Uniarts Helsinki Research Newsletter

This newsletter brings you news, upcoming research events, calls and recent publications from the University of the Arts Helsinki. Image in December 2024 Newsletter: Data Ocean Theatre (Tragedy & the Goddexxes, VI. Exodos) by Vincent Roumagnac, 2023. Research Pavilion #5. Photo: Roosa Oksanharju.



New projects

ExoSound explores electronic music as environmental sonic art

The Research Council of Finland-funded ExoSound: artistic, technological and social prospects for environmental sonic arts research project started at the Uniarts Helsinki Research Institute in September and runs until August 2028. The research project investigates and develops artistic, technological and social prospects for participatory electronic sound arts that take place outdoors. The principal investigator of the project is Otso Aavanranta and the researchers are Oleksandra Nenko, Alejandro Montes de Oca, and Dominik Schlienger.

Read more about the project

Work on national Child Strategy measures continues
As part of the Uniarts Helsinki Research Institute´s cERAda Network, the Observatory for Arts and Cultural Education, Finland has launched a new project on national Child Strategy measures in September 2024. The project is a collaboration between the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Observatory for Arts and Cultural Education, Finland, and the Cupore Center for Cultural Policy Research. The aim is to gather the latest research data on factors that influence the wellbeing of children and young people for the use of leisure-time activity instructors to support their work and to reinforce their knowledge base. The project will result in a guide that will be written in non-specialist language and aimed at all hobby instructors regardless of their discipline and field. The project implements the measures included in the implementation plan for the national Child Strategy, and the guide will be edited by senior researcher Anna Kanerva from Cupore. The project, funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture, will run until May 2025.

Read more about the Observatory for Arts and Cultural Education, Finland

Music, Memory and European Values fosters common values
The Music, Memory and European Values project has received funding from the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Programme of the European Commission. The coordinator of the project is Forum Voix Etouffees. Professor Anne Kauppala is the responsible leader of the project at the Uniarts Helsinki Research Institute. The project is a series of European events aimed at reminding the public of the consequences of totalitarianism as the cause of armed conflicts and genocides such as the Holocaust. The project shares with the public the idea that peace on the continent cannot be based solely on markets but also needs strong common values, freedom and unity, and the fight against racism and anti-Semitism.

The project is a follow-up to the EU-funded project Music, War and Peace in Europe 1922–2022, which finished in 2024.

Outputs and activities

Embodied Language Learning through the Arts project news
As the Embodied Language Learning through the Arts (ELLA) research project (2021-2024), funded mainly by the KONE Foundation, is coming to an end, a closing event was arranged on October 23 at the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki. With about 100 participants, a full day of both academic and practical presentations, and the launch of a booklet highlighting insights, findings, and policy recommendations of the project, the event demonstrated how art, embodiment, and language are intertwined and can be further connected in multiple ways. Moreover, ELLA researcher Kaisa Korpinen's doctoral dissertation Dancing Language Education was publicly examined on December 5 at the University of Turku. Finally, a special issue of Apples - Journal of Applied Language Studies, with six ELLA articles and two external articles, has just been published.

Find ELLA publications

Rethinking Music Performance in Higher Education ends with multiple outputs
Sibelius Academy researchers Prof. Heidi Westerlund, Prof. Mieko Kanno, and Assoc. Prof. Guadalupe López-Íñiguez participated in the Rethinking Music Performance in Higher Education project (REACT, 2020–2024) with European partners from Norway, Sweden, Portugal, and Cyprus. REACT was a Strategic Partnership funded by ERASMUS+ that advocated the necessity of rethinking how changes in professional and societal landscapes should inform higher music education and doctoral studies in music.
In several publications, Westerlund, Kanno, and López-Íñiguez discussed future directions for professional education and musicians’ employment in a changing world, with a rare focus on contemporary composers’ education and professionalism. The researchers also explored the justification for doctoral degrees arguing that doctoral degrees should not be confused simply with students’ interests in personal development.

