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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.

Africa-EU relations, migration, development and integration

The Africa-EU relations, migration, development and integration (AEMDI) project, aims to bring into conversation leading academics, policy makers, political observers and practitioners from civil society to explore and examine intra-Africa migration on one hand and EU-Africa relationships vis-à-vis migration on the other hand. Efforts to integrate Africa, through the RECs, should, then, be informed by lessons and parallels drawn from across Africa, and chiefly, the integration experience of the EU—particularly the Schengen Area—in moving from free movement of labour (only) to EU citizenship, as enshrined in Article 20 (1) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Its main activities of AEMDI will include two international workshops and one international conference. One workshop will be hosted by the University of Eastern Finland and another by the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation (GovInn) at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. The main output of AEMDI activities will be a scientific edited volume, based on deliberations in and papers from the workshops. The main outcome of AEMDI is the promotion of the Jean Monnet Programme and adoption of best practices from the EU`s successes in regional integration, in Africa. The impacts of AEMDI will include increased networking and expertise between/of academics, policy makers, professionals and relevant stakeholders in Africa and the EU. AEMDI responds to the need to promote development and well-being in Africa through, among other things, learned experiences from observed successes in EU integration.

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 Inkinen (alina.inkinen@uef.fi)

I work as a project researcher in the School Well-being, Learning Support, and Teacher Segregation Project (KOTOPE). In this project, my research focuses on the appearnce of school segregation from the perspective of teachers across different regions of Finland and various types of schools. Additionally, I examine teachers’ educational pathways and their placement in the profession, as well as issues related to segregation as part of these.

My other research interests include higher education policy, especially politics of transitions that are related to access to higher education from both political documents and applicants’ perspectives.

Anna Rawlings (anna.rawlings@uef.fi)

In my research, I examine motivation, learning, and well-being in different learning environments and among learners of different ages. I am particularly interested in how temperament guides these phenomena, processes, and their interconnections. I have started working as a grant researcher at UEF in May 2023.

I am also coordinator of FinEd, or the Finnish Multidisciplinary Doctoral Training Network on Educational Sciences (2022–).

Anna-Leena Toivanen (anna-leena.toivanen@uef.fi)

I am a comparative literature scholar interested in adopting a mobility studies approach to literary studies. I currently work as Academy Research Fellow and my project, “The Poetics of Afroeuropean Mobilities in Francophone African Literatures” (project number 330906), examines how Francophone African literatures from the mid-20th century to the present represent forms of human physical travel (pedestrianism, automobility, aeromobility, maritime travel, travel in public transport etc.) in the wider context of different Afroeuropean mobilities: student mobilities, tourism and exploration, professional mobilities, criminal mobilities, return travel, and clandestine travel. The project develops analytical tools for reading mobilities in literature. My book “Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures” was published in March 2021 (Brill): https://brill.com/view/title/57650

 

Anssi Voitila (anssi.voitila@uef.fi)

Doctor of Theology (University of Helsinki) 2001; Adjunct Professor (Dozent) (University of Joensuu, later University of Eastern Finland) 2007.

Working career: University of Helsinki, Department of Biblical Studies: University Lecturer of Exegetics, Researcher, Assistant, Translator of the Old Testament Apocrypha 1990-2003; University of Eastern Finland (formerly University of Joensuu) University Lecturer of Biblical Languages and Studies 2003 (2021 – Senior University Lecturer). I have been a member in the following academic research projects:  The Research Unit for the Formation of Early Jewish and Christian Ideology (Center of Excellence in Research, Academy of Finland) 2000-2005; Birth and Transmission of a Holy Tradition (EURYI) 2007-2012; Project participant: Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions (CSTT) (Center of Excellence in Research, Academy of Finland) 2014-2019.
My research interests span the language of the Septuagint (Greek), its translation technique, Classical Hebrew language, semantic change and the book of Ben Sira.

I am particularly interested in Septuagint syntax as a part of the broader Post-Classical, Hellenistic, or koine Greek syntax of the last three centuries BCE. Because the Septuagint is a translation, the most powerful method for examining this language is translation technic study. I have also done some research concerning the theology of the translation: Ideologically motivated transformations in the Greek version of the Book of Ben Sira and written a paper on Moses in the Greek Pentateuch. My latest interests include the polysemy and semantic change as evidenced in the Classical and Hellenistic Greek corpus of which the Septuagint forms an important part: I have written about the auxialiary verb construction μέλλω + INF., on ἁπλοῦς “simple” and its derivates and at the moment I am working on the verb ἐκβάλλω.

I have recently widened my research interest to the Greek middle voice (medium) in the Septuagint, e.g. why the translators occasionally use middle voice although the Hebrew source text has an active verb form, as well as to the translation of the Hebrew verbless clauses, my question is how and why do the translators resort to verbal clauses, rendering the verbless clause in the Septuagint. My publications include Présent et imparfait de l’indicatif dans le Pentateuque grec: une étude sur la syntaxe de traduction (Helsinki-Göttingen 2001).

Antti-Jussi Kouvo (antti.kouvo@uef.fi)

I am a senior lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Eastern Finland. My teaching focuses on research methods, especially statistical ones. My research focuses on well-being, social cohesion and social networks. I have studied the topics in the contexts of welfare states, neighbourhoods and the disadvantaged groups. For example, in our  research project “The neighboring networks of the older city dwellers” we looked at the role of neighborhood networks for the well-being of older people and in our current project called SISU (funded by Research Council of Finland) I lead a work package that focuses on the role of institutional trust during the green transition.

SISU project (in Finnish)

Anu Lainio (anu.lainio@uef.fi)

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the research project ‘Breadline Utopias: Alternative Futures of Material Assistance,’ funded by the Kone Foundation. We explore utopias of those working in food assistance now and in the future, as well as those who need food aid.

I earned my Doctor of Philosophy degree in 2024 from the University of Surrey in the field of sociology of education. My doctoral research was part of the ERC-funded Eurostudents project, which explored constructions of contemporary higher education students by various social actors across six European countries. In my thesis, ‘Discursive Politics of Studentship: Representation of Higher Education Students in the News Media Across Europe,’ I examined and compared constructions of students in newspapers in Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Poland, and Spain.

My research interests encompass a wide range of higher education-related themes, including student identities and discursive practices of identity formation, marketisation of higher education, educational inequalities, media studies, and cross-national and international higher education research. Currently, my research focuses on utopian theories and methods, students’ utopias of food assistance, as well as the political imagination and agency of students in a changing welfare society.

Anupam Sen (anupam.sen@uef.fi)

I am a grant researcher in the University of Eastern Finland since January 2022 with a grant from Kone Foundation for my doctoral research.

My doctoral research is aimed at exploring disposability, otherness, marginality, waste and their intricate relation to humanity in the context of contemporary dystopian literature (fiction and film). The aim of my research is to understand on a global scale the obsessive re/production of redundant populations across the world in this age of neo-liberal globalization and examine their precarious conditions as represented in various dystopic narratives. My dissertation is supervised by Professor Jopi Nyman and Pekka Kilpeläinen.

As a part of my doctoral researcher position at UEF, I am also teaching a course at MA level students.