Kategoriarkiv: Doktorsavhandlingar

Dissertation Defence: Kun kunta lakkasi olemasta: Kylä- ja kotiseutuyhdistykset kuntarakenteen muutoksiin reagoivina toimijoina (2023)

Disputationer, Doktorsavhandlingar, Publikationer, ,

Niina Koskihaara is defending her thesis in ethnology at University of Turku on November 10, 12:00-16:00 at Arje Scheinin -sali, DENTALIA, Lemminkäisenkatu 2, 20520, TURKU. The defence can also be followed online.

Read more here

English abstract:

When the municipality ceased to exist. Village and local heritage associations as reactive actors to municipal mergers

The topic of this study is the restructuring of local government and services in the early 2000s (PARAS project) and its impacts on communities operating at the local level. The research project examines how the reform, initiated at the highest level of state administration, affected the activities and operational environment of village and local heritage associations as well as the cultural processes resulting from the municipal mergers at the local level. The actors involved with village and local heritage associations have most clearly focused their efforts on specific villages and local regions. During the municipal restructuring, concerns were expressed at the local level about the villages and home regions being left behind as neglected and remote villages, causing the sense of place and local identity to disappear.

The study focuses on nine village and local heritage associations that operate in municipalities where the reform was carried out in 2007 and 2009: Mynämäki (Mynämäki and Mietoinen in 2007), Pälkäne (Pälkäne and Luopioinen in 2007), Salo (Salo, Halikko, Kiikala, Kisko, Kuusjoki, Muurla, Perniö, Pertteli, Suomusjärvi and Särkisalo in 2009) and Hämeenlinna (Hauho, Hämeenlinna, Kalvola, Lammi, Renko and Tuulos in 2009). The main data for the research project consists of thematic interviews conducted with association actors. In addition, the interviews include discussions with the main actors in LEADER groups and cultural associations. The method employed for analysing the data is close reading. The theoretical framework guiding the research and shaping the close reading approach is based on Lefebvre’s triad of social space, which adopts the perspective of viewing the municipality as a conceptualised, perceived and lived space.

The study demonstrates that the restructuring of local government and services was not merely about administrative reorganisation but also concretely impacted community activities and the operational environment as a whole. Municipalities are important partners for village and local heritage associations. The municipal restructuring brought about alterations in the forms and prerequisites of such relationships. The operational methods of the new municipality required the associations to adapt, redirect their approaches and engage in advocacy with respect to the municipality. The municipal mergers also triggered processes whereby village and local heritage associations became subject to new expectations, leading them to reconsider the contents of their activities, their (geographical) scope and their inter-associational collaboration. The removal of municipal borders also revealed the ways in which the former ‘boundaries’ between communities had impacted municipal relations.

The characteristics of places, family and friendship ties, as well as involvement in associations, serve as factors emotionally connecting associational actors at the local level. The interviewees’ descriptions of their personal local identities appear more fluid and shifting in the study than their identities at the community level, whose modes and areas of operation are defined more narrowly. People are the most significant resource in association activities, but they also pose a threat to the continuation of operations if associations fail to attract new participants. Changes that impact residents’ everyday lives at the local level motivate people to participate in association activities.

The thesis can be found here.

Kutsu osallistua tieteelliseen toimintaan. Etnografisia näkökulmia monitieteisen kyselytoiminnan yhteistyöhön ja käytäntöihin (2023)

Disputationer, Doktorsavhandlingar, Publikationer

Anna Kirveennummi is defending her doctoral thesis ”Kutsu osallistua tieteelliseen toimintaan. Etnografisia näkökulmia monitieteisen kyselytoiminnan yhteistyöhön ja käytäntöihin” in ethnology at University of Turku 16 June 2023 at 12:00.

Read more here.

English summary of the thesis:

An invitation to participate in scientific activity: ethnographic perspectives on collaboration practices in multidisciplinary questionnaire activity

Qualitative thematic inquiries form a specific method for creating research material, comparable to fieldwork, interviews and semi-structured questionnaire forms. The idea behind this method of collection was to send questionnaires published in printed leaflets to people who assisted researchers in providing information about their observations, experiences and memories connected with folk life. The basis of this study is the multidisciplinary and collaborative process of inviting citizens to create a new set of ethnological and sociological collections at the University of Turku. It took shape through the series of questionnaire leaflets Tiedusteluja kansallisten tieteiden alalta (Inquiries from the field of national sciences).

