WHO ARE WE?
The Art-Eco research group consists of artists, philosophers and educators as well as a multidisciplinary group of dance animateurs as fellow researchers, consisting of professionals in different areas.
Raisa Foster, Ph.D. – Project Leader
Dr. Raisa Foster (b. 1976) is an independent researcher/artist/educator. She completed her Ph.D. in 2012 at the University of Tampere, Finland. She graduated as a dance animateur in 2006 from the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Foster has created her own artistic/pedagogical method Tanssi-innostaminen®, a pedagogical method The Pedagogy of Recognition as well as an art-based research method Eragraphy.
Foster is currently interested in combining different artistic and more traditional qualitative research methods in her practice as an artist/researcher/educator and establishing her unique approach to performance art.
How can the holistic awareness of empathetic-ecological humanity be supported?
Jussi, Mäkelä, MA (fine arts and education)
Jussi Mäkelä (b. 1973) is a researcher, an artist and a teacher. His master’s thesis in education (University of Tampere 2002) was about Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy. After graduating as a teacher Mäkelä started to focus more on art and art education, ending up doing an art-based hermeneutical research as a master’s thesis in art education (Aalto University 2010). Mäkelä is interested in art-based phenomenological research as a method of understanding the complex relationship between an individual and the surrounding world. In his PhD project Mäkelä is scrutinizing Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture through the perspectives of space, sculpture and freedom, thus pondering the human-world relationship. The main questions in his research deal with the fundamental responsibility of a free creative human being. Mäkelä’s art-based œuvre is built on various artistic techniques including sculptures, installations, paintings and small conceptual compositions.
Specialists in eco-justice and eco-citizenship
Rebecca Martusewicz, Ed.D.
Professor, Eastern Michigan UniversityProfessor Rebecca Martusewicz (Ed.D.) have been actively engaged in learning with Detroit and other grassroots activists for over ten years in projects to revitalize the Detroit commons. She developed and direct a concentration in EcoJustice Education for the Masters Degree program in Social Foundations of Education. She teaches courses on ecojustice, teaching for social and ecological justice, ecofeminism, gender and education, and sociology of education. She has been the editor in chief of Educational Studies: The Journal of The American Educational Studies Association for 15 years. She also helped to found and directed the Southeast Michigan Stewardship (SEMIS) Coalition, a group of teachers, community activists, and teacher educators dedicated to developing citizen stewards of the Great Lakes. Her current research interests include the cultural foundations of the ecological crisis, as well as the theoretical foundations of ecojustice pedagogy and community education.
Veli-Matti Värri, Ph.D.
Professor, School of Education, University of Tampere, FinlandProfessor Veli-Matti Värri (Ph.D.) is a philosopher whose expertise consists of the central issues of educational philosophy and theory, teacher education, ethics of education and philosophy of dialogue. The most of Värri’s publications deals with the basic questions of educational ethics and the critique on instrumental rationality in education. His monograph Hyvä kasvatus – kasvatus hyvään, 1997 (Good Education – Education for Good ) has reached its fifth edition in 2004. In his current project Värri´s main interest is to re-conceptualize the ontological, socio-cultural and ethical reference points for constituting moral identity in the ecological sphere of late-modern education. Maurice Merleau-Ponty´s late philosophy (The Visible and Invisible) and Jacques Lacan’s psycho-dynamic theory of subjectivity will be utilized as the main sources in Värri’s research project.