Abstracts

Interrogating ‘Planetary Boundaries’ of the Anthropocene: Borderlands, Justice, and Re-Ordering

Sanjay Chaturvedi (South Asian University)

The shifting meanings of boundaries and borders—both material/tangible and intangible/ideational, and across multiple scales—lie at the heart of unfolding debates on the Anthropocene. This ‘new’ social-geological epoch, marked by humanity’s unprecedented impacts on Earth’s geosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere, also generates under-researched boundary-inducing effects through its meta-geographies.

This keynote explores how borderlands, when re-imagined as homelands, function as under-recognised yet powerful barometers of the Anthropocene. Drawing on the lived realities of border villages in Indian Punjab, such as Mohar Jamsher, it highlights how communities at the margins are doubly exposed—both to ecological disruptions like floods and agrarian precarity, and to the epistemic violence of the post-partition locational curse. These experiences underscore the limits of classical geopolitics, rooted in rigid borders and state-centric security, in addressing socio-environmental injustices.

The keynote proposes de-bordering as both method and metaphor: questioning undifferentiated notions of sovereignty, development, and risk, while re-envisioning borders as sites where ‘collective climate security’ may be approached through the lens of ontological (in)securities. Situating border communities as vantage points rather than peripheries, it calls for inclusive, bottom-up governance and a move beyond technocratic framings of planetary limits toward more just, culturally embedded, and integrated approaches to Earth System Governance. The notion of a critical geopolitics of the Anthropocene advanced here directly challenges the conceit that planetary problems can be managed through the very bordered frameworks that produced them.

 

Unexplored Literary Territory: Brussels Through the Eyes of Outsiders

Elisabeth Bekers (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

In 1992, Dutch novelist W. F. Hermans commented on his choice to live in Brussels by noting that the city was “unexplored territory” (1992: 36–37, my transl.), a remark that can certainly also be applied to the city’s depiction in literature. Unlike other major cities whose iconic identities (Paris, city of love; New York, promised land) are widely recognized, the Belgian capital has not developed a distinctive myth of its own and consequently is less familiar to readers and scholars of modern literature. Nevertheless, since the 19th century, Brussels has inspired canonised and less-established authors, locals and foreigners writing in various European languages. In this paper, I will consider how Brussels has been imagined from the perspective of the Other—termed hetero-images in imagology, which studies how national and cultural images and stereotypes are construed in literature (Beller & Leerssen 2007).

In my discussion, the views of Brussels formulated by European border-crossers in works by canonical French and British authors from the 19th century—Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, and Joseph Conrad—are compared with the perceptions offered by non-European travellers and immigrants in contemporary works by foreign and Brussels-based writers of non-European descent, such as Teju Cole, Alecia McKenzie, and Leïla Houari. The authors of this relatively broad range of works will be shown to be less interested in capturing the spirit of Brussels—let alone in creating a transcendent myth or a comprehensive portrait of the city—than in tailoring the city to their own agendas. In my close reading of selected fragments, I will demonstrate how Brussels serves as a pretext for self-criticism and self-reflective socio-criticism, for which the authors draw on urban tropes that are applicable well beyond the Belgian capital, such as the city as palimpsest, flânerie, alienation, existential crisis, colonial continuities, cosmopolitan hybridity, and the persistence of boundaries and margins in an increasingly globalised world/Brussels.

Embodied Mobilities and Transcultural Memory in Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life

Ari Räisänen (School of Humanities, UEF)

The ‘American dream’ narrative of upward immigrant mobility underpins U.S. national ideology, often obscuring the political and social histories that drive migration. This paper examines how embodied mobility in Atticus Lish’s Preparations for the Next Life (2014) facilitates the emergence of a transcultural memory that reveals these masked histories. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s concepts of “multidirectional” and “knotted” memory, I argue that the novel’s focus on movement, borders, and kinaesthesis performs memory work with aesthetic and narrative function. Mobility thus forms a mnemonic meshwork that is both transcultural and multidirectional. The novel’s juxtaposition of the undocumented immigrant and the traumatized veteran further critiques contemporary American culture, revealing how personal mobilities and memories intersect with broader historical and political narratives.

 

Memories of Industrial Work in Sweden-Finnish Literature

Eila Rantonen (Literature Studies, University of Turku)

My paper deals with depictions of industrial work in Sweden-Finnish prose and autobiographical writings. Finnish immigration to Sweden was extensive especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Current Sweden-Finnish writers, such as Susanna Alakoski, have considered it important to address the memories of work of their parents and grandparents. Especially the first generation of Sweden-Finns have written about the experiences of hard industrial work and working-class life in Sweden (e.g. Pynnönen 1991; Vallenius 1998; Gröndahl 2018). These stories include reflections on ethnic minority identity, mobilities as well as cross-cultural encounters. In my presentation, I will discuss the intersections between class, ethnicity and gender. For example, Sweden-Finnish women writers have depicted women’s experiences in male-dominated metal industries and trade unions. I will also examine what kinds of rhetoric and stylistic devices are employed in these class-conscious texts.

