Tää on samaan aikaan lohdullinen ja kuumottava ajatus: yhteiskuntamme on pystyssä ja kaupunkimme niin isoja, koska tässä (ja kaikissa muissa yhteiselämisen haasteissa) olemme onnistuneet.

I, for one, expect that our rodent overlords are more capable than us in resolving climate change and biodiversity crises.

And before you notice it, the rats are grounding KLM long-haul flights:

Then Faculty newsletter had this guidance:

RHEV Helsinki strains clustered together with strains from South Korea and Spain, but polytomous phylogenetic trees and large branch lengths suggest lack of sampling. Our genotype RHEV-C1 has been reported to cause mild liver dysfunction with human case reports from Hong Kong, Spain, and France.

The research might be "eclectic disciplinary perspectives", but as Riikka aptly summarizes: "Urban stigmatisation and marginalisation are multispecies processes that emerge with place-making and have consequences for all the multispecies cohabitants of the city."
(5/5)

Waste, humans, rats - junk food, shopping centers, drunk people. "Well, this just happens to be a place where people randomly poop around, business as usual."

Belonging and place-making are multispecies phenomena, and urban is not only human, but more-than-human.
(4/5)

With this invisible rat presence, we examined urban stigmatisation and belonging as examples of societal phenomena which can be rethought as multispecies. They are very territorial in scope, and place-making emerged as a fruitful concept to understand how multispecies urban is formed.
(3/5)

We (as in the ragtag bunch of researchers in CitiRats project) went out to look for rats with lower secondary-school students and we did not see any rats, but we did felt their hidden presence. They were present in stories, stereotypes, memories, and athmospheres.
(2/5)

Things that I learn while doing research: Instagram is just as cut-throat to street plants as to humans.

We had a discussion why pavement plants might be underwhelming in authentic context. Nienke mentioned that it is difficult to take a good photo of pavement plant as you need to pick out the cigarette butts and other trash, figure out the light, find the least scrappy individual and so on.