Research Focus Areas

As a Marie Skłodowska Curie Action postdoctoral fellow in Sanderien Verstappen’s group, I study the roles urban activists perform in public, for instance, when they present themselves/are presented as domain experts in media coverage. In particular, I am interested in the multi-faceted motivations behind certain role-choices, how activists’ roles are perceived by their vis-a-vis, such as policymakers and the general public, and how role-choices influence the outcomes of their political efforts.
It is typical for my work to liberally change back and forth between quantitative and qualitative methods, and between different ontological and epistemological positions. I am firm in quantitative methods, for instance, in the area of (urban) data science, and keep up with the latest developments in qualitative, in particular, urban ethnography methods. I am a fond reader of critical urban theory, and enjoy discussions around the power of maps and the everyday structuration of space.

Short Biography

Before joining KSA, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Digital Geography Lab at the University of Helsinki, where I was involved in a Horizon-2020 project that investigated to which degree digital urban twins can help planners to better consider the specific realities of older people, improve accessibility for the ‘non-average resident’ to urban participation, and enable their rights to the city.

In the research leading up to my dissertation at the Helsinki Lab for Interdisciplinary Conservation Science, I investigated whether the opportunities of big data, such as social media, could be leveraged to address the ongoing global biodiversity crisis. To that avail, I evaluated different quantitative methods, such as natural language processing and image recognition, adapted to the use cases of conservation scientists and practitioners.

In my Master’s thesis at the University of Vienna, I used a critical cartography perspective to investigate ‘implicit cartographies’. I asked which epistemologies are at play when volunteers contribute to collaborative cartographies, i.e., maps, map-like artifacts as well as collections of spatially explicit data, such as Wikipedia, and whether they reproduce different realities than maps authored by members of a more ‘explicit cartography’.

Selected Publications

• Fink, C. et al. (2021) ‘Mapping the online songbird trade in Indonesia’, Applied Geography, 134, p. 102505. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2021.102505.
• Fink, C., Hausmann, A. and Di Minin, E. (2020) ‘Online sentiment towards iconic species’, Biological Conservation, p. 108289. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.108289.
• O’Hern, S. et al. (2022) ‘Relationships among Bicycle Rider Behaviours, Anger, Aggression, and Crashes in Finland’, Safety, 8(1), p. 18. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/safety8010018.
• Sancho-Reinoso, A. et al. (2022) ‘Mapping hierarchies of mobility in the Baikal Amur Mainline region: a quantitative account of needs and expectations relating to railroad usage’, Polar Geography, 45(3), pp. 157–176. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1088937X.2022.2046195.
• Tupasela, A. et al. (2023) ‘Older people and the smart city – Developing inclusive practices to protect and serve a vulnerable population’, Internet Policy Review, 12(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.14763/2023.1.1700.
• Willberg, E., Fink, C. and Toivonen, T. (2023) ‘The 15-minute city for all? – Measuring individual and temporal variations in walking accessibility’, Journal of Transport Geography, 106. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2022.103521.