From bridging communities as a guest researcher to exploring and redefining energy citizenship

Introducing Senja Laakso’s Research on Sustainable Practices and Energy Transitions.

By Katharina Reindl.

In January and February 2024, Senja Laakso from the Centre for Consumer Society Research, University of Helsinki, and Tampere University visited us at the IIIEE for six weeks. This is the first post of a two-part series presenting Senja and the interesting work she is doing in the realm of social practices, sustainability, and the transition of our energy systems. We hope to collaborate with you in the future, Senja!

I will start by reflecting briefly on what a research exchange means, being a host as well as a guest researcher and then I present Senja’s research interests and projects she has been working on.

Photo by Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash

Reflections on research exchange

Being a guest researcher and hosting guest researchers is very important and fruitful in academia, as it can contribute to academic growth and innovation as well as create a dynamic environment where knowledge, skills, and cultures come together.

For a host institution, welcoming a guest researcher can help to introduce fresh perspectives and enrich academic dialogue.

I was a guest researcher two times during my PhD, and I can say that it was an important experience for me and contributed to my academic journey. I could broaden my professional network as well as learn from different academic cultures and specific colleagues I met at my exchange. This helped greatly me to further develop my PhD thesis.

So, I think, both, being a guest researcher or hosting a researcher, is a valuable experience for everyone! Doing a research exchange can be like opening the door to, for instance, new theories and methods, initiating discussions and potential collaborations, and building bridges between academic communities, which can help build long research collaborations, nationally or internationally. To summarise, it is a win-win for everyone!

Introducing Senja Laakso

Similar to us here from the IIIEE energy blog, Senja’s research focuses on energy, everyday life, and sustainable well-being. Regarding energy, she studies energy use in homes, energy action in housing cooperatives, and urban energy transitions. Senja’s research also focuses on everyday life, where she looks at sustainable consumption in areas such as heating, laundry, and food. When it comes to sustainable well-being, she looks at the concept of sufficiency, which includes transitions and inclusion. The theories Senja commonly uses in her research are practice theory and transition theory. The methods she applies include the co-creation of knowledge, experiments, interventions, and interviews.

While Senja visited us, she presented some very interesting completed and ongoing projects that are worth looking at, you can find the links below.

Completed projects

EE-TRANS (Eating and Energy Use Reconfigured? Disruptions and Novel Transition Pathways in Food and Energy Systems, 2018–22)

ENERGISE (European Network for Research, Good Practice and Innovation for Sustainable Energy, 2016–19)

Ongoing projects

ENUSE (Enoughness in energy use: Sustainable and sufficient energy consumption in Finland, 2021–24)

ENCIT (Citizens, everyday life and tensions in the energy transition, 2020–24)

Stay tuned, the second part will be about one of Senja’s latest articles.