Team

PI Dr Katri Gadd

PI Dr Katri Gadd works as a university lecturer in the Department of Geography and Geology at the University of Turku. She is a specialist in methodologies in HuRiIA. She has used and advanced time-geographic approaches and developed co-research methodologies throughout her career. Gadd’s first two postdoctoral projects focused on migration, laws and policies regulating it and on irregular migrants, trying to survive and navigate those laws. Gadd’s research started with undocumented (Iraqi) migrants in Finland continuing to research with Iraqis, who had returned to Iraq after unsuccessful asylum journey to Finland. Gadd has also piloted HuRiIA methodologies in Iraq together with Faleha Ubeis. Gadd is responsible for the project management in HuRiIA. She leads WPs 2 and 3.

Dr Pasqualina Eckerström

Dr Pasqualina (Paky) Eckerström holds a PhD in the Study of Religion from the University of Helsinki and is a postdoctoral researcher in Human Geography at the University of Turku, as well as in the Study of Religions at the University of Helsinki. Her doctoral dissertation examined how extreme metal musicians and fans at risk utilise music to resist religiously motivated laws and assert personal and social agency under authoritarian regimes. The findings have been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Religion and Contemporary Islam, and presented at over twenty-five international conferences worldwide.

Currently, Eckerström works in the project Human Rights Incorporated and Acquired HuRiIA – الحرية, which explores the lives of Iraqi women navigating multiple normative frameworks in Finland. She is also involved in the project ArtAct: Artivism Across Borders, which investigates the influence of digitalised activist art related to Iranian women’s protests.

Eckerström is an advocate and a council member of Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML). She has also collaborated with Freemuse and Artists at Risk Helsinki. Her advocacy and research focus on art as a tool for activism, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa.

Eckerström is serving her second term as a board member in The International Society for Metal Music (ISMMS).

Meiju Marttila

Meiju Marttila is a doctoral student in Human Geography at University of Turku. In her PhD, she focuses on the everyday negotiations of belonging and inner agencies of Iraqi women in Finland. Her research draws on relational understandings of space, feminist geography, and non-representational theory (NRT). She contributes to critically explore and map the agencies, using experimental methods designed together with women participating in the research.

In her previous studies (MSc), she studied how perceptions of (in)security of migrant women in Turku are affecting their everyday urban life. She will be responsible for the practical arrangements of the creative writing and future workshops.

Faleha Ubeis

Faleha Ubeis works as a co-researcher in HuRiIA. She graduated from Middle Eastern Studies in the Leiden University. Ubeis is Iraqi but has been living in Finland and Netherlands for thirty years. She runs her own company Sabisk that aims to help in building relations between Iraqi, Dutch and Finnish companies and organisations. Her social media channels have thousands of followers from different parts of all three countries, especially Iraqi women.