The starting point for my work is the University of Turku TYKL-Collections of the Archives of the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies (HKTL-archives). I examine the series of questionnaire pamphlets as well as related archive materials and discussions. I contemplate how questionnaire activity directed at citizens was planned and realized and on what kinds of social and intellectual interaction, circumstances and practices these forms of collaboration were based. By studying the processes from various ethnographic perspectives I attempt to deepen understanding of the many connections between the methods applied in questionnaire activity, on the one hand, and cultural, societal and scientific changes, on the other.

The series of questionnaire pamphlets was initiated in 1958 by Esko Aaltonen (1893-1966), Professor of Sociology, while he was serving as head of the Department of Sociology and the new Department of Ethnology in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Turku. I have identified the most active period for multidisciplinary collaboration to be 1958–1962, during which time 14 questionnaire pamphlets appeared. They contained a total of 28 questionnaires, of which 12 came from sociology and 13 from ethnology, sometimes in parallel and sometimes consecutively. Three questionnaires intended for rural workers in specific trades were implemented in closer collaboration between the two disciplines. The basis for scientific co-operation was formed through regular work on the methodology of questionnaire leaflets. The invitation process was intended to be accessible and engaging for the respondents as well as to fit the research profiles of the institutions.

Esko Aaltonen and other researchers in the so-called national sciences participated actively in the Finnish Local Heritage Federation (Kotiseutuliitto) and other rural and museum organizations. It was also through these organizations that citizens were familiarized with the process of collecting materials and responding to questionnaires as aspects of knowledge creation and circulation. Prompts and practical instructions for amateur scholars who collected and wrote down responses to the questionnaires were shaped in the guides to local work (Kotiseututyön opas, 1948, 1953, 1963) published by Esko Aaltonen. During the 1950s and 1960s the methodological attention shifted from collection of material to new use contexts for the materials connected with rural sociology and planning the emerging modern society. The polyphony of questionnaire activity can be read in the various research programs that I recognize in the formulation of the questionnaires and prompts. During the 1950s and 1960s as well the significance of field work gradually began to be emphasized and questionnaire activity was modified to be a kind of passive field work conducted in rural communities.

Finally, using selected examples of personal data forms, I contemplate what preconditions for responding were created in survey activity. In the closing discussion I explore the opportunities for analyzing and developing methods of asking in connection, for example, with emerging areas of practice in sustainability and citizen science.

Translation by Kendra Willson

The thesis can be found here.

Desires of Decoloniality and Museal Logics: Encounters between the Swedish Museum of Ethnography, democratic ideals, and contemporary audiences (2023)

Disputationer, Doktorsavhandlingar, Publikationer, , , , ,

Charlotte Engman disputerar den 5 maj 2023 i etnologi vid Umeå Universitet med en avhandling vid namn Desires of Decoloniality and Museal Logics: Encounters between the Swedish Museum of Ethnography, democratic ideals, and contemporary audiences. Opponent är Anna Rastas.

Tid: Fredag 5 maj, 2023 kl. 10:00 – 12:00
Plats: UB.A 240, Lindellhallen 4, Samhällsvetarhuset, Umeå

Avhandlingens abstrakt:

‘Decolonisation’ is a frequently used expression in museum contexts, and a growing museal practice. In ethnographic museums, such attempts are usually performed in the shape of projects that seek to establish new relationships with source– or diasporan communities. However, little research has been produced about how these practices relate to the political demands and expectations set on state museums, and how they are shaped in a Swedish context. By following the project Ongoing Africa at the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Sweden, the thesis aims to explore how different museal logics condition activities, are reproduced, and relate to each other. The empirical data consists of interviews with museum staff and collaborators engaged in the project, observations of project activities, and written data such as policy documents and government publications.

The findings show that tension and ambivalence characterise museal decoloniality. Along with ideals of social inclusion, co-creation and decolonial agendas, the museal economy is being eroded and activities market-adjusted, at the same time as the museum is also expected to be educative and authoritarian. While museum professionals struggle with creating relevance for the museum and the collections, the latter has been discursively fragmented through contemporary investments in heritage justice and repatriation discourse. To external stake holders, the ethnographic collection symbolises ongoing forms of colonial violence and heritage items that contribute to diasporan identity formation. Furthermore, the public museum is today a place where contemporary anti-racist ideology manifest itself through silences performed in relation to racialisation, and knowledge is at the museum a contingent and relational practice.

