A research project addressing sensory environmental relationships led by Professor of Cultural Studies Helmi Järviluoma has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant of 1.9 million euros. The ERC Advanced Grant is highly competitive, and in Finland, a similar funding in the field of the humanities has been awarded only once before, eight years ago. This year, ERC funding in the field of the humanities was awarded to two Finnish researchers, one at the University of Eastern Finland and the other at the University of Helsinki.
The five-year Sensory Transformations and Transgenerational Environmental Relationships in Europe, 1950–2020 (SENSOTRA) project led by Järviluoma produces new understandings of changes in people’s sensory environmental relationships in Europe between 1950 and 2020. The project is interdisciplinary, focusing on transgenerational sensory environmental relationships through, for example, sensobiographies.
“The research is urgent, because at present we are still able to ethnographically study people who were born in the 1930s and 1940s, i.e. people who lived their early years before the era of computers and other digital technologies. On the other hand, the project also focuses on generations born straight into the digital world, where there are new kinds of challenges to maintain a many-faceted relationship with their environments,” Järviluoma says.
The project also involves collaboration with artists representing a variety of different fields. The field’s most extensive empirical study so far will be carried out in three medium-sized European cities: Brighton (UK), Ljubljana (Slovenia), and Turku (Finland).
Helmi Järviluoma is an ethnomusicologist. She has been Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Eastern Finland since 2005. Over the past two decades, Järviluoma has been the leader of several highly successful international research groups addressing changes in European soundscapes. Järviluoma is one of the key professors of the Borders, Mobilities and Cultural Encounters research area of the University of Eastern Finland, and she leads the Doctoral Programme in Social and Cultural Encounters.
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