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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)

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).

 

Aino Luotonen (aino.luotonen@uef.fi)

My research interests include everyday life, family figurations, intimacies, kinship, temporality, qualitative methods and sociological theory. I work as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the project Networks of reproduction in the complex planetary future: Intimacy, companionship and family building in Finland, Portugal, and Scotland (NETREP) that investigates young adults’ thoughts and plans concerning family and intimate life in the context of social, economic, and environmental crises. The project is funded by Kone Foundation. My background is in Sociology and I am Dr. of Social Sciences  (from University of Helsinki).

I am the editor-in-chief of Perheyhteiskunta.fi, a Finnish blog popularising scientific research on families and intimate lives. I am also a board member of Finnish Society for Research on Families and Personal Relationships.

Aku Seppänen (aku.seppanen@uef.fi)

Professor Aku Seppänen leads a research team, which develops and applies computational and statistical methods for solving inverse problems arising from (physical) science and engineering. The main applications are: 1) environmental monitoring and modeling (especially measuring atmospheric aerosols and remote sensing of forests), and 2) tomographic imaging (especially electrical impedance tomography, industrial process tomography, non-destructive material testing and structural health monitoring; special emphasis is on concrete and other cement-based materials and structures).

Alexandra Simon (alexandra.simon-lopez@uef.fi)

My primary fields of research are transculturality, imagology, German writers abroad, German film and television, the European Avant-Garde, and the Apocalypse in cultural productions. I teach all areas of German language and culture courses, including text workshops, oral communication, literature and culture courses, media and business German courses.

I am Docent in Multicultural Literature and Media Studies (University of Turku), and I hold a PhD in Comparative Literature (University of Eastern Finland). My professional career and multilingual and intercultural research projects are grounded in my enthusiasm and personal life, as I have lived and worked in several European countries over the past 20 years. I studied in Germany (Düsseldorf), Spain (Salamanca) and France (Nice), worked as a lecturer in France (Nantes) and the United Kingdom (Cambridge).

Andrew Copus (andrew.copus@uef.fi)

Andrew has more than thirty years experience in Rural Development Research at Institutes and Universities in Scotland. Also ten years part-time secondment to Nordregio, (Stockholm).
His interests include rural demography, development approaches for remote rural areas and islands, and European and National rural/regional policy.