HOMINGS is a transdisciplinary project, commencing from the proposition that sustainability transitions are not driven by humans alone, but by humans in alliance with more-than-human beings. Aiming to create new knowledge of how sustainability transitions are rooted in everyday life storylines, HOMINGS collaborates with citizens, exploring sites of perceived human mastery par excellence: human homes. Homes are studied as productive sites of everyday life negotiations between humans and more-than-human beings, bringing forth possible new accountabilities – forms of compassionate action generated in co-habitation. Through exploring the past, present and future storylines of more than just human homes, HOMINGS aspires to contribute to a culture of societal conversation and scholarly practice where everyday life sustainability transitions are understood as co-created with other species and are culturally, rather than only individually enacted.

MUST is a research project funded by the Finnish Strategic Research Council. Our vision is to enable multispecies transitions in which humans and other species can adapt to a new way of life that supports their mutual well-being, without high levels of suffering or inequality between different groups of people, other species or populations. Work package Unlearning with other species is led by Animate. Previous learning frameworks highlighting the interests of other species have focused on theory-building. We now crucially need experiential ways for unlearning human mastery over nature. During MUST we will create multispecies pedagogies to move away from previous patterns of thinking and to better recognize the agencies, representation and interests of other species especially in urban planning.

Fellow Feelings explores the cognitive-affective dimensions of biodiversity through a citizen science project with young people. The project is a response to a need to understand biodiversity not only factually and cognitively but also to produce information of how feelings of affection emerge and can be supported. Combining ecological inquiry with education and biological art, the project will combat biodiversity loss by exploring how someone becomes a ‘fellow’ who we recognize as in need of protection. The flagship species of the project are insects. Fellow Feelings proceeds in two empirical stages. First, young people work with ecologists aiming at discovering an entirely new insect species through methods of DNA barcoding and genomics. Second, they collaborate with an artist to combine knowledge from the first stage with creative exercises in interspecies attachment. This project is based on two paradigmatic shifts: DNA barcoding in taxonomy and multispecies thinking in education. The long-term impact locates in progressing environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive education. The project is conducted at the Faculties of Education and Science.

The CitiRats project combined education, social sciences and natural sciences. With around 100 secondary school-age young people, we explored how it is possible to perceive our local environments in a way that allows us to understand the other species that share our everyday space as if citizens with their own goals and lives of intrinsic value. Researchers, young people and experts went through three phases of research. In the first phase, the young people took part in an ecological citizen science project to determine the size of the rat population in the area. In the second phase, they undertook ethnographic walks in their local environment to observe interspecies equity issues. In the third phase, author Johanna Sinisalo guided the young people in imagining alternative futures through speculative fiction. The multidisciplinary and speculative approach helped participants to engage with the diversity of their local environment in a critical, curious and multi-perspective way.

The objective of this project is to produce knowledge of the ways in which child–animal relations are significant in order to accommodate their existence in a rapidly urbanising world. In studies that map important individuals in children’s everyday lives, children themselves repeatedly include animals. Systematic in-depth studies on how significant child–animal relations form and evolve on children’s own terms thus contributing to their experienced wellbeing, are still missing however. At the same time there is a growing concern in urbanising societies of the diminishing of direct, spontaneous contact between children and animals. If societies respond to this challenge by fostering child–animal relations animals and children can form strong bonds, meaningful ‘networks of learners’ and ‘communities of knowers’. Such communities exemplify ’common worlds’ in which the human actors are intensely aware of their interconnectedness with the environment. Fostering such worlds will not be possible, however, before we know how significant child–animal relations form and are sustained by children and the animals as part of their everyday lives.

Young people in Finland, as well as elsewhere in Europe, generally view their future with optimism. However, they feel they have little influence over major environmental changes. When public attention is focused on individual activists or large-scale events, it can seem as though changing the world requires one to be exceptionally brave, knowledgeable, and skilled. ELOTILA is a development project where researchers from various fields, artists, and students come together to share what matters to them about nature and living beings. The project creates space and methods for enabling change collectively and as part of everyday shifts in thinking. The project will be implemented in two schools in the Helsinki metropolitan area during the 2025–2026 school year. The developed model will be further advanced by partner organizations: Luontoliitto (The Finnish Nature League), the Children and Youth Foundation, the Young Academy Finland, and the Finnish Environmental Education Institute SYKLI.

MuSes considers sound as a modality of being and knowing in the world and thus as a powerful route for exploring and transforming our relationships with human and non-human others amid the current crises. Combining multispecies ethnography with sonic methodologies and philosophy for children, MuSes develops arts of attentiveness towards multispecies communities as resilient and critical survival skills towards sustainable co-living. The project unfolds in three progressive stages in two schools with 50 children – LISTENING, QUESTIONING, and REMIXING – producing a range of fieldnotes, audio and visual materials. The combined effect of MuSes advances understanding of our multispecies communities in their complexity, critical examination of the political and environmental consequences of our ways of listening and hearing, and possibilities for creative responses. Through this it contributes to conceptual and practical developments of non-anthropocentric education.