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20180923

I really believe this city is teaching me something. It works on me, my views on independence, freedom and collaboration are being altered by this place. In New York freedom is the right to express yourself and move without interference, in Helsinki freedom is about having access to forums were futures are being decided.

A Feminist Counterapocalypse (2018) Joanna Zylinska. The text frames Judith Butler as a posthumanist (We suspected this with Pietari)! It gives a great overview to Anna Tsing’s thinking and provides a framework for further developing the happy degrowth movement or a #deathhack cult. More Anna Tsing on Landscapes (2016) Anthropod podcast. Terms to take home from the lecture: Creatures of Empire = Animals which colonizers brought with them (horses etc.), Shock-Troops = Pathogens, Camp followers (Starlings etc.) = Species brought by settlers which threaten threatening local ecology. “Landscape assemblage”.

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20180711

Animals and Anthropology (2018) AnthroPod podcast. A good source for learning about approaches animal studies offer anthropology (and arts). When human interests (white male) are positioned outside the focus of a study, different beings have the opportunity to emerge. For example “wildness” (as a state of being) is linked to colonial views of what nature is. Wildlife reserves are for animals which fit westerners views on how wild beings should behave – Uninterfered by human development, like in paradise. The podcast provides (yet an other) argument that anthropomorphisation is not as bad as previously thought, when it offers us a way to approach others (as informants of situated knowledge). There is also a call for decolonisation of animal studies.

More-than-Human Politics (2016) AnthroPod podcast. A less compact series of talks and discussions, which investigates how to translate nonhuman knowledge into words and texts. I think this is a silly question to begin with… It’s not actually a question, it’s a statement (or a prayer, like loreipsum), uttered to further the omnipotence of words. The statement is fuelled by able-bodied nostalgia and a mystic believe that there is a meaning behind what we experience. Judging from a recent column Sofie Oksanen is a victim of the same mysticism A Soviet shadow looms over the Putin-Trump summit in Helsinki (2018).

Language shapes reality, and our recent history still makes Finland behave in a certain way.