 

“Immigrating into History”: Immigrant Encounters with Finnish WWII Memory

Olga Davydova-Minguet, Olga Filippova, Tetiana Nahirniak (Karelian Institute, UEF)

Our presentation introduces the Kone Foundation–supported project Towards Relational and Multidirectional Dialogue on Memory Politics in a Diverse Finnish Society (launched in summer 2024). The project engages two immigrant groups: Russian speakers and Ukrainians who arrived after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Importantly, the researchers share the same backgrounds as the participants.

The project examines how these groups encounter Finnish WWII memory sites, reflecting emotionally and intellectually on their meanings. Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine forms the backdrop, sharpening the relevance of WWII narratives, which in Finland are tied to patriotism, defense, and national identity.

Key questions include: How do immigrants perceive and reinterpret WWII in the Finnish context? How does today’s war reshape their relation to these narratives? And how do concepts of diversity apply to Finland’s memory landscape?

We present preliminary results from the project’s first year, focusing on discussions with Russian-speaking and Ukrainian participants and the themes emerging from their reflections.

 

True Crime as a Death Penalty’s Cross-Narrative in Modern Russia

Alena Fedotova (ExpREES, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki)

The death penalty in Russia is a law, political, cultural and social question. The state may reinstate the death penalty as a form of punishment – and how media narratives prepare citizens for the return of legal murder?

The death penalty is the ultimate punishment for criminal offences.  Nowadays Russia is the only country in the Council of Europe that has not ratified the European Convention of Human rights. This means that Russia retains the right to lift the moratorium and reinstate the death penalty as the ultimate punishment. The idea of bringing back the death penalty is being actively promoted through social media and media products. In recent years, there’s been a big increase in interest in the ‘true crime’ genre in Russian media. This confirms the idea that the media shapes narratives that can influence legislation and increase acceptance of killings.

The Securitisation of Transnational Influences of Media in the Russian-Speaking Diaspora

Tiina Sotkasiira (Department of Social Sciences, UEF)

This presentation examines Russian diaspora politics through the lens of media use, exploring the interplay between communication and politics based on interview data collected in 2015–2016. It also reflects on the topic from a more recent perspective, considering the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation in 2022 and its impact on Finnish society. The presentation discusses the diverse motives behind diasporic media use and considers the types of conflicts related to Russian speakers’ media consumption, as well as how they navigate their media environments and the contradictions within them. The study confirms the strong politicisation of the media landscape for Russian speakers in Finland already some ten years ago and identifies elements of political mobilisation among the residents of Russian origin in recent years.

 

Caring for Democracy in Geopolitical Uncertainty

Aija Lulle (Department of Geographical and Historical Studies, UEF)

My research explores how everyday life-making practices contribute to sustaining democracy in Latgale, a geopolitically sensitive border region of Latvia that borders Russia and Belarus. While migrants are being pushed back at the borders and many locals have left to earn money abroad, this study focuses on those who remain. It examines how these residents—through their commitment to place and community—invest significant, often invisible labour in nurturing democratic values. I will analyse specific groups of active individuals, including mothers, youth, athletes, choirs, and hunters, who not only sustain everyday life but also actively shape the future in places overshadowed by geopolitical uncertainty.

 

International Migration and Policy Responses in Kazakhstan

Minna Piipponen (Karelian Institute, UEF)

The presentation outlines the plan of my research visits to the Nazarbayev University (Astana, Kazakhstan) and the University of Zurich in the spring of 2026. I will focus on the recent international migratory trends and policy responses, with a particular emphasis on Kazakhstan among the Central Asian countries. Unlike many other Central Asian countries, which experience large-scale labour migration, especially to Russia, Kazakhstan is a migration-receiving country due to its economic development. As a result, it has not become dependent on the Russian labour market in the same way. However, the direct and indirect impacts of COVID-19, and especially the geopolitical instability following Russia’s attack on Ukraine, have also influenced migration in Kazakhstan. Furthermore, Kazakhstan receives refugees not only due to conflicts and extremism, but also as a result of climate change, and this type of mobility is expected to increase across Central Asia in the coming decades. As several ongoing phenomena may affect international migration and the dependencies of Central Asian countries, including Kazakhstan, I am interested in policy responses to these changes and studying how these responses may reflect the countries’ relations with Russia.

 

Europeans in Cairo – a Research Plan

Saara Koikkalainen (Karelian Institute, UEF)

Egypt is a transit hub for migration toward Europe and an important part of the Mediterranean migration system. However, Egypt is also a migration destination in its own right: IOM (2022) estimates that up to 9 million international migrants who originate from 133 countries live in the country.  While the largest national groups of migrants originate from Palestine, Syria, Sudan, Somalia and Iraq, this population also includes Europeans and other Westerners. They include as lifestyle and retirement migrants, corporate employees, researchers, artists, and students, for example. This presentation outlines the research on European voluntary migrants that I will conduct at the American University of Cairo within the “MARS – Non-Western Migration Regimes in a Global Perspective” project. My research falls within the project’s Research Stream 2, which focuses on (emerging) regional migration patterns, tendencies, and dynamics in the context of non-Western migration locales.

Protectors of State and Protectors of People. A Practitioner’s View into the Baltic Asylum Systems.

Teele Jänes (Department of Social Sciences, UEF)

Asylum decision-makers at times consider themselves as protectors of the state (Barry-Murphy & Stephenson, 2015). Within the framework of current ongoing doctoral study, data collected from the Baltic region in 2023-2024 provides a possibility to look into the accounts of asylum officials, judges, border guards and other key stakeholders as they describe their daily work in the field of asylum. Tasked with the dual goals of fulfilling international fundamental rights obligations and protecting (border) security, officials share their thoughts about navigating the institutional challenges and decision-making in the context of increasing cultural and religious diversity. Refugee support organisations are offering a balancing perspective on the asylum proceedings in the region, pointing to areas of concern at the borders and in decision-making.

 

The Threshold: What is Most Important in Life for Asylum Seekers

Ville R. Hartonen (School of Applied Educational Science and Teacher Education, UEF)

Public debate on humanitarian migration increasingly mobilizes the language of “values.” Such appeals perform dual functions: they foreground humanitarian, legal, and moral obligations while simultaneously positioning certain cultures and religions as incongruent with purported European values. In Finland, value-laden and discriminatory discourse has ethnicized forced migrants, thereby complicating their integration trajectories. Against this backdrop, this qualitative study interrogates what asylum seekers (n = 181) identify as most important in life during a threshold phase of settlement. Through qualitative analysis, seven domains of importance including family, existential significance, ontological security, participation and agency, psychological balance, and health along with losses emerge as existential anchors that sustain continuity and meaning across life transitions. These findings contribute to scholarship on migration and integration by centering asylum seekers’ evaluative horizons and by offering empirically grounded insights for fostering social cohesion amid divisive public discourse.

 

Narrating through Naming: Contesting Border Spectacles at the Sudanese Egyptian Borders during the April 15th, 2023, Conflict

Ahmed Idrees (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Doha, Qatar)

Egypt’s President El-Sisi has repeatedly referred to refugees from neighboring countries as “guests,” sparking a media debate on their presence and statistics. This occurs against a backdrop of restrictive immigration laws and a highly militarized border enforcement since 2023. Meanwhile, Sudanese irregular migrants to Egypt after the outbreak of the April 15, 2023, conflict, use numerous names narrating their border crossing experience. For example, “flybox”: the 4X4 vehicles”, “Takhzeena”: the waiting-points, and “Shattat”: the entire journey, and a hashtag for irregular border-crossing community’s content on TikTok. Considering these contrasting naming, How Naming and Counter Naming shapes the Sudan-Egypt Border spectacles? The current paper deal answers that question by building on concepts like “Narrating Names, Border Spectacles, Borderscapes,” and qualitatively analyzes various set of data: interviews conducted in 2024, and border legislation produced by the Egyptian state after the April 15, and textual and visual content on TikTok by irregular migration community with whom the researcher interacts.

 

The American Frontier Marches Northward: Greenland’s Annexation in U.S. Geopolitical Thought and Narrative

Marco Ghisetti (Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Lapland; Visiting Researcher, Arctic Centre)

Recent U.S. interest in annexing Greenland has sparked debate, yet this ambition stretches back to the 19th century. American policymakers have long framed Greenland as part of the Western Hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine, justifying claims. Over two centuries, recurring annexation proposals reflect a pattern of U.S. territorial expansion, from the Louisiana Purchase to Cold War securitisation.

This paper examines continuities between historical and contemporary narratives advocating Greenland’s incorporation into U.S. territory. Focusing on the Second World War and early Cold War, it analyses how Greenland’s strategic value was articulated during its de facto inclusion into U.S. security system. The study inquires how geopolitical narratives transformed the island from a peripheral space into a contested security asset. Through discourse analysis of WWII-era expansionist arguments, the paper highlights how historical justifications persist in modern debates, with strong implications for contemporary sovereignty debates and Arctic security perceptions.

Translocal Poetics: Galina Rymbu and the School of Experimental Writing

Inga Kontkanen (School of Humanities, UEF)

Poetic language, with its capacity for protest, holds the power to reshape reality. In literature, the symbolic and the real converge, generating a resistant force against oppression and stagnation. While propaganda seeks to exploit language, it cannot fully subordinate it; rather, it expels antagonistic forms from the public sphere. Within Russia’s authoritarian regime, preserving alternative linguistic practices becomes crucial for sustaining oppositional cultural environment. A notable example is the School of Experimental Writing, founded by Galina Rymbu with Russophone activists. By addressing themes of feminism, queerness and postcoloniality the School fosters an inclusive and democratic space of solidarity. Living in Lviv during the war, Rymbu reflects on questions of poetic language in general, as well as on her own, which she regards simultaneously as her mother tongue and a “language of the killer”. This paper examines her poem Mama Writes and the School through the lens of translocality and nomadism.

 

Queering the Vyshyvanka for Ukrainian Unity: Queer Activism during the Russo-Ukrainian War

Vassa Yakymets (School of Humanities, UEF)

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the struggle for independence, juxtaposed against Russia’s state-sanctioned homophobia, has provided a space for the queer community to shift the national narrative toward queer rights. This narrative is visibly spread through Ukrainian culture, signaling solidarity between the queer community and wider Ukrainian communities. This paper draws on recent cases of queering Ukrainian folk clothing, especially the vyshyvanka, as a means of examining this emerging discourse. Ultimately, it provides preliminary reflections on how conflict at the Ukrainian border has influenced the queer community’s adaptation of traditional culture to form counter-narratives for both queer rights and Ukrainian independence.

 

Cyberfeminism as a Negotiation Space Between Russia and the West, and Between Politics and Art

Daniil Zhaivoronok (Tampere University)

Cyberfeminism emerged in Russia in the early 1990s and experienced a second wave of popularity in the mid-2010s. This presentation explores the key figures and artifacts that shaped these developments, including various publications, artworks, and translations of Anglophone literature. It examines how cyberfeminism functioned as a mediator between Russia and the West and as a bridge between artistic practices and political activism.  The presentation is grounded in preliminary observations of the field and aims to raise questions about the role of transnational cyberfeminist discourse in local cultural and political contexts.

 

Images of Russia and Russianness in Translation: The Reception of Oksana Vasyakina’s Finnish Translations

Erja Vottonen and Marja Sorvari (School of Humanities, UEF)

In recent years, two novels by Russian author, feminist and human rights activist Oksana Vasyakina (b. 1989) have been translated into Finnish: Haava (Rana, 2021; trans. Riku Toivola, 2023) and Aro (Step, 2022; trans. Riku Toivola, 2024). They are among the few translations of contemporary Russian fiction published in Finnish after the outbreak of Russia’s war of aggression, and they have well received in newspaper reviews and literary blogs.

Vasyakina stands out in the Finnish translation landscape, as her works address feminism and LGBTQ+ rights in Russia – subjects largely absent in earlier translations dominated by male authors and retranslations of Russian classics. This presentation examines how Vasyakina’s works were chosen for translation and how they have been received by Finnish readers. To examine the reception and images of Russia and Russianness, we analyze paratexts such as translator interviews, reviews and blogs.

Topography of Cultural Cold War: Transnational Nodes, Routes and Networks of Tamizdat

Ilaria Sicari (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; Leiden University College)

During the so-called “Cultural Cold War”, the ideological struggle between the two blocs was primarily fought on the battlefield of cultural production and the weapons massively employed in the fight were books.

With the aim to trace a socio-cultural history of Soviet and Eastern European literature not submitted to censorship (nepodtsenzurnaia literatura), this research analyzes the transnational production, circulation, and reception of tamizdat by focusing on socio-cultural small actors (individual and institutions) involved – at different levels, with different roles and goals – in all the phases of the publishing process, from the clandestine smuggling of manuscripts (samizdat) to their print (tamizdat) and distribution in the West and, underground, also in the Eastern bloc. In that way, it is possible to foreground the role of state and non-state actors (such as social activists, dissidents, editors, translators, literary agents, critics, diplomats, émigré journals, literary associations, covert organizations etc.) in preventing the cultural isolation of the two blocs and in promoting the circulation of knowledge and ideas across and beyond the Iron Curtain, a geopolitical and ideological border extremely permeable to cultural objects.

In this seminar – through the use of digital tools for analyzing, extracting and visualizing data from a corpus of archival documents – Sicari propose a model for tracing the “topography of Cold War culture” and representing the complexity of the cross-border flow of cultural objects by mapping the transnational routes of samizdat/tamizdat and the relation networks among the socio-cultural actors involved in their cross-border production and circulation.

 

“Readers from Kuokkala to Cairo” The Transnational Impact of the Magazine Žurnal Sodružestva (1933–1938) 

Sofia Schulgin (School of Humanities, UEF)

What actually were the transnational, or cross-border, impact and narrative of the periodical Žurnal Sodružestva, published in Vyborg between 1933 and 1938.

The magazine in question has not previously been studied from a transnational perspective. Previous research on the magazine in Russian and Finnish has mainly mapped the magazine’s early publishing history and its positioning as a part of the extensive Russian-language émigré press around the world around 1917-1940.

Magazine had as part not only of the Russian-speaking community in Vyborg, but also more broadly as part of the international borderless microcommunities of Russian diaspora in the interwar period were a tense tangle of political-literary circles, to which the international situation often added its own tensions, especially in the mid-1930s.

From the perspective of mobility, cultural history, minority history and migrant studies, it is also important to take into account the interwar period, the means and ways in which information was shared within the Russian-speaking linguistic minority. The publication in question, the magazine, was a periodical whose content reflected stirring and topical issues within the international Russian diaspora.

 

Multilingualism in English-dominated Scientific Research

ReTra research group: Juho Suokas, Erja Vottonen, Elina Kainulainen, Helka Riionheimo, Esa Penttilä (School of Humanities, UEF)

Present-day research work may often be presented as a monolingual, English-speaking monolith when scientific work is narrativized in both popular media and scientific publications. In fact, in many linguistic and cultural contexts, researchers are expected to work in English, yet these contexts are often so diverse that attempts to force everything into an Anglophone mould can be ethically, linguistically, and epistemologically questionable.

In this presentation, we present examples of what kind of narratives and assumptions are constructed when people involved in research work discuss multilingualism, translation, and the role of English. Our examples originate from interviews conducted with researchers and language service providers during the spring of 2025. This presentation is based on initial examination of our interview data, which comprises all in all 74 interviews.

Assemblages of Art and Identity in Transit: The Novye Khudozhniki and Their Reception in Finland

Pauliina Lukinmaa (School of Humanities, UEF)

The onset of perestroika is closely tied to the Soviet underground art scene and has been described as “a gate in time and space” (Turkina & Mazin, 2018). Among the key figures of this cultural shift was the Leningrad-based group Novye Khudozhniki (New Artists), founded in 1982. Their work engaged with themes such as aestheticized homosexuality, fin-de-siècle sensibilities, and the European-Byzantine spirit of St. Petersburg, often expressed through pastiche and collage.

Many of its members first traveled west via Finland, where their work gained visibility through exhibitions and Timur Novikov’s Ars Fennica nomination (1994), prompting reciprocal visits to St. Petersburg. This paper asks: How did New Academy artists navigate artistic identity across borders, and how were they received in the Finnish context?

 

The Finnish Reception of Maxim Gorky’s Literary Works, 1900-1939

Sini Siitonen (School of Humanities, UEF)

The conference proposal is based on a doctoral dissertation currently being completed in Finnish at the University of Eastern Finland, titled ‘The Finnish Reception of Maxim Gorky’s Literary Works, 1900-1939’. The research falls within the fields of literary studies, reception studies and Russian literature, examining the connections between Maxim Gorky and Finland, as well as the Finnish reception of his literary works in Finland, the United States, and the Soviet Union.

The doctoral dissertation on introduces new perspectives to the transnational study of Russian literature. The cultural status that Gorky received in the Finnish art world reflects the breaking of conventional national boundaries, as well as the reception and valuation of his literary work reflects not only the Finnish reception of socialist realism but also the transnational nature of socialist realism itself. The dissertation is the first extensive investigation into Maxim Gorky’s influence within the Finnish cultural sphere.

 

Cultural Border-crossings: Texts and Women on the Move in the Literary Field of Finland, Russia, and the Soviet Union

Kati Launis and Marja Sorvari (School of Humanities, UEF)

How many female authors, writing in Russian, are you familiar with? If you have only read a few works, it is not because literature written by women has not been published or transmitted throughout history. There have been many women writers and cultural agents in the literary field between Finland, Russia and the Soviet Union, but literary history has been written in a way that emphasises national boundaries and highlights Russian male classics. In other words, the narrative of crossing borders — national, linguistic and cultural — has been incomplete and gendered.

The proposed presentation will focus on literary relations between Finland, Russia and the Soviet Union, as well as the reception of two female writers, Marie Linder (1840–1870) and Nina Berberova (1901–1993), who transmitted ideas and ideologies across borders. Reception is understood broadly to include not only translations, but also the various ways in which texts have moved transnationally. The presentation is based on the project Texts on the move: Reception of women’s writing in Finland and Russia 1840–2020 (Emil Aaltonen Foundation), and the edited volume Liikkuvat tekstit, liikkuvat naiset: Suomen, Venäjän ja Neuvostoliiton kirjallisella kentällä (2025).

