History of Experience: Methodologies and Practices 2.-4.3.2020 Tampere
About the conference
The conference aimed to deepen and diversify the methodology of the history of experiences, and to connect it to historian’s practices. What do we do, as historians, to study and conceptualize experience? How do we choose methodologies and why, and how they anticipate potential explanations?
History of experience means individual, social, and collective experiences as historically conditioned phenomena. ‘Experience’ refers here to a theoretically and methodologically conceptualized study of human experiences that has potential to bridge structures, ideologies, and individual agency, which has been a difficult gap to close. But potential also includes challenges: How do subjective experiences influence knowledge regimes, social order and divisions, institutions, or other structures, and how do structures shape experiences? How do historians deal with connecting individual and society?
The conference was organized by the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences (HEX), hosted by Tampere University. HEX is seeking new ways to study experiences and their role in explaining history. HEX studies experiences as lived realities and focuses on three wide-ranging cultural and societal phenomena: lived religion, lived nation, and lived welfare state.
Programme
The venue is the main building of Tampere University.
Address: Kalevantie 4, Tampere.
The keynote speakers of the conference are Professor Raisa Toivo and Professor Javier Moscoso. Professor Jacqueline Van Gent’s keynote has unfortunately been cancelled.
Find the abstracts here. (Updated 27 February 2020.)
Mon, 2 March
9.15–9.30: Opening (D11)
9.30–10.30: Keynote I (D11), Professor Raisa Toivo: Premodern and modern problems of right and wrong experience
Chair: Pirjo Markkola
10.30–10.45: Coffee (Gallery)
10.45–12.15: Parallel I (A2b, A3, A4)
1)War Experiences and the Nation, A2b
Chair: Reetta Eiranen
Matthew Lenoe: Experience and Official Discourse in the Red Army: Front Life and Rodina in the Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945
Tanja Vahtikari, Sami Suodenjoki & Ville Kivimäki: Lived Nation: Messy and Entangled Experiences
2) (Post)colonialism and Minority History, A3
Chair: Riikka Miettinen
Julia Hurst: Epic and messy narratives: Aboriginal identity across urban geographies
Hanna Lindberg: Documenting and Exploring Experiences within Minority History. Methodological and Ethical Considerations
Ismay Milford: Frustration in the making of an anticolonial culture, 1950s East and Central Africa
3) The “Expertise of Experience” in Britain, A4
Chair: Johanna Annola
Ruth Davidson: Women, welfare and poverty: experiential expertise, a comparative approach
Caitriona Beaumont: Housewives’ Associations, Collective Experience and Voluntary Action: How wives and mothers influenced social policy reform through ‘experiential expertise’ in post-war Britain
12.15–13.15: Lunch (Restaurant Aleksis, Kalevantie 2)
13.15–15.15: Parallel II (A2b, A3, A4)
4) Experiences and Hagiography, A2b
Chair: Päivi Räisänen-Schröder
Jenni Kuuliala: Hagiography and Religious Experience of Infirmity in Catholic Reformation Era Italy
Rose-Marie Peake: Saints’ Vitae and Identity-Shaping in an Early Modern Catholic Community in France
Thomas Devaney: Feeling with Miracles: Emotional Management in Early Modern Spain
Päivi Räisänen-Schröder: Commentator
5) Witnessing Conflict and Repression, A3
Chair: Marko Tikka
Eileen Groth Lyon: Lived religion in Dachau: analyzing the multiplicity of witnesses in the ‘priest barracks’
Virva Liski: In-between: role conflicts and intersecting identities in experiences of the Finnish civil war
Pablo Toro-Blanco: The experience of political fear in three critical junctures: Chile, 1905, 1957, 2019
6) Senses and the Archive, A4
Chair: Rob Boddice
Laura Nissin: Gone with the wind — studying the ancient olfactory sensations
Ilaria Scaglia: The Source and I: Archival Emotions (or Experiences?) in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1850–1950
Viliina Silvonen: Performed and experienced emotions on archival audio recordings of Karelian laments
15.15–15.30: Coffee (Gallery)
15.30–17.30: Parallel III (A2b, A3, A4)
7) Experiences of Everyday Life, A2b
Chair: Sami Suodenjoki
Kalle Kallio: Like one big family
Ann-Catrin Östman: Respectable enough? Understandings of mobility, community and edification in early life stories of migrant men
8) Languages, Narrative and Experience, A3
Chair: Ville Vuolanto
Xavier Biron-Ouellet: From experientia to sentimentum: the semantics of religious experience in the Middle Ages
Outi Lehtipuu: Lived Scriptures in Late Antiquity
Liv Helene Willumsen: A Narratological Approach to Witchcraft Trials: A Contribution to the History of Experience and Emotion
9) Experience as an Analytical Category, A4
Chair: Pertti Haapala
Georg Gangl: The History of Experiences: A history like anything else?
