Tampere University

Yeah, I'm Sebastian Sontag.

I'm a research fellow at the GPT Lab, Tampere University.

I have my PhD back in the days from Aalto University.

I was doing computer science, telecommunication related stuff, but there was actually machine learning, but it's way back before the generative AI.

So that was quite early.

And by the way, I heard a... a girl from the Tampere University who was studying communication in there to give a personality to our chatbot in Berlin.

And I wanted the chatbot to be having this self-deprecating humor because I thought that it's going to fail so many times because it's early times that it has to basically release the anger of the users by being humorous.

And she was very good at it.

As always, I'm Joe Dukes.

I'm a gender studies postdoc at Tampere University.

And in each episode of this podcast, I sit down with different scholars from around the world who research queer geographies, trans geographies, and the geographies of sex and sexuality.

You might remember a couple of episodes ago, I mentioned that I was traveling to Slovenia to attend the European Geographies of Sexuality's conference held at the University of Maribor and organized by Peter Kuma, Dylan Collar and other colleagues.

Olli is also an award-winning journalist and an academic, and has authored books on journalism practice and the changing media environment.

During the 2019-2020 academic year, he served as professor of practice in journalism at Tampere University in Finland, and in 2022 he was a visiting scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

Welcome, Olli.

Thank you, Ulrike.

I'm your host, Joe Dukes.

I'm a postdoctoral researcher in gender studies at Tampere University.

If you're not already acquainted with this podcast, I sit down with scholars who work roughly around queer geographies, as well as trans geographies and the geographies of sex and sexuality.

In particular, at the moment I'm sitting down for the first series of Space and Sexuality with contributing authors to the 2025 collection Queer Geographies, Key Debates and Contending Perspectives.

Whereas today I'm joined by my very own colleague Derek Roos

here

at Tampere University in Finland.

If you've listened to previous episodes of the podcast, I think that you're going to appreciate perhaps some much better audio quality.