Rūta Kazlauskaitė

Description of research and teaching

Rūta Kazlauskaitė is a political scientist at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. Her research examines disinformation and propaganda in extended reality (VR/AR/MR), focusing on how immersive technologies are transforming political communication and collective memory. She co-founded the Social Sciences and Humanities in Extended Reality Network at the University of Helsinki.

Her work has been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, including Memory Studies, Rethinking History, Memory, Mind & Media, International Journal of Heritage Studies, Journal of the Philosophy of History, Emotions and Society, and Ethnicities.

She currently leads the project Halbwachs in the Metaverse: Storyliving and democracy in the age of immersive spatial computing (2025–2028), funded by the Kone Foundation. This project examines the impact of extended reality (XR) technologies on political communication and democratic governance. It has three aims:

(1) To provide an analytic and empirical overview of how VR is currently used in political communication and to map emerging developments;

(2) To capture user experiences of VR in political communication. This involves investigating how users experience themselves and others within virtual environments, how they step into and out of roles, and how they negotiate, accept, or resist messages of immersive content;

(3) To theorize the democratic potentials of XR. It is important to ideate how these technologies can be applied in support of a sustainable media environment that supports democratic society.

Rūta is affiliated with the Helsinki Research Hub on Emotions, Populism and Polarisation (HEPP).

Previously, she led and contributed to several research projects:

• 2024 – 2025: Horizon Europe project Politics of Grievance and Democratic Governance (PLEDGE), where she examined how immersive VR content shapes pro- and anti-democratic expressions of grievance; developed future scenarios assessing the risks and opportunities immersive technologies pose to democracies, with a focus on affective polarization.
• 2023 – 2024: Bringing the Past to Life: History, Right-Wing Politics and Emotions in the Age of Immersive Media (individual grant: Rūta Kazlauskaitė), funded by the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation.
• 2021 –2022: Researcher in the Now-Time Us-Space (NTUS) project (PI Emilia Palonen), funded by Kone Foundation.
• 2020 – 2021: Immersive Pasts: Politics of Truth and Empathy in Virtual Reality History Education (individual grant: Rūta Kazlauskaitė), Aalto University, Department of Media, affiliated with Systems of Representation Research Group.
• 2019 – 2020: Researcher in Whirl of Knowledge: Cultural Populism in European Polarised Politics and Societies (PI Emilia Palonen), funded by the Academy of Finland.
• 2018: Researcher in the Mobilizing the Disenfranchised: Post-Truth Public Stories in Finland, France, and the United States project (PI Karina Horsti), funded by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation.

She has also held visiting researcher positions at several institutions: the Department of Film, Television and Scenography (ELO), Virtual Cinema Lab, Aalto University (Finland, 2020); the Institute of Political Science, University of Warsaw (Poland, 2019); and the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research (Germany, 2013).

In addition to her research activities, Rūta Kazlauskaitė holds several positions of trust in academic publishing and professional organizations. She is currently the Book Series Editor for the International Review of History Education (IRHE, since 2025) and serves on the Advisory Board of the History Education Research Journal (HERJ), published by UCL Press (since 2024).

She has been actively involved in promoting interdisciplinary collaboration within the Finnish academic community. From 2022 to 2024, she served as Vice-President of FINTERDIS – The Finnish Interdisciplinary Society, where she has also been a board member since 2018. She is a long-standing member of the Memory Studies Association (MSA).

She has extensive teaching experience across a range of interdisciplinary subjects, with a particular focus on digital media, political communication, and ethnic relations. She has completed pedagogical training at the University of Helsinki.

At the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, she has served as a lecturer for several courses, including Social Media, AI, and Extended Reality (2024), Qualitative, Quantitative and Computational Methods of Textual Analysis (2025), and Current Trends in European Politics (2019). She has also contributed as a guest lecturer in the course Digital Media and Society (2020, 2021). Earlier in her career, she taught at the Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki, where she lectured in Current Research on Ethnic Relations (2012–2015) and Cultures in Contact (2012).