Close

Refine your search

A Lost Mitten and Other Stories

The project, Lost Mitten and Other Stories, examines a new sense of neighbour relations that transpires as a result of growing mobility. The project focuses on the ways in which these new neighbour relations or a sense of neighbourliness emerge from stories related to personal items of significance, and the way in which these stories are perceived. Lost Mitten and Other Stories is an interdisciplinary project that seeks collaboration between art and science. The project is carried out in eastern Finland.

The main concern of the project is to find out how the items of personal significance and the stories related to them help establish dialogue and, consequently, new kinds of mobile and cross-border neighbour relations and a sense of neighbourliness. Furthermore, the purpose is to explore how dialogic interaction helps promote, for example, the construction of cultural citizenship and create new, migrating, deterritorial cultural heritages. The items of personal significance as well as the stories relating to them are examined through a materialistic, cultural, linguistic, and narrative point of view and are, additionally, exhibited through artistic, interactive displays. The items of personal significance are understood as a poetic and political medium of various dialogues between past and present, between immigrants and natives, between different generations, between mobile and sedentary people.

The approach and the subject matter of the project are topical: immigration, different mobilities, the encounter of languages and cultures, and thereby, emerging new neighbour relations and a sense of neighbourliness. The multidisciplinary approach, combining different methods of science and art, enables new ways of examining the issue of neighbour relations and a sense of neighbourliness.

The project combines science and art innovatively and, therefore, generates new methods to investigate the current issues of different mobilities, language and cultural encounters, and challenges arising from new neighbour relations.

The project is funded by the Kone Foundation.

Ágnes Németh (agnes.nemeth@uef.fi)

Currently, she is managing two European projects: “CASPER: Citizen Activation in Shrinking rural areas for Place-based policies to Enhance Resilience” (Interreg Europe, 2023-2027) and “SERIGO: Social Economy for Resilience, Inclusion and Good Life in Rural areas” (Horizon Europe, 2024-2027).

She is involved in the research project “ESSPIN: Economic, Social and SPatial INequalities in Europe in the Era of Global Mega-trends” (Horizon Europe, 2022-2025).

Her doctoral thesis dealt with issues of regional policy, relational-governance and mega-events planning. She has been involved in European research projects (European Science Foundation, FP7) in border studies focusing on cross-border cooperation processes and the social (de)construction of borders. In her post-doctoral research, she studies foreigners’ socio-economic engagement in different Finnish urban environments with the aim of producing knowledge on the local particularities and challenges of integration processes. She was managing the international project “ECoC-SME: Actions for inducing SME growth and innovation via the ECoC event and legacy” (Interreg Europe, 2019-2021).

 

Aija Lulle (aija.lulle@uef.fi)

I am a migration scholar and geographer, currently working on a project Returning home? Making and imagining ageing futures. This research examines the lives of ageing people in the historical context of recent large-scale emigration and the unprecedented acceleration of population ageing in Eastern Europe. Its rationale originates from an urgent necessity to understand the wellbeing needs of ageing people. The theoretical approach is grounded in concepts from human geography and migration theory, focusing on migrants’ capabilities to aspire. The project utilises sensory, practical and imaginative homemaking practices.

Prior to my current research post, I was Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at Loughborough University, UK. My experience includes intense teaching and diverse fieldwork in Baltics, Nordic countries, border regions with Russia and the UK. In addition, I have significant leadership and administrative skills (as Director of the Diaspora and Migration Research Centre in Latvia (2014-2015) and as head of Doctoral Programmes in Geography and Environment in Loughborough (2021-2022).

 

Alina Kuusisto (alina.kuusisto@uef.fi)

I work as a project researcher at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland. In gained my PhD in 2017 in Finnish history. I have studied higher education policy, history of education and agriculture, Finnish and European cross-border cooperation, as well as the local and regional history of North Karelia and Eastern Finland in 1800s and 1900s .

Azmeary Ferdoush (azmeary.ferdoush@uef.fi)

I am an Academy of Finland (AOF) postdoctoral researcher based at the Karelian Institute. My AOF project explores whether, why, and how the state creates a situation where refugees and asylum seekers are kept indeterminately waiting. It is geographically focused on the Rohingya refugees in the camps of Bangladesh and the asylum seekers residing in different reception centers in Finland.

At the Institute, my works engage with the university strategic program that focuses specifically on the profiling area of  “cultural encounters, mobilities and borders.” Broadly, I am interested in exploring the way man-made ideas of borders and bounded spaces affect human mobility and vice versa. As such, I specialize in the study of state, territory, borders, sovereignty, (non)citizenship, and migration. At the same time, I often remain critical regarding “importing” ready-made ideas from the Global North to the Global South in terms of both theory and methods. My scholarship thus sits at the intersection of political geography, critical geopolitics, decolonial praxis, and qualitative research methods.

You can find more about my research here.