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.

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

 

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.

Jaana Vuori (jaana.vuori@uef.fi)

In her research, Jaana Vuori is currently focusing on migrant integration work and public service interpreting. She is also interested in the research topics parenting, family and gender. Vuori is working as the professor in gender studies in Cultural Studies BA and MA programs. Methodologically Vuori is specialized in qualitative research methods, especially discourse analysis and ethnography. Vuori is part of the research community https://www.uef.fi/en/research-community/borders-mobilities-and-cultural-encounters-bomocult.

 

Joni Virkkunen (joni.virkkunen@uef.fi)

Joni Virkkunen (PhD, title of docent) works as a Research Manager at the Karelian Institute. He is also the Director of the VERA Centre for Russian and Border Studies, a member of the executive board 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. His research relates to borders, border governance, cross-border cooperation, EU-Russian relations, regional and cross-border cooperation and transnational migration in Russian and post-Soviet contexts. He has been recently studying, for example, the Northern Dimension policy and the regional impacts of EU-Russia relations, local meanings of the border and cross-border cooperation, the 2015-2016 Arctic migration route through/from Russia to Finland and, recently, temporary protection holders from Ukraine. The latter he has been studying through Finnish and Russian migration and border policies, publicity and public debates, migrants’ everyday insecurities, and informal practices.

Kari Korolainen (kari.korolainen@uef.fi)

How do traditions – cultural continuities within immaterial and material folklore and customs – relate to geographical and other, more symbolic borders as well the plurality of mobilities? And what kinds of perspectives open up, when these issues are addressed from the viewpoint of material and visual culture, and aesthetic matters? How do we visualize, especially by means of sketching, things like immaterial folklore, beauty, or borders? What viewpoints research and arts, separately and together, provide for these questions?

Folklore and culture studies researcher Kari Korolainen is specialized in cultural traditions and mundane aesthetic issues, as well in visual and material culture, not only in the research but also from the practical stance. In the project the Lost Mitten and Other Stories (Jan 1, 2018-July 31, 2020), Korolainen combined research and visual arts. Accordingly, “Marjatta & Ilman Kinna” comic book was published (by Kirjokansi) in February 2020 In the earlier studies, Korolainen dealt with issues as the borderlands of (visual) arts, home decoration and cultural customs from the viewpoint of artification. Korolainen possess multidimensional expertise also in the issues relating to the collecting and the archives of the folklore materials. He used to work in the Finnish Literature Society Archive and in the North Karelian Museum. Formerly, he worked as a visual artist.

Minna Piipponen (minna.piipponen@uef.fi)

I am a Human Geographer, D.Soc.Sci. My latest research interests focus on international migratory processes related to Russia. The earlier interests covered community and regional development related to restructuring processes of natural resource industries especially in North-West Russia and border regions. In addition, I do organizational tasks at the Karelian Institute including e.g. providing support for the Institute’s researchers and projects in their daily work, as well as communication and reporting tasks.

I work also as the Coordinator of the Borders, Mobilities and Cultural Encounters research community (BOMOCULT RC). This research community brings together research teams and scholars from the Karelian Institute, the Department of Social Sciences and the School of Historical and Geographical Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies, as well as from the School of Humanities and the School of Theology at the Philosophical Faculty.

Saara Koikkalainen (saara.koikkalainen@uef.fi)

I work as a university researcher in the Cultural encounters, mobilities and borders (CULTCHANGE) -profile area (2020-2023). My research focuses on various mobility phenomana in Europe, such as on the experiences of Nordic migrants in London during the Brexit era and mobility caused by the war in Ukraine. This research has also been funded by the Kone foundation, the Alfred Kordelinin Foundation and the Kansan sivistysrahasto -foundation. My PhD (University of Lapland 2013) examined the labour market experiences of highly skilled Finns in the European labour markets. I have published also on migration decision making, the labour market position of return migrants, intra-European mobility and Iraqi asylum seekers in Finland.

Tuulikki Kurki (tuulikki.kurki@uef.fi)

I work as a Professor in cultural studies (specialising in research on cultural change) at the School of Humanities, University of Eastern Finland. My recent research has focused on borders and borderlands from the point of view of culture, literature, and objects, and my latest monograph addresses Finnish language literature in Russian Karelia, ”Rajan kirjailijat: Venäjän Karjalan suomenkieliset kirjailijat tilan ja identiteetin kirjoittajina” (Trans. Writers of the Border: Finnish Speaking Writers of Space and Identity in Russian Karelia, SKS, 2018). My recent research projects include “Traumatized Borders: Reviving Subversive Narratives of B/Order, and Other” (Academy of Finland, 2016-20), and “A Lost Mitten and Other Stories: Experiences of Borders, Mobilities, and New Neighbor Relations” (Kone Foundation, 2018-2022). Visit the virtual exhibition of the project “A Lost Mitten and Other Stories” here: https://www.360panorama.fi/360KadonnutKinnas/.