Academic networks have been very important to me in the different stages of my research career. I was a member of the board of the Finnish Society for Labour History between 1993 and 1999. The biggest project from those years was the research symposium Crisis, chaos or challenge? which was organised in Karkkila in August 1995. The idea originated from the economic crisis in Karkkila in the early 1990s.

The Finnish Oral History Network (FOHN) became an important community for me after my doctoral dissertation. I coordinated FOHN symposiums between 2006 and 2008, and I have participated in them every time. Those same years saw the birth of a network of researchers studying the development of literacy and self-taught writers in the 19th century, which grew into an international nexus. Projects led by Lea Laitinen, Anna Kuismin and Taru Nordlund have resulted in numerous conferences and publications. A third important group has been the network for researchers of the history of education, which established the spirited multidisciplinary publication Kasvatus & Aika (‘Education & Time’). I was a member of the editorial staff between 2007 and 2012, and I edited, for example, the themed issues on the history of writing, the history of childhood, and the relationship between religion and education.

In the summer of 2000, I participated for the first time in a conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) in Mainz. Then I had to explain my own role as a folklorist interested in literary history. In 2010 I was involved in organising the annual SHARP conference in Helsinki, the theme being “Book Culture from Below.” I am now the Foreign Liaison for SHARP in Finland, and I have been a member of the jury for the DeLong literary prize since 2014. Between 2011 and 2014 I was the secretary of the Book History Society of Finland, and from 2014 onwards I have been the chairperson. For example, the Society ran the Life as a Reader project, which organized a life-writing call in collaboration with the Literature Archives of the Finnish Literature Society in 2014.