Minna Vigren

I'm Assistant Professor of Global Communications and Climate Change at LUT University, Finland. I'm a scholar in digital sustainability, with a research focus on alternative futures, the environmental footprint of digital technologies and lifestyles, and themes of imagination, power, and resistance. My interdisciplinary work combines material media studies, critical infrastructures studies, science and technology studies, and futures studies.

I completed my Ph.D. in 2020 at Tampere University, with a thesis examining imaginaries of agency within digitalised society. In the thesis, I studied how understandings of human agency and the technologically mediated everyday life entwine in the ‘landscapes of code’. I asked how imaginaries of one’s own agency and that of others are constructed and how societal power structures and arrangements are produced, reproduced, and possibly challenged in the processes of constructing imaginaries of agency. The four empirical case studies explored the narrative construction of an ideal citizen in The Digital Agenda for Europe, the pre-domestication of Google Glass in Finnish media, the negotiations of the infrastructural power of platforms by Facebook users and non-users, and the experiential landscapes of connective everyday life of avid social media users. 

Currently, I lead two research projects. In the art-science project Everyday Imagination and Collective Hope: Method Experiments at the Intersections of Art and Science (Kone Foundation, 2026-2030), we explore ways of fostering collective hope for a better life and society in a time marked by growing social short-sightedness and despair, individualism, and competition. We ask: how can hope be recollectivised? Through co-research and self-research methods, the project examines the needs people experience in their everyday lives, their utopian imagination, and their capacity to collectively transform society, for example, in processes of producing scientific knowledge, in the development of urban environments, and in civic, hobby, and leisure activities. Artistic works invite people to imagine otherwise through photography and performance art.

The science-based action project Sustainable Digital Everyday Life (Nessling Foundation, 2026-2027) challenges the view of digitalisation as a solution to the sustainability crisis by highlighting the environmental impacts of digital consumption and devices. The project addresses the limited awareness of digital sustainability by making scientific knowledge more accessible and fostering public debate on the issue. Training for library staff strengthens their capacity to promote sustainable digital practices as part of digital support services. At the same time, the project develops practical materials to support digital clean-up practices in everyday life. The project will culminate in March 2027 with events held in libraries across Finland as part of the international Digital Cleanup Day.

My project  Imagining Sustainable Digital Futures: Outlines for Eco-Digital Citizenship (Research Council of Finland, 2022-2025) finished in August 2025. During this three year Academy postdoctoral research project, I studied the environmental unsustainability of our digitalised society and developed methods to imagine alternative futures. 

Before starting at LUT, I worked in the departments of computer science at Aalto University and at Stockholm University, as well as in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki.