The research project “Making Spaces of Justice Across the East-West Divide” organizes a variety of different activities.
Investigative art and research workshops are organized jointly by scholars, artists and university students. Workshops form part of the teaching activities of the participating universities in Finland and in Russia.
The aim of these workshops is to creatively explore politics of gender and sexuality as well as migration and multiculturalism in the course of jointly producing different kinds of artefacts (e.g. a performance, an intervention, a piece of writing, a painting, a collage, etc).
Through such activities we seek to explore the limits of established and conventionalized ways of knowledge production within academia as well as to identify new kinds of solutions to pressing problems related to politics of gender & sexuality and migration & multiculturalism.
The artefacts produced at the workshops are also used as research materials in academic research and disseminated through project publications.
The project team will also organize weeks of action which take place in Finland and in Russia. The action weeks will be organized around the notions of bodies, memories, and popular culture which are used as entry points to the more abstract notions of social justice and equality. The aim of these weeks is to involve the general public in the project activities. During the weeks of action academic and artistic outputs are exhibited in public spaces (e.g. libraries, museums, parks, cafés, etc.) and panel discussions and actions involving the public are organized around them.
Experimental summer or winter schools will be organized on the topic of politics of sexuality and gender. These schools will be aimed at a wide audience, including students, journalists, lawyers, social workers and the general interested public. They will include lectures, roundtables and art workshops through which the conventional ways of conceiving and doing gender and sexuality will be disrupted.
The project team will also organize a number of seminars and workshops in which the on-going activities and research related to them are presented and discussed.
The project is funded by the Kone Foundation.