About me
In my PhD research (to be completed in 2025), I analyse how cities know how to govern climate change. I look for sociologically informed ways to understand how the governance of a complex and irresoluble problems such as climate change and the critically uncertain futures it brings takes shape in the practices of trying to know what the problem to be acted upon actually is. With the Research Council of Finland -funded projects WISE and LONGRISK, I have designed and carried out policymaking exercises for city politicians and experts to rehearse considering the long-term repercussions of climate heating and to match them with equally long-term policies and with foresight for their uncertain consequences. My analytical outlooks and approaches are informed by science and technology studies, social and political theories of temporality, social practice theories, scholarship on preparedness, futuring and ‘wicked problems’, as well as sociologies of risk and modernity. My upcoming postdoctoral project will expand the scope of climate governance and preparedness to insurance and carbon offsetting in an effort to abstract from all of them a common logic of ‘as if’ and find sociological conceptual tools to understand how the fictional or imaginary is made into actionable realities, all the while acknowledging they are only as if-real.
Selected publications
Reinekoski, T., Lahikainen, L., Virtanen, M. J., Sorsa, T., & Lehtonen, T.-K. (2023). Frictional rhythms of climate work in city governance. The Sociological Review, 71(3), 660–678.
https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261221123186
Virtanen, M. J., Reinekoski, T., Lahikainen, L., & Lehtonen, T.-K. (2022). Travels and Trials of Climate Knowledge in Finnish Municipalities. Science & Technology Studies, 35(1), 2–20. https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.97519
https://sciencetechnologystudies.journal.fi/article/view/97519
Ahvenainen, M., Janasik, N., Reinekoski, T., & Lehikoinen, A. (2021). Tulevaisuusresilienssi ja strateginen ennakointi: kriisinkestävyyden harjoittelua bayeslaisella kausaalimallinnuksella. Futura, (4/2021).