No abstract

The reconstruction of Lapland after World War II did not mean merely restoring the pre-war infrastructure and buildings; Lapland was both reconstructed and built afresh at the same time. Reconstruction was viewed by planners and architects as an inspiring challenge to modernise the devastated areas. Lapland region was considered a real-life laboratory for arranging novel ways for “living, moving and working”. Almost all the rapids of Finland´s longest river, the Kemijoki, were harnessed during the 1950s and 1960s. The construction of hydropower plants changed both the mental and physical landscape of Northern Finland in ways that were not anticipated in the planning stage of the projects. One of the rapids harnessed on the Kemijoki River was Pirttikoski. During the construction years (1955-1959) the population of Pirttikoski grew from zero to almost 4000. In this article I will discuss the kinds of modernising influences that the construction of the power plants introduced into the culture and everyday lives of the people living in the region, asking what was the ethos of regional planning articulated in the planning of both the community and the region. I will further explore what was the anticipated future society that the designers of Lapland regional plan in the 1950s were pursuing. In this article the village of Pirttikoski serves as a model community in two ways. Firstly, Pirttikoski was originally designed as an experimental model community for creating solutions for future power plant construction site communities. Secondly, it is a model village of my study, a micro case from which I will examine the process of designing a regional plan for Lapland in the 1950s.  

With Microbes shows the diversity of human-microbe relationships and their dynamism, through detailed ethnographies of the relationships between humans, animals, plants, and microbes. The objective is to look at situated practices: categories mobilized by people to talk about their relationships with microbes, their practices and actions, stories people tell about microbes and materialities that are specific to them. Therefore, the volume is just as much on scientific practices of living-with-microbes as it about other ways of engaging with them. The introduction develops the notion of 'withnessing' to understand these relations. Ethnographic contributions of the book present diverse forms of microbial encounters that open up new perspectives, showing how humans and microbes compose common worlds together. Crucially, the authors and editors of this project put forward new vocabulary for describing the human-more-than-human nexus without dichotomizing between nature and culture, subject and object, human and other, etc. This is a move away from an approach that stresses on terms, entities, and individual organisms, to attend to the relationships between human-microbe entanglements, how they develop and by which they exist.

This article is a reflexive methodological opening into changing writing by transforming the event of writing.Drawing from feminist theorization and the recent calls for writing differently, the eventness of academic writing was attested. It was explored how experimenting with and altering the writing events opens up potentialities for change in us as researchers, and in the practices of academic knowing in a wider sense. Three autoethnographic experiments were shared in transforming the writing through creative fiction, corporeal movement, and collective speculation. Introducing an event-based mode to the academic thinking and writing practices provided us with means to broaden our scholarly imagination by writing from and with our feeling, sensing, and moving bodies, which allowed us to ask tentative questions and speculate wildly.

The energy in these islands is a literal force that changes the body, and so changes what you know about the world. (Watts, p. 50)