Find the REACT research publications, toolkit and report on the project website

Neurodiversity in the Arts Symposium gathered participants from 19 countries
The Neurodiversity in the Arts Symposium was held on 15 November online and 22 November 2024 onsite at the University of the Arts Helsinki. The event brought together 130 registered participants in total: teachers, researchers, students, activists, and practitioners across the arts, whose work and/or lived experiences engage with concepts of neurodiversity and neurodivergence in relation to fields in the arts and arts education. The symposium was organized by Timothy Smith, University Researcher at the Uniarts Helsinki Research Institute. It was hosted by the Research Institute and funded the university and the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. The keynote lecture was held by Kai Syng Tan, Associate Professor in Arts and Cultural Leadership at the University of Southampton, UK. Kai has posted an article on the blog of the Society of Research into Higher Education (SRHE), which summarizes and evaluates the experience at the symposium: "What’s love got to do with neurodiversity and HE art and design"

Watch the keynote recordings from the Musica Mercata 2024 symposium
The music history symposium Musica Mercata: Finance, Commodity and the Music Industry from Antiquity to the Present was organised in Helsinki on 5–7 June 2024 by the Uniarts Helsinki Sibelius Academy and Research Institute´s History Forum Network. The symposium featured keynotes by Kyle S. Barnett and Gundula Kreuzer. Subtitled recordings of the keynote speeches are now available.

Read more about the speakers and watch the keynotes. The 8th Sibelius Academy Symposium on Music History is being planned for 2027.

The title of docent appointments at the University of the Arts Helsinki
The Rector of University of the Arts Helsinki has awarded in 2024 the title of docent to Alex Arteaga (docent in Artistic Research at the Research Institute), Juhani Koivisto (docent in Scientific Research at the Sibelius Academy), Ulla Pohjannoro (docent in Musicology at the Sibelius Academy) and Leena Unkari-Virtanen (docent in Music History Pedagogy at the Sibelius Academy).



Upcoming events

Check the details for these and other events in the Uniarts Helsinki event calendar. See also all our doctoral examinations on their own page.

Writing as Artistic Research seminar
31 January 2025, 17:00–19:00
Space for Science and Hope, Puistokatu 4, Helsinki
Register by 23 January 2025

The Writing as Artistic Research seminar explores the ways in which writer-centered literary artistic research works and what it could offer to other fields of artistic research as well as to the humanities and literature studies. Depending on the definition, literary artistic research can be seen as a young field of study, or as a field of study that has been accumulating for ages (essayistics, poetology and the traditions and methods of experimental writing). The event will be arranged by the Research Institute's Network for Artistic Research and celebrates the launch of the issue of niin & näin magazine on Writing as Artistic Research (4/2024).
Read more about the Writing as Artistic Research seminar

Save the dates: Thematic morning seminars at Uniarts Helsinki
14 February 2025, 9:00–12:00: theme to be confirmed
Auditorium 2, Haapaniemenkatu 6, Helsinki & online

21 March 2025, 10:00–12:00: Genret, identiteetit ja musiikin poliittisuus
Chamber music hall, Pohjoinen Rautatiekatu 9, Helsinki & online

See the event calendar for details of the thematic seminars in the new year.

Book launch: two new volumes on music education
14 February 2025, 13:00–15:00
Agora, Helsinki Music Centre, Töölönlahdenkatu 16, Helsinki
Register by 6 February 2025

The Research Institute's cERAda Network will organise a publication event of two new international edited volumes on the changing professional field of music education:

• The Transformative Politics of Music Education, edited by Tuulikki Laes, Gert Biesta & Heidi Westerlund (Routledge, 2025)

• Music education, ecopolitical professionalism and public pedagogy: Towards systems transformation, authors
Margaret Barrett & Heidi Westerlund (Springer, 2024)

The speakers are Professor Margaret Barrett (Monash University, Australia), Professor Gert Biesta (University of Edinburgh, UK) (online on Zoom), Dr Tuulikki Laes (Uniarts Helsinki) and Professor Heidi Westerlund, Uniarts Helsinki.

SibA Research Days 2025 – Ethics in Research and Artistic Practice
24–25 March 2025
Black Box, Helsinki Music Centre, Töölönlahdenkatu 16, Helsinki

The theme of the 2025 edition of the Sibelius Academy's SibA Research Days is ethics, conceived as broadly as possible – as something that we unavoidably encounter both in our work as artists and scholars, and as something that surrounds us embedded in the conventions, institutions and practices of art and scholarship. In research, there is no escape from ethics. The choice of theoretical standpoints and research methods is always informed by ethical guidelines and imperatives. Research always builds on earlier work, and thus acknowledging previous work of our colleagues is ultimately an ethical duty. Similarly, artistic practice always has ethical dimensions, represented, for instance, by the obligations and responsibilities that the artist is seen to have towards the audience, composer, collaborators, historical context – or his or her artistic self. The final program will be announced in February.

