Keynote speakers, abstracts & recommended readings for each session

Inna Perheentupa & Saara Särmä: Exploring Zine-making as a method to rethink capitalism

During this session, the workshop participants will get started with crafting their own self-made self-publications, zines. The session starts with a brief introduction to what zines are, how they are connected to the do it yourself -culture, and enable working with political imagination and envisaging alternative futures. After the brief introduction to the medium, we will discuss the possibilities of making one’s own zine, by introducing different types of zines and approaches to editing them.

We will also discover a key zine making method, collaging, and what that is in practice. Materials for collage-making – cutting, ripping, gluing, and drawing – will be provided for the participants of the session. But participants are also welcome to bring their own materials, for example printouts or magazines or other found items.

Zine and collage making does not require any previous knowledge or artistic skills, so anyone willing to experiment and play is warmly welcome to the session.

The session will be moderated by postdoctoral researchers Inna Perheentupa and Saara Särmä. The participants can work on their zines for the whole duration of the three-day workshop. The zines will be showcased on the final day of the workshop, Wednesday. Parts of them such as single collages can also be contributions to the joint edited volume.

Inna Perheentupa is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology at the University of Turku. In her research, she has specialized in issues of activism, feminism, social change, and political imagination. She first became fascinated by zines during her PhD project on feminist activism in Russia. Currently she is working on a book chapter that discovers the Feminist Anti-War Movement’s zine Zhenskaia Pravda, and the way it discusses gender and nationality. Inna is currently a member of the research project Equality to economics, feminism to fiscal policy: Tensions of feminist knowledge and politics in the strategic state (https://blogit.utu.fi/femtie/in-english/). In the project she is co-editing a book with the working title Feminismiä talouteen: opas kriittiseen talouslukutaitoon (Feminism to economics: a guide to thinking about economics critically, Gaudeamus, 2024), which aim is to democratize economic talk and bring feminist and ecological issues to its core. She is also co-editing a special issue on political imagination this Spring. Before engaging with research, she worked as a journalist for media outlets such as Helsingin Sanomat, Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE and the Finnish News Agency.

Dr. Saara Särmä is a feminist, an activist, an artist and a researcher. She’s interested in politics of visuality and image circulation, feminist academic activism, collaborative woek, and laughter in world politics. Saara is the creator of “Congrats, you have an all male panel!” and co-founder of the Feminist Think Tank Hattu, which has empowered numerous women in Schools of Daring and Cursing Soirées. Her doctoral dissertation in International Relations (University of Tampere, 2014) focused on internet parody images and developed a unique and innovative art-based collage methodology for studying world politics, which her postdoctoral project (at Tampere University 2019-2023) Making Meaning out of Meme-making expands. She has also worked at Finnish National Defence University researching Hybrid Terrorizing. In her artistic work, Saara has been engaged in several projects aiming at countering the effects of hatemail and online misogyny. She is committed to making both academia and the world kinder and better places.

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Sabaheta Ramcilovic-Suominen: Why decoloniality should be the foundation of all future action and deliberate “inaction” (as decolonial strategy)

Strategies and approaches that aim to resolve the socioecological crises human and other-than-humans face are as multiple and diverse as are those crises – from the limits to growth and sustainable development, to Earth stewardship and Planetary boundaries, to Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chuclucene and more recently Degrowth. The scope and extent of Decolonial critique of such Eurocentric and Global North based approaches is similarly wide and deep.

In my talk I will argue that if the current dominant strategies for “saving the world” are to cease to reproduce the row (e.g. neocolonialism and extractivism for renewable energy) and slow violence (e.g. cognitive and epistemic injustice) – that are the core of the colonial-capitalist nexus and structures – they need to take decoloniality seriously.

I will approach decoloniality in a broad manner, one that is not limited to specific historic, geographic, racial, or related boundaries. By doing so, I aim not to neutralize or obscure the questions of reparations for colonialism and repatriation of Indigenous lands. On the contrary, I aim to create space and stimulate discussion about the multiplicity of ways, sites, levels, pathways and entry points toward reaching such goals, arguing that such need to be connected for collective envisioning of decolonial futures and pathways towards such futures, across the Globe.

I will argue that at the core of these multiple approaches and pathways to decoloniality is unlearning and active undoing of colonial, capitalist and extractivist ideas and knowledges, as well as the associated structures, which do not allow for, nor acknowledge other ways of knowing, relating, governing, being. I will try to disentangle what specific colonial logics needs unlearning and how this can be done. Concerning the later (the how), I will touch upon the relations between unlearning and undoing at the inner/internal and outer/external levels, which will take us to the discussion of unbecoming (that successful individual that the colonial-capitalist society has tricked you into becoming). In terms of action, I will echo decolonial scholars, such as Olivia Rutazibwa, to claim that along actions and protest, not participating and actively rejecting, refusing, and disobeying – quietly and visibly or otherwise – are all radical acts that carry out the desire to decolonise.

Sabaheta Ramcilovic-Suominen is an Associate Research Professor and Academy of Finland Research Fellow, based at the Natural Resources Institute Finland, Luke. Her research interests encompass the socioecological and political aspects of global forest and land use changes, including power relations and socioecological (in)justice. She has studied global, and EU driven environmental policy and governance instruments, such as those that promote green economy, bioeconomy, carbon forestry and forest legality. Her work sheds light on the intended and unintended effects such agendas and instruments have on the historically and currently marginalized, dispossessed and made vulnerable human and other-than-human populations. More recently her work explores the concepts and agendas of decoloniality, degrowth, and multispecies justice in relation to just socioecological transformations.

You can find more about her work at:

Luke: https://www.luke.fi/en/experts/sabaheta-ramciloviksuominen

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sabaheta-Ramcilovic-Suominen

GoogleScholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=iusOsZcAAAAJ&view_op=list_works

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/SabahetaRamilo1

Mariam Khawar: Alternative epistemologies in political economy: agency and private property in Islamic economic philosophy

The post-crisis global political stage urges us to explore heterodox epistemologies for answering ever-changing questions. The question of epistemologies is also integral for decolonial struggles inside and outside the academy. This session focuses on Islamic economic philosophy and explores the epistemology of Islamic economics and questions of decoloniality. Although scholars in Islamic studies engage with decoloniality, Islamic economic philosophy seems to be missing this conversation. It is argued that decoloniality in Islamic economics requires thinking from within the discipline without attempting to adhere its contours to particular ideologies (Marxism, Liberalism) or economic systems (socialism, capitalism). Critically engaging with Islamic medieval sources and interdisciplinary scholarship, it is clear that a variety of theoretical elements can be redefined in Islamic economics. This presentation discusses two of these, private property and the economic agency of women.

Mariam Khawar is a Doctoral researcher in the discipline of Political Science at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on the theoretical development of Islamic economic philosophy. This interdisciplinary project benefits from the diverse fields of political economy, global politics, Islamic philosophy and theology. Link: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/mariam-khawar

Jutta Bakonyi: Capitalism and Infrastructural Statecraft: how dialectic tensions of materials and mobilities drive the global reordering of state-society relations

Infrastructures matter. They mediate human experiences and facilitate how we engage with and think about the world. Long relegated to the background, the contemporary infrastructural boom across the global South dragged infrastructures into the limelight of academic studies. An increasing number of scholars across disciplines are raising questions about the role of materials in the making of our world. My paper will follow this question and show how the peculiar ontology of infrastructures as ‘matter that enables the movement of other matter’ (Larkin) brings to the fore dialectic tensions of materials and movements that are challenging conventional understandings of space, scale and agency. On the one hand, infrastructures are undergirding capital’s insatiable drive towards spatial expansion and ever-faster circulation and the promises of progress and access to a world of frictionless mobility and consumption that capitalism promotes. Infrastructural installations, on the other hand, enable the regulation of movements and make the mobile appear bounded and static. Border infrastructures, for example, underscore the division of the world into autonomous states. Infrastructures are co-constituting the unity of state, territory and people, and are driving feelings of nationalism and patriotism while the state inserts itself in everyday lives through the provision of water, electricity, sanitation, and roads. The paper will trace the dialectic tension between capital’s drive towards the transgression of all barriers and the states’ attempt to erect and solidify them. It will then introduce zoning as a spatial technology that mitigates these tensions and builds on examples to discuss the effects of these special technologies on state-society relations. While infrastructures, so my main argument, increase connectivity and speed up mobilities, they are ordering society and nature and are fostering distinctions that solidify relations of power which are, however, vested in promises and dreams.

