Keynotes

Keynote speakers for the Finnish Gender Studies Conference 2026 are an associate Professor Matilda Arvidsson, a scholar and writer Susanna Hast, and a multidisciplinary artist Onerva Luoma.

Matilda Arvidsson

Matilda Arvidsson is a legal and interdisciplinary scholar based in Lund, Sweden. She studies how law, technology, flora, and fauna interact. Drawing on posthuman, de-colonial and feminist theories she researchers how humans and non-humans, technologies, and institutions produce and embody law and justice. An editor of the Routledge book series on AI, Law and Society, and a co-editor in chief of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, her research has featured e.g. in the Australian Feminist Law Journal, the Leiden Journal of International Law, and the  American Journal of International Law Unbound.

Recently published work include: M. Arvidsson (2025) ‘A jurisprudence of gardens: International law, architecture and gardens of multitudes’, in R. Voss, S. Stolk & M. Bak McKenna (eds) International Law and Architecture (Edward Elgar); and  M. Arvidsson (2025) ‘On gardens of the Anthropocene: gendered violence, colonial legal enclosures, and feminist posthuman kinship’, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment.

Susanna Hast

Photo: Eeva Anundi

Susanna Hast is a Finnish author, performer and a researcher of war and militarism. She is an associate professor of artistic research at the Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. Hast has studied compassion in war, Finnish military training and synchronicity in capoeira, among other things. She is known for using sound art and song writing in her research. 

Hast’s first literary novel Ruumis/huoneet (Body of Evidence) published by S&S won the prestigious Helsingin Sanomat literature prize in 2022 and was praised for its raw and honest account of sexual violence as well as its genre-bending form. Hast’s second novel Toivottomuus (Despair, S&S) was nominated for Runeberg-prize in 2025 and European Union Literature Prize in 2026. In reviews Despair has been called structurally ambitious world-class literature. 

In recent years Susanna Hast has become one of the rising voices of Finnish literary fiction. She brings citation into literature as an uncompromising artistic practice and transforms the novel into a space of thinking.

Onerva Luoma

Onerva Luoma is a multidisciplinary artist, costume designer, and writer. Driven by the use of recycled materials, playfulness is central to her work. Everything she creates could be described as collage: Luoma collects and rearranges. 

Her practice is characterized by various in-betweens. She is equally at home in the borderlands between art and design, text and image, as well as science and art. In recent years, her artistic practice has focused on exploring what a meaningful relationship with clothing might mean in the context of the climate catastrophe. She is currently leading a pilot project to establish Finland’s first clothing library at the Oodi Central Library in Helsinki. 

Her works have been featured in solo exhibitions in Finland and the United States. Luoma has worked as a costume designer for theaters such as Q-teatteri, Oulu Theater, and Vaasa City Theater. She has created performance costumes for artists such as Litku Klemetti. Her debut novel will be published in the summer of 2027.