HUMAK UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES
Humak University of Applied Sciences is a Finnish university of applied sciences, operating through a network of campuses, that offers studies in three focus areas. These are community education, cultural management, and interpreting and linguistic accessibility. Humak is the largest provider of education in its focus areas in Finland and a renowned expert in these fields in Europe. Humak’s English degree programmes include a Bachelor’s Degree Programme in Adventure and Outdoor Education and a Master’s Degree Programme in Sign Language Interpreting. Supporting the principle of lifelong learning, Humak also offers an increasing number of courses and competence modules in English as open university of applied sciences studies. In Finnish, Humak organises bachelor’s and master’s degree programmes in all its focus areas. The open university of applied sciences studies includes a wide variety of courses and competence modules to promote lifelong learning.
Researchers from HUMAK
- Dr. Päivi Rainò
Senior Researcher, Dr. Päivi Rainò is a General Linguist (MA in Finnish philology, PhD in Finnish Sign Language) with a primary research focus on SLs, deaf studies and interpreting between visual and auditive languages. Besides lexicology, her specialities within applied linguistics are socio-demographic research on the communities of Deaf people, and users of sign language and their linguistic accessibility. Dr. Rainò has published appr. 120 academic articles and other publications, as well as multimedia productions on these.Her research areas have included e.g. Finnish as a second language of SL users; learning outcomes in the syllabus of FinSL in basic education and studies on demographics and linguistic accessibility among the deaf people in Finland and in Albania. Her recent studies have focused on linguistic rights and attitudes towards SL users and future needs in the education of SLIs in Finland.
- Outi Kuvaja
Outi Kuvaja (previously Mäkelä) graduated as SL interpreter in 1994 and received a MA degree in Education in 2001. She is specialised in interpreting for the deafblind people. At Humak, she has participated in designing the curricula for the Bachelor’s Degree Programme in Interpreting and Linguistic Accessibility; Master’s Degree Programme in the Development of Interpreting Practices; European Master in Sign Language Interpreting (EUMASLI). With L. Halkosaari (see below) she is the co-author of Recommendations for a Curriculum for Deaf Interpreters produced during the Erasmus+ project Developing Deaf Interpreting In Europe. Kuvaja has held positions of trust at the University of Tartu (Estonia), Training programme for Sign Language Interpreter being a member of the accreditation committee in 2009. At Humak UAS she has been a Member of the Board of Examination since 201
- Liisa Halkosaari
Liisa Halkosaari is an interpreter trainer with a BA in interpreting (Diaconia UAS 2002) and a MA in FinSL (University of Jyväskylä 2013). She has long-standing experience in being involved with the Finnish Association of SLIs. Lately, she has managed projects on revitalisation of Finland-Swedish SL and curriculum development for Finland-Swedish SLIs.
- Juha Manunen
Juha Manunen is a Deaf lecturer of sign language and interpreting at Humak. He received his MA degree in Education from Jyväskylä University in 2008. In his master thesis, Manunen analyzed plural negation in FinSL. He has been one of Humak’s lecturers at EUMASLI MA Programme; LIVS2 programme for interpreters in Finland-Swedish SL and as a project researcher at Humak he participated in the production of open online dictionary for FinSL (SignWiki).
- Sirpa Lyytinen
MA, Senior Lecturer in Interpreting Sirpa Lyytinen has held her post at Humak UAS since 2001. She is also specialized in interpreting for customers with multiple challenges. She is one of the authors of Humak UAS’s new curriculum designed for people with speech and language disorders.