Jutta Bakonyi is Professor of Development and Conflict at Durham University in the UK (https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/jutta-bakonyi/). Her main research interests are on the causes, actors and dynamics of violence, orders of violence beyond the state, state dynamics and international interventions. More recently, she has shifted her focus to the material and emotive side of politics and is conducting research on the nexus of urbanisation and displacement (securityonthemove.co.uk) and on the politics of infrastructures (https://more.bham.ac.uk/port-infrastructure/). I especially explore how infrastructures relate to global relations of power, state dynamics and shape (urban) lifeworlds.

Liisa-Rávná Finbog: Capitalism’s colonial epistemicides

Within the framework of a Western onto-epistemology, colonization is undeniably linked to the advance of capitalism – both as an ideology and economic system. Nevertheless, in the face of an the increasingly felt pressures of climate change, efforts to decolonize the capitalist markets are progressively being instituted; a process which often see various engagements with and the ecological knowledge of Indigenous communities. Through the politically correct lens of sustainability, Indigenous knowledges has become a core tenet of the decolonial movement, seemingly asserting values of equity and climate justice. Said adaption of Indigenous knowledges, however, are anything but.

Indigenous knowledge take part in sophistocated systems of knowledge, developed within specific contexts of land and philosophy. These epistemologies are aligned with particular ontologies, the latter of which form the foundation of the former. And yet, when knowledges from within these epistemologies are appropriated in the project of decolonization, and into other epistemologies, they are severed from their initial ontologies; re-imagined and re-named – often as sustainable practices. This process is a form of epistemicide, a killing of knowledge, and just like said killing in the past was intertwined with colonization, this new form of epistemicide finds it legitimacy in capitalism.

Dr. Liisa-Rávná Finbog (Rámavuol Liisa-Rávná) is a Sámi Indigenous scholar, duojár and curator from Oslo, Vaapste, and Skánit in the Norwegian part of Sápmi. As a long-time practitioner of duodji [Sámi practices of aesthetics and storytelling], her work combines her aesthetic practice with an Indigenous research focus, blending Sámi ways of being (ontology), knowing (epistemology), and doing (axiology) with traditional research paradigms of Western academia. Moving between Sámi aesthetics and the materiality of creative practices, she navigates the dynamics between fine art and politics of indigeneity in her work, both as an academic and duojár, but also in her curatorial practice. Due to her deep investment in Indigenous methodologies through creative practices, Finbog was in 2021 appointed as co-curator of the first ever Sámi Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. She is also a founding member of the artist collective, Hásstuheaddj, which has performed at multiple art scenes.

Finbog is currently based in Oslo, Norway, working as a curator at KORO (Norway’s national body responsible for curating, producing and activating art in public space). Additionally, she holds an associate researcher position at Tampere University in Finland.

A prolific author, her written works include the recently published “It Speaks to You – Making kin through people, stories, and duodji in Sámi Museums” (2023), contributions to collective works such as ‘Research Journeys In/To Multiple Ways of Knowing (2019), articles in Nordic Museology (2015) and in the digital platform “Action Stories” (2021), as well as essays in multiple exhibition catalogues (2022, 2023). You can find more about Liisa-Rávná and her work at her homesite: https://liisaravna.blog/about/

Henna-Elise Ventovirta: Movement-based workshop session: Retheorizing capitalism as reparation

This workshop invites all participants to reflect, question and integrate what they have experienced and learned in the previous days of the Retheorising Capitalism Funfair. For this integration we will use a mixture of spatial scores, movement tasks, reflection in small groups and creative writing. No previous experience with the abovementioned practices is needed. The objective of the workshop is to go beyond the problem analysis of capitalist assemblages, and to intentionally trace that which is life-enhancing and regenerative at the peripheries and outside of capitalism. We will get intrigued about what is already existing in our bodies, relationships, intertwined environments, and communities that live, breathe, and function outside of capitalist accumulation logics. What is reparative about the theories and perspectives that we have learned about in the last days of the Funfair?

