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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)

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 is managing the international project “ECoC-SME: Actions for inducing SME growth and innovation via the ECoC event and legacy” (Interreg Europe, 2019-2021).

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 .

Gleb Iarovoi (gleb.iarovoi@uef.fi)

Having defended my Russian “candidate of science” dissertation in 2007, I am currently writing my “European” PhD thesis, which was devoted to cross-border governance on the EU-Russian border, participatory arrangements in cross-border programmes and the role of non-state actors in inter-regional cooperation. However, after Russian invasion of Ukraine there is no more “cross-border cooperation” and “cross-border governance” on the EU-Russian border. So my current research is being revisited towards exploring the “subaltern geopolitics” of the Finnish-Russian border, i.e. the geopolitical imagination of subaltern groups having direct or indirect relations to this border. Also, as a research hobby and a natural scope of interest, I study academic freedoms in Russia (and Russian academia as subaltern).

As a freetime hobby, for many years now, I do journalism. Previously, I reported on sensitive issues of Russian political and social life, such as human rights violations by the state, by the Russian Orthodox Church, by security agencies and courts. Currently, I cover different issues of the Finnish-Russian relations for Russian readers.

Joni Virkkunen (joni.virkkunen@uef.fi)

I work as Research Manager at the Karelian Institute. As the Director of the VERA Centre for Russian and Border Studies, I am also executive board member of the UEF’s top-level research area Borders, Mobilities and Cultural Encounters (BOMOCULT) and of the cross-faculty Doctoral Programme in Social and Cultural Encounters. My research relates to borders, border governance, cross-border cooperation, EU-Russian relations and transnational migration in Russian and post-Soviet contexts. I have been recently studying, for example, at the Northern Dimension policy and the regional impacts of EU-Russia relations, and 2015-2016 Arctic migration route through/from Russia to Finland. The latter I have been studying through Finnish and Russian migration and border policies, publicity and public debates of the migration / migration route, migrants’ everyday insecurities, and informal practices such as corruption and criminality.

Kaisa Vainio (kaisa.vainio@uef.fi)

I’m working as PhD researcher in the multidisciplinary ‘Trees Near Us’-project, which studies the relations between humans and trees. I examine the cultural relationship with trees, and personal affection humans have for individual trees. In my study I cover tree-relationships from several angles, such as nature-connectivity, ownership, memories, sensoral experiences, care, connections to previous generations, spirituality and Finnish forest-relationship.

Other research interests:
– Cultural studies of environment
– Sosiocultural bioeconomy research
– Arctic Studies
– Cross-Border cooperation and cultural exchange (Finland-Russia)

Moritz Albrecht (moritz.albrecht@uef.fi)

I am a human-geographer specialized on relational aspect of environmental and sustainability governance. My core expertise is to study socio-spatial processes of bio-based resource policy, management and local materialization to evaluate development frameworks, barriers and alternatives. I am experienced in research on policy mobility and translations in an EU context, case studies on regional and local development and policy materialization as well as sustainability perspectives in economic contexts.

My current research is focused on the socio-spatial processes and materialization of regenerative bioeconomy development with key attention to water based sectors, particularly seaweed farming but also recirculating aquaculture systems. Additionally, a side branch of my research interest deals with development in shrinking and peripheral localities in the North.

I am currently also acting as board member of the Finnisch Geographical Association (Suomen Maantieteen Seura) and the SOBIO network at UEF on social scientific biosociety focused research. I am further the coordinator of the Nord+ geographers Network GEONORDBALT on shrinking and peripheral locality development in the Baltics and Northern Europe.

Past projects:

– “Sustainability governance of BioAssemblages: A trifold perspective on bioeconomy clusters in the making” (2017-2019)
– Karelia CBC; WasteLess Karelias (Project coordinator) (2018-2022)

Previous research:
-EU bioenergy policy design and transformation between Brussels and local implementation
-Perspectives on sustainable forest certification in European supply chains
-Cross-border management of natural resources.

Onerva-Aulikki Suhonen (onerva-aulikki.suhonen@uef.fi)

Onerva-Aulikki Suhonen (LL.M., M.Sc.) works as a lecturer in civil law at the UEF Law School. Her teaching focuses on transnational commercial law and supervision of commercial law theses.

In her Ph.D. research, Suhonen studies the regulatory framework applicable to cross-border commercial contracts and analyses the development of transnational commercial contract law doctrine. The study systemizes the intertwining of legal norms applicable to transnational commercial contracts and examines the interaction of publicly and privately created normativity in the governance of cross-border business relationships.

Suhonen is a Finnish national rapporteur at IACL’s comparative law study “The effectiveness of international legal harmonization through soft law.”