Rate My Professor Riikka Hohti

Riikka Hohti is Associate Professor of Sustainable Futures in Education and Ethics in the Department of Education at the University of Helsinki, holding a second term appointment, with additional roles in Practical Theology and as Docent at the University of Tampere since September 2021. She is affiliated with the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science. Hohti earned her Ph.D. from the University of Helsinki in 2016 with the dissertation "Classroom matters: Research with children as entanglement," which examined research with children through entanglement. Previously, she obtained a Master's degree in music as a classically trained violinist, transitioned to education, worked as a class teacher, and began her academic career as a Ph.D. researcher in 2011. She has held postdoctoral positions, including at the University of Oulu and the University of Helsinki, and serves as a Finnish Academy Research Fellow.

Hohti's research centers on childhood studies, multispecies research, sustainability science, and education from a more-than-human perspective, addressing child-animal relations, materiality, temporality, atmospheres, museum pedagogy, feminist care ethics, and education in the Anthropocene. She leads the "Children of the Anthropocene – Atmospheres" project funded by the Kone Foundation (2022-2026) and the Academy of Finland project "Figurations of the child and more than human politics of childhood for the post-Anthropocene: The fossil, the microbe, the weather" (2024-2027) as Principal Investigator. Her key publications include "‘Do the next thing’: an interview with Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre on post-qualitative methodology" (2015), "Lollipop stories: Listening to children’s voices in the classroom and narrative ethnographical research" (2014), "The greenhouse effect: Multispecies childhood and non-innocent relations of care" (2019), "Children writing ethnography: children's perspectives and nomadic thinking in researching school classrooms" (2016), "‘For whom? By whom?’: Critical perspectives of participation in ecological citizen science" (2022), and "Composting storytelling: An approach for critical (multispecies) ethnography" (2024). She has received the World Cultural Council Special Recognition Award (2023), Vuoden museopedagoginen teko (2021), Vuoden paras artikkeli (2018, shared), and Väitöskirjapalkinto (2017). Hohti has edited research journals and special theme issues and served on the scientific committee for the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (2024).