In the attempt of tracing the life-enhancing, I anchor in the invitation of the Finnish Feminist International Relations (IR) scholar, Elina Penttinen, who has developed a new methodology of joy for social sciences. Penttinen finds that it is elemental to pay active attention to that which is reparative and restorative in order to find solutions to prevailing injustices instead of only digging deeper into the narratives of misery and violence. Sedgwick (2002, 143), like Penttinen, also proposes reparative reading and practises as a counterbalance to paranoid societal readings. According to Sedgwick (2002, 134-137), the priority in paranoid interpretation of politics is to focus on the worsening of existing problems in order to avoid an even more devastating future. However, there is little room for surprise, joy, or a better future in such an understanding of society because, ironically, the constant portrayal of ruin and violence inadvertently narrows the possibilities for political thinking and action (Sedgwick 2002, 143). In a reparative reading of politics, attention is instead focused on abundance, gentleness, joy, and resources. J.K. Gibson-Graham (2008, 614) have also criticised theorising based on mistrust and negativity, advocating for the use of performative research that is building the groundwork for the development of new unexpected economic practices. In her analysis on the reparative and life-enhancing practices of the new protest movement, Eva von Redecker (2020,17) proposes that “[w]e can save the living/life instead of destroying it, regenerate labour instead of exhausting it, share goods instead of exploiting them, and nurture property instead of dominating it.”[1]

These theoretical impulses will guide us in the workshop as we try, trouble and discover what practices and perspectives can help us to repair the world in the ruins of fossil fuel capitalism (cf. Tsing 2015). In order to do that, we will tap into sources of knowledge and insight that go beyond the cognitive-analytical modes of knowing and/or complement it. Below, you will find an audio exploration (duration ca. 15 min) that serves as an embodied preparation, tuning-in, for the workshop. The invitation is to listen to the audio file while exploring the city, district, village, or other environment that you dwell in. Below the audio file, you will find a script for it, in case hearing is not available for you.

Audio exploration_Script_Tuning-in_Retheorizing Capitalism as Reparation.MP3(1)

[1] English translation mine.

Henna-Elise Ventovirta (previously Selkälä) works at the intersection of Feminist International Relations, International Political Economy, dance arts and climate activism. Contributing to a comprehensive eco-social transformation is at the heart of her work. Henna-Elise is currently a doctoral researcher at the Tampere University studying the resisting bodies and reparative practices of climate justice activists opposing extractivist fossil fuel economies. Her dissertation is funded by the Kone Foundation. As part of the research project Assembling Postcapitalist International Political Economy (POSTCAPE) Henna-Elise investigates the intersection of corporeal political disobedience and the creation of diverse economies in international climate action camps in Europe. Her master’s thesis was awarded as the best thesis in Political Sciences in Finland in 2020. Furthermore, Henna-Elise is one of the founding members of the Berlin-based Kipppunkt Kollektiv, which promotes education for climate justice. Since 2016, she works as a performer in a Swiss dance ensemble, Compagnie el Contrabando. As a dance practitioner, Henna-Elise is particularly interested in the themes of vulnerability, improvisatory co-creation and the embodied imagination of other kinds of worlds.

References

Gibson-Graham, J. (2008). Diverse economies: performative practices for `other worlds’. Progress in Human Geography, 32, 613–632.
Penttinen, E. (2013). Joy and International Relations. A New Methodology. Routledge.
Tsing, A. L. (2015). Mushroom at the end of the World. Princeton University Press.
von Redecker, E. (2020). Revolution für das Leben: Philosophie den neuen Protestformen. S. Fischer Verlag GmbH

Keynote speakers, abstracts & recommended readings for each session

Inna Perheentupa & Saara Särmä: Exploring Zine-making as a method to rethink capitalism

Recommended readings for the session

***

Sabaheta Ramcilovic-Suominen: Why decoloniality should be the foundation of all future action and deliberate “inaction” (as decolonial strategy)

Recommended readings for the session

Mariam Khawar: Alternative epistemologies in political economy: agency and private property in Islamic economic philosophy

Recommended readings for the session

Jutta Bakonyi: Capitalism and Infrastructural Statecraft: how dialectic tensions of materials and mobilities drive the global reordering of state-society relations

Recommended readings for the session

Liisa-Rávná Finbog: Capitalism’s colonial epistemicides

Henna-Elise Ventovirta: Movement-based workshop session: Retheorizing capitalism as reparation

References