On 1 December 2024, at the ceremony marking the anniversary of the University of Tartu as Estonia’s national university, Olle Järv was awarded the Expatriate Estonian Visiting Professor’s Scholarship for the next academic year.
Olle Järv is an alumni of the Mobility Lab at the University of Tartu, and a Docent in Human Geography and Academy Research Fellow at the Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki. We are pleased to welcome him back to the Department of Geography, University of Tartu, for this academic year, where he is also actively contributing to the work of our Mobility Lab.
To help introduce him, we asked him a few questions!
What is your background?
I’m a human geographer intrigued by human mobilities at large. Human mobility is at the core of my research, providing new insights into people, places, and societal processes and phenomena at local, regional, and international scales. I am especially interested in using Big Data – such as mobile phone and social media data – to study human mobility.
I completed all my university studies here at the Department of Geography at the University of Tartu. After defending my joint PhD between the University of Tartu and Ghent University, I took up a postdoctoral position at the Digital Geography Lab, Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki. Currently, I’m running my own projects focusing on cross-border regions and transnationalism, socio-spatial inequality and segregation, regional attractiveness, and multilocal living.
I’m very excited to be back in Tartu after ten years!
What brings you to Tartu, and what are you working on during your time here?
I came to the University of Tartu as a Visiting Professor of Human Geography for this academic year after receiving the Visiting Professor Scholarship Award from the University of Tartu Foundation.
I arrived in September – time really flies when you’re working on exciting topics and meeting excellent scholars 😊. Here, I’m collaborating with colleagues at the Mobility Lab and the Centre for Migration and Urban Studies, and beyond.
My current work focuses on cross-border interactions and mobility, spatial inequality and how it manifests within cities and regions, and its links to multilocality, remote work, and transnational people – such as Estonians who live in Finland while remaining connected to Estonia.
So far, in addition to ongoing projects, I’ve drafted new studies with colleagues at Tartu and delivered a keynote titled “The Role of the Digital Turn and Mobility of People in Integration Processes: Remote Work, Multilocality and Transnational Lifestyles” at the FOR-IN 2.0 Migration Conference organized by the Nordic Council of Ministers’ Office in Tartu. The conference video is available on YouTube.
What do you do in your spare time?
This is a tricky one 😊. We have a lovely one-year-old baby in our family, which means there’s rather limited “spare time” nowadays. But it’s enjoyable time!
In general, I like running, playing basketball, going out into nature on weekends, and preparing delicious dinners with good company. I also enjoy the sauna very much! At our second home, anything involving hands-on physical activity counts as spare time for me – for example renovating an old sauna building 😉
What is your favourite book?
I do like to read books, but I’m not a book lover as such. Yet, I’m very passionate about old atlases like a true geographer! I collect them and every now and then I browse these beautiful maps, and marvel at how well they were designed over 100 years before GIS and current technologies. If I travel abroad for work or leisure, I try to visit bookstores that sell old books to see if they have any atlases or maps. The most recent atlas I bought was in Belgium, and it’s a masterpiece – A3 size and weighs about 7 kg! That’s my favorite at the moment.
The Mobility Lab of the University of Tartu is an interdisciplinary research group that studies human mobility and its associations with society and the environment using mobile (big) data.