Read more about SibA Research Days 2025

CARPA9: Ecological Design and Performance Pedagogies: Sustainable Practices and Interdisciplinary Acts in a Climate Changed World
28–30 August 2025
Theatre Academy, Haapaniemenkatu 6, Helsinki

The next CARPA conference explores pedagogical approaches to, in, and for performance making in a climate changed world. The ninth Colloquium on Artistic Research in the Performing will be arranged by the Performing Arts Research Centre, together with the master’s programmes in Scenography, Lighting design, Sound design, Theatre pedagogy and Dance pedagogy of the University of the Arts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy, and the Performance + Ecology Research Lab (P+ERL) of the Creative Arts Research Institute (CARI) of Griffith University, Australia. General registration will open on 2 June 2025.

Read more about CARPA9

Calls

Call for Proposals: The 6th Doctors in Performance Festival Conference
Deadline for proposals: 28 February 2025
The University of the Arts Helsinki invites music performers and researchers to take part in Doctors in Performance (DIP2025), the sixth festival conference of music performance and artistic research. DIP2025 is organized by the following units of the University of the Arts Helsinki: Sibelius Academy's doctoral schools DocMus (Department of Classical Music) and MuTri (Department of Music Education, Jazz and Folk Music), the Research Institute's History Forum Network, and the Open Campus.

Read more about DIP2025

Trio journal seeks articles for its June issue
Deadline for peer-reviewed manuscripts: 28 February 2025
Other articles for the June issue can be submitted until the beginning of May.
Trio is a scholarly open access journal devoted to the wide spectrum of music studies and artistic research in music. It covers all genres of music and publishes peer-reviewed articles, lectiones praecursoriae, reviews, essays, book reviews, and reports in Finnish, Swedish and English.

Read the instructions for authors and the current issue of Trio

 

Recent publications

Find researchers and their publications in the Uniarts Helsinki research portal
Keep up to date with research and artistic activities in Uniarts Helsinki via the University of the Arts Helsinki Research portal. In UniartsCRIS you will find information about publications, artistic and research activities of our staff and doctoral students.

Go to UniartsCRIS

New issue of The Finnish Journal of Music Education published
A new issue of The Finnish Journal of Music Education, currently available to subscribers, has been published (02/2024, vol. 27). The journal serves both domestic and international readers and authors, publishing articles in Finnish, Swedish and English. The Finnish language is highlighted in the current issue, which suggests that publishing in Finnish is also considered important by researchers in the field. The issue, edited by Marja Heimonen and Taru Koivisto, includes an article on the history of music education of the deaf, with a summary also published in sign language. The journal is published by the Sibelius Academy of the Uniarts Helsinki, in collaboration with the Finnish Society for Research in Arts Education. This issue marks the end of the era of Heidi Westerlund and Marja Heimonen in the journal. From November 2024, the journal moved to the journal.fi publication platform and Tuulikki Laes and Taru Koivisto will take over as new editors-in-chief.

Go to The Finnish Journal of Music Education

See also the call for papers for a special issue “Music Education Technology for the Future World”. Deadline for full-text submissions: 15 February 2025.

Read the full call and instructions for submissions

RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research issue 21 has been published
The issue is titled “Performing Artistic Research in Music – Performing Music in Artistic research”.

Read RUUKKU 21

Read Open Access materials in the Taju repository
Taju is the institutional repository of the University of the Arts Helsinki. Publications and materials produced at the university, such as theses, artistic research, self-archived copies of research articles, publication series and educational materials, and also digitized sheet music, sound recordings and concert recordings, are stored in the archive. Some materials are Open Access while some can only be accessed on-site on library's Taju workstations.

Go to Taju

A selection of recent Open Access publications in Taju:

Kauppila, Heli (Ed.); Rouhiainen, Leena (Ed.)
Taidealojen yliopistopedagoginen koulutus 10-vuotta: näkökulmia taide- ja taiteilijapedagogiikkaan = 10-years of university pedagogy in the arts: perspectives on arts and artist pedagogy
https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-353-085-0

Arlander, Annette
How to do things with artistic research: Animal Years revisited
Acta Scenica 65
https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-353-081-2

Koivisto, Juhani
Sylkytys sydänalassa: sanan, sävelen ja elämän kohtaaminen Toivo Kuulan lauluissa
[The meeting of lyrics, music and life in Toivo Kuula’s songs]
Sibelius-Akatemian julkaisuja 30
https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-329-365-6

Guerra, Luis
On gestural apparatuses for a memory to come
Art theorethical writings from the Academy of Fine Arts 18
https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-353-465-0