The 1922 Soviet-Finnish Border Peace Agreement and its Impact on Finnish Defense Preparations and Operations at the Beginning of the Winter War (1939-1940)

Pasi Tuunainen (Department of Geographical and Historical Studies, UEF)

The Tartu Peace Agreement of 1920 established the border between Finland and Soviet Russia. In 1922 a follow-up agreement was signed to avoid future border clashes in the areas between Lake Ladoga and the Arctic Ocean. Thereafter according to the treaty, only lightly armed regular army and frontier guard units could be stationed in the designated border zones that were at least 10 kilometers in width on both sides of the border. There were also limitations on the strength of those forces and their weaponry.

This paper examines how strict compliance with the terms of the border peace agreement by the Finns affected their abilities to defend their eastern border during the interwar period and in the opening phase of the Winter War.

 

Wicked Cities, Guilty Cities. Narrating the Urban “Other” as Socio-political Bordering

James W. Scott (Karelian Institute, UEF)

Real and imagined urban-rural divides are a perennial staple of antagonistic identity politics which pit “big city” cosmopolitanism against the “national authenticity” of rural and semi-rural environments. Both US President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister have engaged in a demonisation of metropolitan centres as part of their politics of division. Although reasons and contexts differ, their narrations of cities as enemy of the nation, as something crime-ridden, foreign and treacherous are essentially projects of socio-political bordering that resonate with familiar right-wing populist tropes. These bordering narratives are targeted at Budapest in Orban’s case, and Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and San Francisco among others in Trump’s. This contribution to the BoMoCult conference will discuss the deep roots of ideas that inform Trumpian and Orbánist framing of cities as something “wicked” or “guilty”. However, this identification of the city as enemy space is not limited to discourse, political practices that discriminate against cities and vindictively curtail their autonomy will also be analysed.

Shifting Identities in Northern Ireland and the Narrativisation of the Irish Border

Mairéad Lordan (Karelian Institute, UEF)

The Good Friday Agreement institutionalised the idea that demographic change – particularly the development of a nationalist majority – would determine Northern Ireland’s constitutional future. This has produced a powerful narrativisation of the border, with census figures being treated as sectarian headcounts and shifting demographics as harbingers of political destiny, intensifying anxieties in both Irish and British communities around sovereignty, belonging and security. Nationalist politicians narrativise uncertainty surrounding the border as a monumental, historic opportunity, while unionist politicians depict it as a terrifying, existential threat, shaping law-making as everyday policy debates are refracted through these competing narratives. This paper argues that this fuels recurrent political deadlock, leading to governance that is ineffective and unable to address daily social and economic challenges. It further considers how these narratives, amplified through political discourse, reinforce simplified interpretations of demographic change and exacerbate ongoing and historical tension between the two traditional communities of Northern Ireland.

Postdystopian Care: Climate Mobilities, Anticipatory Geomedia and Ecosocial Infrastructuring

Tuomo Alhojärvi (School of Humanities, UEF)

The ongoing climate breakdown has disastrous ramifications on different peoples, species and ecosystems. This is acutely seen in and narrativized as people forced on the move due to politically mediated ecosocial unravelling. Climate mobilities are exposed to stratification and bordering in geopolitical but also cognitive and epistemic terms. As critics of racialized and securitized governance argue, global violences of climate coloniality translate into dystopian frameworks of anticipating mobile peoples. In the Global North, dystopian racializations often feed into militarised forms of securitization as well state-centric, structurally violent frameworks of governance. Here, I propose an alternative framework for exploring and amplifying urban forms of care from a decidedly postdystopian perspective. The focus is on ecosocial infrastructuring, which refers to a geomediated patterning of solidarity, abundance and commoning. Discussing the promise of counter-cartographic strategies, I present a postdystopian toolkit of radical care in an age of racially differentiated climate breakdown.

 

Narrativising Postcolonial Aviation: Aeromobile Chronotopes in Francophone African Fiction

Anna-Leena Toivanen (School of Humanities, UEF)

Despite its global connotations, aeromobility tends to be associated with Western kinetic elites and the Global North (Lin 2016). Air travel has also been studied from a postcolonial perspective in the context of Afrodiasporic literatures (e.g., Neigh 2018; Kumavie 2021; Toivanen 2021), but it has primarily been explored as a transcontinental form of mobility. This paper discusses African aeromobilities in three Francophone African novels, namely Ibuka Ndjoli’s Une Place là-haut, Rachid Hachi’s Testaments du ciel, and Assamala Amoi’s Avion par terre. While aeromobility is often rendered in a marginal manner in African literary texts, these novels foreground aviation as both a thematic concern and a chronotopic organisational device (Bakhtin 1981), rendering them genuine aeromobile novels. The texts emphasise intracontinental flights and localised experiences, challenging dominant transcontinental migration narratives. They reveal tensions between mobility’s social, technical, and political frictions and symbolic flight as escape or transformation. The texts critique the presumed smoothness of air travel and expand literary and postcolonial understandings of African aeromobilities.