Avhandlingen kan läsas i diva-portal.

The Kink Community in Finland: Affect, Belonging, and Everyday Life (2023)

Disputationer, Doktorsavhandlingar, Publikationer, , , , ,

Johanna Pohtinen is defending her doctoral dissertation in ethnology at University of Turku, 25 February 2023 klo 12.00 – 16.00 (UTC +2). The title of the dissertation is The Kink Community in Finland: Affect, Belonging, and Everyday Life and it can be found here.

From the abstract:

This research explores the relationship between kink and everyday life, how affects are related to kink, and how community and belonging are important for kinky individuals. The main research material consists of themed writings, which deal with kinksters’ relationship to the community and their own kinkiness. The materials also include photographs of kink objects and homes, as well as participant observation and interviews on kink events. The materials are understood as dialogical: they are in dialogue with each other and with the researcher. The research methods are based on cultural analysis and draw on theories on affect, community, and everyday life.

Time Warps. Refugees and the Experience of Waiting in Rural Sweden (2023)

Doktorsavhandlingar, Publikationer

Time Warps. Refugees and the Experience of Waiting in Rural Sweden is a doctoral dissertation written by Rikard Engblom at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at Uppsala University.

From the abstract:

This thesis explores the ways in which refugees’ experience of time is warped when they come to Sweden. It is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Avesta, a small municipality in rural Sweden. Refugee reception and immigration control in Sweden is characterized by humanitarian ideals that exist in tension with practices and policies aiming to restrict immigration in the name of security and stability. Each chapter of this thesis documents a different combination of these ideals and concerns, examining how they generate particular configurations of waiting. For many refugees in Sweden, everyday life is characterized by waiting—waiting to have their asylum application processed; to receive a residence permit, which grants them the right to work; to be reunited with their families to find a place in Swedish society. This process often takes several years, during which the conditions for receiving residence permit may suddenly change or be made more difficult. The thesis is a contribution to the recent “temporal turn” in migration studies through its focus on waiting as a productive phenomenon in vulnerable circumstances. The increased presence of refugees has given rise to anti-immigrant sentiments in Sweden, but it has also generated welcoming, compassionate responses. By addressing not only how refugees cope with living in a continual state of waiting under precarious conditions, but also how bureacracies, civil societies, and individuals respond to this waiting, the thesis discusses the sociological and ethical implications of refugees’ waiting. Time Warps demonstrates the importance of unpacking combinations of humanitarianism and securitarianism when developing a deepened understanding of refugees experience of waiting in rural Sweden.

Full text can be found in diva-portal.

Kalevalan kirjallista nykykäyttöä (2022)

Disputationer, Doktorsavhandlingar, Publikationer

Merja Leppälahti is defending her doctoral thesis Kalevalan kirjallista nykykäyttöä (Contemporary literary use of the Kalevala) at University of Turku on Saturday 3 December 2022 at 12:00. You can read more here (in Finnish).

The thesis can be viewed here.

Short excerpt from the English abstract:

”Right from its publishing, our national epic Kalevala has been an inspiration to artists, authors, and composers. Interest in the Kalevala has continued to this day, and it still continues.

Here I research how material from the Kalevala is used in new texts. The main material consists of fiction literature published over three decades, and I also look at metal music lyrics. This research consists of five articles and a summary section, where I also present the research material. The research touches the interface between literary studies and folkloristics. The material is literature, but the perspective is that of cultural studies.”

”Sillä ainahan merimies sentään on erimies”: Merimiesidentiteetit muuttuvassa maailmassa (2022)

Disputationer, Doktorsavhandlingar, Publikationer, , ,

Ulla Kallberg is defending her doctoral thesis in ethnology ”Sillä ainahan merimies sentään on erimies”: Merimiesidentiteetit muuttuvassa maailmassa (in english ”For always a sailor is a different man”: Seaman identities in a changing world) at University of Turku on Saturday 12 November 12:00-16:00. More information can be found on University of Turku’s website.

The thesis can be found here.

