Annalisa Sannino works at the Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning (CRADLE) in the Faculty of Education at University of Helsinki, Finland. Currently on leave from her position as University Lecturer in Educational Sciences, she holds an Academy Research Fellowship (2012-2017) with a project focused on “The Emergence of Agency: Foundations for Educational Change from Below.” She holds Visiting Professor positions at University West, Sweden (2016-2017) and at Rhodes University, South Africa (2016-2019).

Significant past experiences include a post-doctoral Fulbright Fellowship in the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition and the Department of Communication at the University of California San Diego in 2002-2003. Also, from 2001 to 2008 she worked as researcher in psychology with a tenured full-time position in the Department of Education at the University of Salerno in Italy.

Annalisa Sannino's research and teaching are primarily focused on understanding transformative agency as a dialectical process of mastering historical contradictions and related conflicts of motives. She has written on the relations between discourse and activity, on the interventionist nature of cultural-historical activity theory, and key epistemological principles characterizing formative interventions within this theoretical framework. More specifically, in her recent work she has developed foundations for an intervention methodology based on the principle of double stimulation and on the principle of ascending from the abstract to the concrete. Her work demonstrates how transformative agency can be discursively identified, supported and enhanced within communities, educational and work activities. 

Beside her numerous refereed journal articles, she is the leading editor of the volume Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory (co-edited with Harry Daniels and Kris Gutierrez) by Cambridge University Press and Learning and Collective Creativity (co-edited with Viv Ellis) by Routledge.

She completed her PhD in Psychology in 2000 at the University of Nancy in France.