 

Migrant Masculinities in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician

Rodwell Makombe (Department of English, North-West University, South Africa, Humboldt Fellow, University of Bonn)

Transnational migration and its attendant challenges have become recurring themes in African novels of migration that have emerged in recent years, particularly after the year 2000. Scholarship on this literature (Motahane et al 2020, Guiliani 2021) has tended to focus on issues of home, identity and belonging and neglected issues of gender and its performance away from home. In this paper, I explore how two Zimbabwean novels, namely NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician depict the un/performance of masculinity and femininity by migrant characters in foreign spaces.  I ask how migrants negotiate gender norms and roles in spaces that subscribe to different norms and value systems. How does one become a man or a woman in a foreign land? I draw on Judith Butler’s (1988) notion of gender performativity and Homi Bhabha’s (1992) the “unhomely” and the “Third Space” (1994) to reflect on the ways in which migrant characters in the two texts (un)perform gender roles in foreign spaces. Judith Butler’s idea of gender performativity is premised on the idea that gender is not something innate, or given to us at a birth, but something performed according to a particular cultural script. On the other hand, Bhabha’s idea of the “Third Space” suggests that culture (and in my case, gender) is located, not in established traditions but in the contact zone in-between cultures. This paper argues that the two novels portray foreign countries as fluid spaces that require migrants to adjust to and adopt new gender norms and roles that often contradict those of their home cultures.

Narrating Insecurity: Border Fences as Symbolic Politics 

Olga Cielemecka and Jussi Laine (Karelian Institute, UEF)

Despite post-Cold War aspirations for openness, Europe has witnessed a resurgence of hard borders in recent years. This paper examines newly constructed border fences in Poland and Finland, arguing that these structures serve not only as physical security measures but also as symbolic instruments within contemporary political discourse. Through an analysis of policies and narratives surrounding these cases, we demonstrate how border fences function as legitimizing symbols of threat and insecurity. Positioned within a context shaped by hybrid threats and the instrumentalization of migration, these barriers create an illusion of control and safety while obscuring and, at times, deepening underlying structural challenges. This study forms part of the project “Not just a fence: Disentangling the boundaries of order, logic, and control,” which explores the multifaceted roles of border infrastructure in shaping perceptions of security and political order.

 

Encountering Living Borders in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune

Anupam Kamal Sen (School of Humanities, UEF)

This paper discusses Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021-2024), a two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel of the same name, as a narrative of ruin where collapse and resilience are inseparably linked. The film adaptations visualize a dystopian future where a desert planet named Arrakis is ravaged by the politics of resource extraction. What is more, imperial violence constitutes this regime as a state of exception in which sovereign power exerts necropolitical dominance over the lives of Fremen and the desert’s living ecosystems. However, against such exploitative apparatus, the desert emerges as a ‘living border’, where resilience is vitalized through non-human entanglements, especially through the sandworms, which shape, regulate, and resist movements. Taking this into account, this paper asks: What does it mean to encounter a border that is alive and where movement is regulated by nonhuman species that defy sovereign control?

 

Border Crossings and Borderscapes: Reframing Diasporic Belonging in Lahiri’s The Namesake

Priyanka Muhury (School of Humanities, UEF)

This article explores the role of geographical, cultural, and affective borders and borderscapes in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake through Ashima Ganguli’s experiences, foregrounding the novel as a powerful intervention in the narrativization of borders, mobilities, and cultural encounters. The narrative subtly conveys Ashima’s deep-seated liminality as she continually negotiates layered bordering processes between Calcutta and America. Her movement thus offers an affective counter-narrative to static representations of belonging, highlighting how South Asian women construct stories that resist the simplified portrayals of border-crossing often circulated in media and political discourse. Ashima’s evolving self within this complex borderscape, a concept developed by border theorists such as Brambilla to describe sites of encounters that extend beyond physical borders, demonstrates the novel’s capacity to illuminate the enduring impact of border-crossings on identity formation and to provide a more nuanced understanding of diasporic experience that transcends reductive political messaging.

