Ms. MELANIE SARANTOU

Melanie Sarantou (PhD) is a Professor of Social Design at Kyushu University in Japan. She is also an Adjunct Professor of social design at the University of Lapland, investigating how arts and narrative practices impact marginalised women. In her role as Research Fellow (2020 – 2023) she explored the role of arts in societies that exist on the margin of Europe in the European Commission-funded Horizon 2020 project titled ‘Action on the Margin: Arts as Social Sculpture’ (AMASS). She is a member of the Service Design Research Group, in Finland and her past research focused on social design and arts-based research in marginalised communities in Finland, Australia and Namibia. Her research and art explored concepts of marginality, which in this project is defined by conditions of isolation and migration, emphasised by the geography of the project in the Arctic and far south.