An short excerpt from the english summary:

”This study, which is part of the field of ethnology, examines the manifestation of the self and self-understanding of Finnish sailors in the working communities of steamers transporting freight. Central to it is the experience of an individual working as a sailor on an ocean liner about his own self and how he understands himself. The events described in the study date to between 1910 and 1955.”

Dissertation Defence: Fangar hefðarinnar: Konur og kvenleiki í íslenskum þjóðsögum

Disputationer, Doktorsavhandlingar, Publikationer, ,

Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir is defending her dissertation in folkloristics at University of Iceland today, June 7th 2022 14:00-16:00 (GMT/UTC+0). The dissertation is named Fangar hefðarinnar: Konur og kvenleiki í íslenskum þjóðsögum (in english something like: Prisoners of tradition: Women and femininity in Icelandic folktales).

You can follow the dissertation defence online (in english). Read more here.

If you want to read a little bit more about the research in english you can have a look here.

Anakrona livsvillkor: En studie av funktionalitet, möjligheter och begär i den föränderliga svenska välfärdsstaten

Disputationer, Doktorsavhandlingar, Publikationer, , , , , ,

Den 3 juni disputerar Christine Bylund i etnologi i Umeå på avhandlingen ”Anakrona livsvillkor: En studie av funktionalitet, möjligheter och begär i den föränderliga svenska välfärdsstaten”. Opponent är Maria Bäckman, Stockholms universitet.

Avhandlingen kan läsas här.

Engelskt abstract:
Since 2009 a decrease in support for dis/abled people provided by the welfare state has taken place. In this process, the concept of family and relationships are both overlooked and central. Cuts of support significantly impact family lives, rendering dis/abled people dependent on their partners, parents, or children. However, little research has been produced about how the needs, wants, and desires of dis/abled people are affected by the changing welfare state.

This thesis examines the connections between the changing forms of support in the welfare state, desire, and relationships through a crip-theoretical understanding of dis/ability and a phenomenological understanding of the welfare state as a structure for orientation in both a practical and existential sense. The material consists of interviews with dis/abled people based on the principle of cross-disability and autoethnographic writing.

The findings show that an ableist discourse shapes the welfare state’s earliest support, resulting in segregation and isolation. These discourses were challenged during the period of deinstitutionalisation and through the passing of the LSS-law in the 1993s but never entirely dismantled. During the contemporary neoliberal austerity politics, it returns, positioning dis/abled people as a societal burden. Due to its intimate nature and its conditioning of everyday life, the relationship to the welfare state can be understood as a relationship of its own. Changes in the welfare state affect the physical and emotional movements, making certain lifestyles and relationships appear possible and others impossible. The thesis contributes to and nuances the previous research on the intersection of welfare state support and services and the practical and existential experiences of dis/abled people in Sweden.

 

Autonomous Åland. A hundred years of borderwork in the Baltic Sea

Doktorsavhandlingar, Publikationer,

In Oktober 2021, Ida Hughes Tidlund publicly defended her academic dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnology at Stockholm University. The dissertation can be found in diva-portal.

The abstract from diva:

”This dissertation applies an ethnological and long-temporal view of borders. The region of Åland, being an autonomous and demilitarised island territory under Finnish sovereignty, serves as an illuminative case of the work that goes into keeping borders fixed for two reasons. The region being maritime is the first one, and it being in a betwixt position between a state and a province is the second. The study seeks to explore the borders as cultural entities composed by layers – legal, geographical, political and social – and the processes through which the borders have been anchored. As important are the ways in which the borders extend into everyday life by creating a local order that activities relate to. Borders are hence seen as both objects and sources of actions. Seeing borders as objects of action function as an entry into an exploration of how the borders have been objects of continuous work since their establishment in 1921. The idea of them being sources of actions serves as a window into how the borders in numerous ways have influenced everyday life for inhabitants. In order to analyse the work that goes into borders as well as the actions borders cause, the study explores both the authoritative borderwork and how the borders or their effects have been encountered and handled by individuals who live within. The multifaceted view is achieved through a broad material consisting of archived documents, archived ethnological interviews, participant observations and contemporary interviews, in combination with studies of law and publications. Through the use of the phenomenological concept of practico-inert, the study reveals both how borders are outcomes of incessant human actions, and how they create an undisputable structure for individuals to observe and relate to, but not necessarily obey. In summary, the study contributes with a detailed description of how bordered places are created, and how individuals navigate the structures that they live within. ”