The Society’s annual thesis competition, rewarding outstanding master’s-level work in the field of environmental social science, was celebrated in November at the YHYS Fall Colloquium dinner in Oulu’s Teodorin Puisto. The competition is named after the society’s long-term chair and prominent figure in the field, Professor Emeritus Yrjö Haila. Competition entries are assessed by an annually changing jury, which consisted this year of doctoral candidate Krista Willman from the University of Tampere, Academy Research Fellow Galina Kallio and Adjunct Professor Eeva Berglund from Aalto University.
Out of 14 impressive submissions the jury elected, exceptionally, to award a joint first prize, to Anna Lehtonen (Helsinki) and Sampo Taipale (Oulu).
Sampo Taipale’s thesis, Yksityiset ja yhteiset metsät: Suomalaisten käsityksiä metsästä ja sen omistamisesta Suhteeni metsään -muistitietokeruussa 2020 was written for the University of Oulu’s department of history, and Anna Lehtonen’s thesis, Understanding pluvial flood risk through a social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) approach: The case of the city of Helsinki, for the University of Helsinki’s Environmental Change and Global Sustainability degree programme.
Taipale’s work is situated in history of ideas and takes an approach familiar from research on human-forest relationships. He burrows deep into the role of forests in Finland through an analysis of written materials deposited with the Finnish Literature Society. The jury was impressed by how he avoided highlighting polarisation and so generated a fresh look at a topic featuring regularly in environmental debate in Finland.
Anna Lehtonen’s thesis is a case study of flood-risk governance in Helsinki. Using a social-ecological-technological-systems framing and combining it with the climate risk language used by the IPCC, it is a rigorous and clearly laid out analysis that offers an extensive and critical perspective on what adaptation governance entails or could entail.
Both works were academically strong in their own areas and both were a pleasure to read. Readers without specialist knowledge of the topics will find them informative and vivid. Awarding two first prizes communicated, the jury felt, the exceptional qualities of two very different theses that were hard to rank relative to each other, and a signal that high-quality academic research can and should be pursued both in English, the main language of contemporary scholarship, and in Finnish, which is the dominant idiom for thought, feeling and governance in the community where we work.
The prize was given at the society’s annual dinner by Yrjö Haila. As usual, he selected a recent book for our community to get to know, Proof: The Uncertain Science of Certainty by Adam Kucharski. Haila’s essay on it will appear on our website in due course. You can access the theses online, Lehtonen’s here and Taipale’s here.
Congratulations once again to the winners!
