Veera Kinnunen | University of Oulu (original) (raw)

Drafts by Veera Kinnunen

When you move from one apartment to another, you are forced to face all your belongings – from th... more When you move from one apartment to another, you are forced to face all your belongings – from the granny’s old piano to the pile of forgotten articles and lecture notes. You have to decide what to take to the new location, and what to do with the rest. This “gap in accommodation” is the starting point of my ongoing doctoral thesis aspiring to provide new insights into our ways of cohabiting with things

Papers by Veera Kinnunen

Routledge eBooks, Aug 24, 2022

How would patterns of consumption change if we faced not litter, rubbish, trash or "recycling" bu... more How would patterns of consumption change if we faced not litter, rubbish, trash or "recycling" but an accumulating pile of lively and potentially dangerous matter?

Openness should not be interpreted as weakness, nor as indecision, but rather as the courage to r... more Openness should not be interpreted as weakness, nor as indecision, but rather as the courage to refuse the comforting refuge of broad categories and fixed unidirectional vision.

Routledge eBooks, Aug 24, 2022

Menneisyyden kudokset KEHOLLINEN, LUOVA KIRJOITTAMINEN KULTTUURIHISTORIALLISESSA TUTKIMUKSESSA, 2022

Kirjoittaminen on ajattelua. Kirjoittaminen on myös oivaltamista: historiantutkija lukee lähteitä... more Kirjoittaminen on ajattelua. Kirjoittaminen on myös oivaltamista: historiantutkija lukee lähteitä, jotka usein ovat kirjallisessa muodossa, ja muodostaa niiden pohjalta tulkinnan. Tulkinta esitetään muille useimmiten tekstinä. Kirjoittaminen ei kuitenkaan ole vain pään sisällä tapahtuvaa toimintaa. Se on ruumiillista, lihallista, jopa aistillista. 1 Kirjoittaessa keho toimii, kädet ja sormet juoksevat näppäimistöllä, kynä liikkuu paperilla. Monet kirjoittajat tunnistavat kokemuksen, että sanat tuntuvat virtaavan sormista kuin itsestään. 2 Kirjoittaminen myös tapahtuu tietyssä paikassa, tietynlaisten materiaalisten olosuhteiden mahdollistamana, ja kirjoittamishetken aistimukset, tunnelmat ja mielialat vaikuttavat tekstiin. Tässä artikkelissa yhdistämme luovan kirjoittamisen menetelmiä kulttuurihistorialliseen kirjoittamiseen ja kysymme, miten tunnustella menneisyyden kudoksia kirjoittamalla. Kysymme myös, miten luovan

Living ethics in a more-than-human world, 2017

The issue of ethics is gaining increasing attention in both academic and public debates. For inst... more The issue of ethics is gaining increasing attention in both academic and public debates. For instance, ethics is at the core of the discussions of multiple crises the world is facing; academics are more and more concerned of ethics and politics of doing research; and consumers, citizens and business people encounter complex ethical dilemmas in their everyday life. In this situation, there is a pressing need to develop novel forms of ethics that capture these phenomena and to provide alternative ethical foundations for co-existing in our world.
The purpose of this seminar is to enable and foster the multidisciplinary debate on the issue of ethics as a research topic and as a mode of living in the world, both as academics and as citizens. Living in the world not only refers to human co-existence, but also involves living with various forms of non-human entities – e.g. animals, plants, things, matter, houses, soil, water, air – and in various places and spaces from homes to cities, forests and beyond. Ethical everyday life with these human and non-human relations might require that we call into question the things and beliefs that we take for granted right now.

This study aspires to provide a fresh account of the everyday ethics of living with things by scr... more This study aspires to provide a fresh account of the everyday ethics of living with things by scrutinizing the process of moving house. An average Finnish family owns approximately 10 000 to 50 000 individual pieces of personal property. Ever-accumulating “stuff ” forms an integral but often unobtrusive backdrop to the contemporary way of life. In recent decades, the gradual accumulation of things and its side effects, such as the increasing problems of where to put them and how and where to dispose of them, have become both a societal and individual problem. This study analyses our habitual, everyday life with things and argues that the current environmental crisis calls for an ethics that takes into account not only the needs of other people and animals but all kinds of materialities. Finding fertile ground for an ethics of object relations at the corporeal encounters between humans and things, the research sets out to develop a more than human stance on the everyday ethics of living with things. Drawing inspiration from Tim Ingold and Sarah Pink, the study understands home as a meshwork co-constituted by multifarious elements and their constant movements, which together carve their routes in and through the structures of a home. From this point of view, to inhabit a place is to join in the flux of that place with one’s things. In the flow of everyday domestic life, things are routinely being worked with, maintained, repaired, washed, dusted and discarded without these processes being given a second thought. This habitual engagement becomes momentarily traceable when what have become self-evident routines of everyday life are somehow disrupted. In this study, the process of moving house is taken as a rupture, a juncture, or gap, in accommodation offering a vantage point from which to study the everyday ethics of living with things. When moving house, one is forced to encounter things by going through all one’s belongings, sorting them out and carrying them to the new dwelling. To grasp the ethical dimension of living with things the study draws on Rosalyn Diprose’s idea of corporeal ethics. Diprose develops a position on ethics that does not derive from rational calculation and normative thinking but rather from affective, pre-reflective engagement of sensible bodies. For Diprose a physical encounter is always a disturbing ethical moment: to be open and generous towards other bodies is to be open to other ways of thinking and doing. This ethical dimension of living with things becomes evident in the fleshy encounters of people and things. The study pursues its aims through the following questions: 1) How is life shared with things, 2) how are unwanted things closed out of lives and 3) how does one settle into a new setting with things? The ethnographical data of the study consist of three complementary sets: 1) the entries submitted to a writing competition organized in collaboration with the Finnish Literature Society (SKS), 2) diaries written during the process of moving and 3) ethnographic participatory observation in moving processes. The analysis of the rich ethnographic data has been guided by affective and sensory ethnographic methods. It focuses on three key, intertwined phases of moving – sorting out, crossing thresholds and settling in – which highlight the diversity of living with things from different angles. The study dwells on the threshold of practices of disposing of and keeping things. It argues that an object relationship constitutes a situationally occurring meshwork of ties that bind a thing and human being together. Some meshworks are stronger and messier, and some are weaker. People seem to nurture the meshworks of things as long as they are attached to them, but once the ties are broken, rejected items may not be recognized as things worth caring for anymore. This is the point when an item becomes trash. The study calls for attention to materialities that are not recognized as things. It argues that the current aim to achieve a Circular Society challenges us to treat unwanted and excluded things – trash – as potential objects of care. This turn of recognition would have ethico-political consequences.