Mari Karhu researches the use of collaborative media in societal crises.
The COVID-19 pandemic and climate crisis are drastic examples of widespread crises that involve a tangle of intertwined problems, require rapid action and solutions, and create circumstances where collaborative media is becoming an increasingly important platform for large-scale human collaboration. Still, the research in collaborative media technologies and cultures is fragmentary, and the use of collaborative media in societal crises is a relatively recent development whose parts we are still analyzing.

The novelty of Karhu's PhD research is in its objective to provide a user-centered and holistic view of the use of collaborative media as a part of versatile societal crisis settings. The results shed light on the variety of collaborative media use cases, increase understanding about how to motivate, organize, and maintain collaborative activities, help to seize the opportunities, and tackle the constraints of the collaborative media platforms as well as understand the unique features of collaborative media in the complex media sphere.

Karhu’s research is strongly related to the development of future technology, as the use of collaborative media technologies will increase, for example, due to remote cultures that are becoming more common. Therefore, an in-depth sociotechnical understanding of collaborative media is required.

Karhu received a salaried researcher position from the thematic doctoral program 'The Arctic in a Changing World' at the University of Lapland in 2022. In addition, her research has been funded with a one-year A.E. Nordenskiöld grant provided by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Lapland Regional Fund.