How to Explore Border Narratives through Visual Analysis: The Case of the Finnish–Russian Border

Virpi Kaisto (Karelian Institute, UEF)

This paper presents one example on how visual analysis can shed light on border narratives. It examines representations of the Finnish–Russian border in Finland’s leading newspaper Helsingin Sanomat over the past decade (between 2013 and 2022)—a period marked by escalating geopolitical tensions and shifting everyday realities at the border. Based on a visual rhetorical analysis of 841 press images, the study identifies four overarching strategies that construct the image of the border: as something to be crossed, controlled, managed, and lived in daily life. The findings show that the changing social and political contexts significantly shaped the border representations. Yet, Helsingin Sanomat consistently foregrounded the human dimension of the border. Only Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 produced a marked shift toward more restrictive and securitised imagery.

 

Bible References in Patriarch Kirill’s Statements During the Russo-Ukrainian War

Anni-Maria Peltola (School of Theology, UEF)

This study analyzes Patriarch Kirill’s religious rhetoric during the Russo-Ukrainian War, focusing on the use of biblical references to justify Russia’s military actions. Applying Stephen Toulmin’s model of argumentation, the research identifies patterns in Kirill’s speeches that frame the conflict as a metaphysical struggle—portraying Russia as a divine force opposing Western sinfulness and the Antichrist. It argues that biblical citations serve a strategic argumentative function, legitimizing aggression and aligning Russian Orthodoxy with state ideology. Through a systematic evaluation of theological discourse, the study reveals how religious narratives are constructed to influence moral and political decision-making in wartime. This approach contributes to understanding the persuasive power of faith-based messaging in shaping geopolitical narratives and highlights the broader societal implications of religious argumentation in contemporary conflicts.

 

Surplus Value, Synergetic Space, and Spatial Organization in Cross-border Cooperation

Chao Jiang (Karelian Institute, UEF)

Cross-border cooperation is widely practiced yet remains under-theorized in terms of its fundamental value, especially at a time when national sovereignty discourses cast doubt on the necessity of cooperation. This paper addresses this gap by advancing a conceptual framework built on three interlinked concepts: surplus value, synergetic space, and spatial organization. Existing literature has overlooked how surplus value is unlocked through geographic synergy. I argue that surplus value—both material and immaterial, such as revenue, knowledge, trust, and social ties—emerges through the production of synergetic space, an integrated spatial formation whose effects surpass what its individual border regions could generate if taken alone. This space is organized through spatial relations, practices, and experiences that enable cooperation across multiple levels of stakeholders. By proposing a new formula to capture surplus value, the paper offers a novel theoretical lens that challenges conventional understandings of CBC and rethinks its surplus value in an era of resurgent border nationalisms.

Finnish-Russian Transnationals and Dividing Ideoscapes of Death

Teemu Oivo

This presentation examines the cultural aspects of death within the context of four popular Russian-speaking discussion forums in Finland. What death-related topics stir discussion, and what do these discussions reveal about people navigating their transnational lives between cultures and countries in Finnish-Russian context in the early 2020s? Transnational discussions demonstrate how funerals, bureaucracy, and national commemoration often highlight aspects of national, religious, European, and Soviet demarcation, and how people navigating these cultures relate to them. The online groups themselves provide peer support and the opportunity to hear and share experiences from people with similar Russian or Soviet backgrounds coping with various discussion stirring encounters in Finland. The participants often express a wide range of emotions, including grief, frustration, and nostalgia, occasionally diving into heated arguments.

 

Discussing Religiosity and Non-Religiosity in Russian Speakers’ Deaths in Finland

Pirjo Pöllänen and Olga Davydova-Minguet (Karelian Institute, UEF)

The presentation examines the experiences of Russian-speaking immigrants regarding the role of religion, religiosity and secularity when they face the death of the close relative in Finland. In death, the importance of community and relationships becomes visible. Death also requires practical and ritual care, where the need for so-called death experts is remarkable. In Finland, in accordance with the Lutheran ethos, church officials act as death experts. We ask how the attitude towards religion or secularity affect Russian-speaking immigrants’ encounters and experiences of the society permeated by the Finnish Lutheran ethos in connection with the death of a loved one.

 

The Gendered Everyday Care of (Transnational) Cemeteries in Rural Border Region North Karelia

Ismo Björn and Pirjo Pöllänen (Karelian Institute, UEF)

The presentation is built on the intersection of cemetery research with everyday and care studies. When we talk about taking care of graves, we define care like Fisher and Tronto (1990) as maintenance of life on behalf of another. In this case, the object of care is the last resting place of the deceased – the grave. We treat the cemetery as a gendered space and grave care as a woman’s place of work, and we look for a historical explanation as to why the cemetery is specifically a place for care for women. In addition, we ponder how national views of caring for graves are seen in rural border context in eastern Finland. How caring for cemeteries and graves have become gendered, national or transnational and how they change over time. We focus our attention especially on the rural border context and ponder also the changing forms of transnationalism.