people

Hannu-Pekka Ikäheimo

Project Director, New forms of participation

Who?

Hannu-Pekka works as a project director of Sitra’s New Forms of Participation project, which is part of Sitra’s Democracy and Participation theme. The project develops new ways for people to participate and contribute to representative democracy.

What?

Hannu-Pekka has extensive experience in democracy research and development. In recent years, he has been especially interested in the transformation of communication technologies and its impact on the use of power and participation in society. In 2021, he and his colleague Jukka Vahti published a report on this topic, The transformation and future of media influence on society (in Finnish). Hannu-Pekka is also one of the authors of the book Post-truth: Media survival strategies in the age of bullshit and algorithms (2018, in Finnish).

Hannu-Pekka holds a PhD in Social Sciences. He graduated in 2021 from the doctoral programme in Political Science at the University of Tampere. In his doctoral dissertation Politics without alternatives? he studied Finnish EU journalism.

Hannu-Pekka believes that spontaneously emerging networks will increasingly challenge hierarchies in the future, fundamentally changing societies.

What else?

Hannu-Pekka is passionate about sports. He spends much of his free time on jogging trails, skiing and watching sports.