in public R&D funding allocated though the novel R&D instrument for firms in disruptive circumstances granted in 2020 via Business Finland. The evaluation started by estimating the structural link between R&D funding and economic growth for Finnish NUTS-3 regions using pre-COVID-19 data. These estimates were used to forecast regional recovery growth out of sample and to quantify the growth contribution of R&D funding. Depending on the chosen scenario, the forecasts point to a mean recovery growth rate of GDP between 2–4% in 2021 after a decline of up to ‑2.5% in 2020. R&D funding constitutes a significant pillar in this recovery process with mean contributions in terms of GDP growth of between 0.4% and 1%. At the same time, by using firm- and municipal-level panel regression analyses, the COSPIN project identified key differences and temporal changes in R&D funding patterns across different region types. The empirical results show that firms located in urban regions have been generally more successful in applying for competitive public R&D funding than firms located in rural regions. However, rural firms have caught up to their urban counterparts during the COVID-19 pandemic. This narrowing of the rural–urban R&D funding gap 1) shows that easy and flexible access to R&D++ funding during the COVID-19 pandemic (in 2020) appears to be especially attractive for small rural enterprises, 2) points to the strategic flexibility of small rural enterprises in times of crisis, and 3) indicates that the innovation capacity of these firms/regions is more resilient to economic shocks than typically thought.

Teemu Makkonen, Professor of regional science and economic geography, University of Eastern Finland, teemu.makkonen(AT)uef.fi

 

Friday, 20th JAN

Adaptation and migration in times of environmental change: Evidence from Bangladesh

The low-lying coastal areas of Bangladesh suffer from different types of slow-onset environmental change, of which drinking water contamination, biodiversity loss and land degradation due to soil salinization are the most acute. Further, Bangladesh is among the ten most climate-affected countries in the world, and climate change propels other environmental changes through sea-level rise and changing weather patterns, the first effects being already felt in the country. Based on a household survey among 400 households living in two exposed coastal areas of Bangladesh, this presentation explores the surveyed households’ perceptions of environmental changes, in what ways they have adapted to changing conditions, and how they plan to do so in the future. Using multivariate analysis, it will show which household factors impact the adaptation decisions and how recent shocks impact these decisions. Among other things, our data shows that over 2/3 of households have taken measures in the past to mitigate the effects of environmental change and that 80% plan to take future measures. Interestingly, and despite very pessimistic expectations about how environmental change will impact their income and welfare, only very few expect to migrate permanently in the future. 

Helena Tukiainen, Postdoctoral researcher, University of Oulu, helena.tukiainen(AT)oulu.fi

This work is conducted by Helena Tukiainen, Päivi Lujala and Carolyn Cole, and it is part of a project “Effects of environmental change on adaptation and mobility dynamics” at the Geography Research Unit, University of Oulu.