Minna Harjula & Heikki Kokko: Experience as social construction: towards a structural approach
Klaudia Muca: Between Criticism and Affirmation. Experience Studies in Poland in 20th and 21st Century
Andreas Rydberg: Inner Experience
19.00 – Gettogether (vegan buffet) (Restaurant Telakka, Tullikamarinaukio 3)
Tue, 3 March
9.30–10.30: Keynote II (D11), Professor Javier Moscoso: Local Rhetoric and Global Experiences: the Forgotten History of the Swing
Chair: Ville Kivimäki
10.30–10.45: Coffee (Gallery)
10.45–12.15: Parallel IV (A2b, A3)
10) Experience and Emotion in Legal and Judicial Sources, A2b
Chair: Raisa Toivo
Sari Katajala-Peltomaa: Experiencing Demonic Presence: corporeality, emotions and the sensate in late medieval canonization processes
Emilie Luther Søby: How to be(come) the perfect inmate: Feeling rules as basis for emotional labour within an eighteenth-century prison workhouse
11) Childhood Experiences, A3
Chair: Stephanie Olsen
Ulla Aatsinki: Chilhood Experiences in Politicians’ Memoirs
Kirsi-Maria Hytönen: Interviewing on experiences of difficult childhood
Heidi Morrison: Portraiture as a Method of Capturing Past Human Experience: A case study of war trauma in Palestinian history
12.15–13.15: Lunch (Restaurant Aleksis, Kalevantie 2)
13.15–15.15: Parallel V (A2b, A3, A4)
12) Institutions and Margins, A2b
Chair: Minna Harjula
Johanna Annola: Tracing spiritual experiences in poorhouse inspection records, 1890s–1910s
Sophy Bergenheim: Preserving the ‘welfare spirit’: Explorations into a professional-personal-political concept in social welfare, 1940–1950s Finland
Jesper Vaczy Kragh & Stine Grønbak Jensen: Living with Coercion: Past and Present Experiences in Danish Residential Institutions
Katariina Parhi: Using drugs in Finland in the 1960s and 70s
13) Experiencing Intimacy, A3
Chair: Reetta Eiranen
Eva Johanna Holmberg: Nightmarish travel experiences in the journal of Richard Norwood (1590-1670)
Ina Lindblom: Making sense of romantic jealousy in late 18th-century Sweden
Ulla Ijäs: Mobile people and mobile goods – The urban experience in the Great Northen War
Tomasz Wiślicz: The experience of intimacy in pre-modern peasant societies
14) Experience and Idealism, A4
Chair: Pertti Haapala
Ville Erkkilä: “The peculiar experience of law”. ’Experience’ in German legal science and legal history
Tuukka Brunila: War and the origin of contemporary sovereignty: Re-examining Carl Schmitt’s writings during the First World War
Pedro Magalhaes: Can Ideology Be Meaningfully Experienced?
Ville Suuronen: Debating the twentieth-century experience of crisis and the new concept of human rights
15.15–15.30: Coffee (Gallery)
15.30–17.30: Parallel VI (A2b, A3, A4)
15) Experiences of War, Mass Violence and Persecution, A2b
Chair: Ville Kivimäki
Ismee Tames: Liminality and the Use of Digitized Sources: How to Explore the Experiences of the Stateless
Thijs Bouwknegt: Re-Experiencing Atrocity in Ethiopia Through Transitional Justice
Peter Romijn: Colonial War as a “Prefab Experience”
Marleen van der Berg: Describing the persecution, return and redress of ‘the’ Jewish Community in Rotterdam
16) Sources and Methods of Studying Experience, A3
Chair: Tanja Vahtikari
Anneleen Arnout: Fishwrap: The digitized newspaper as a source for the history of emotional experience
Girija Kizhakke Pattathil: The Transgressive potential of Narrative Tropes: Interplay of Knowledge and Experience
Pia Koivunen: Autoethnographic approach to experience: what can we historians learn from it?
Bruno Lefort: Documenting and conceptualizing experiences in postwar societies through collaborative methods
17) Immigration and Cultural Encounters, A4
Chair: Hanna Lindberg
Laurence Prempain: “Je vous prie d’agréer mes salutations les plus respectueuses”: Migrants’ letters to the French administration: strategies versus control. 1930s-1940s
Kirsti Salmi-Niklander: Exploring the immigrant experience through narrative analysis of archival materials
Samira Saramo: Feeling Places of Historical Inquiry
19.00 – Dinner (Restaurant Tampella, Kelloportinkatu 1)
Wed, 4 March
9.30–11.30: Parallel VII (A3, A4)
18) Contingency of Emotion and Experience, A3
Chair: Ville Kivimäki & Tuomas Tepora
Rob Boddice: Neuroscience and History: Fellow Travellers in the New Turn to Experience
Jeremy Burman: Further toward ‘histories from within’: Lessons worth remembering from forgotten developmental theories
Tsiona Lida: Emotions at the Intersection of Science and History
Ville Kivimäki & Tuomas Tepora: Commentators
19) Norms, Regulations and Breaches, A4
Chair: Mervi Kaarninen
Heini Hakosalo: ‘Cheerfulness is the best remedy!’ The significance and means of emotion regulation in tuberculosis sanatoria (Finland c. 1900–60)
Antti Malinen: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World: Role of Everyday Mobilities in Children’s Experience of Distress in post-WWII Finland
Anna Kantanen: Intimate partner violence as a continued historical experience
11.30–12.30: Lunch (Restaurant Aleksis, Kalevantie 2)
12.30–14.00: Parallel VIII (A2a, A3, A4)
20) Experiences and Politics, A2a
Chair: Kati Katajisto
Jenni Karimäki: Presentation: Heckler, rival, friend or foe? – Trust and the stabilization of a new political force
Vesa Vares: The question of trust and competency
Kati Katajisto: Experiences and trust in politics – the case Paavo Väyrynen in 1980s
21) Experiences of Sound and Voice in History, A3
Chair: Josephine Hoegaerts
Ludovic Marionneau: ‘The president shakes the bell to no avail’: a study of performance in the parliamentary debates leading to Jacques-Antoine Manuel’s exclusion (February-March 1823)
Karen Lauwers: Mapping acoustic spaces of loyalty and resistance by using institutional documents. The case of the Arab bureaus in French colonial Algeria (1846-1871)
Josephine Hoegaerts: The historian’s ear: a challenge for those who love the silence of the archives
22) Experiences of Refuge and Terror, A4
Chair: Heikki Kokko
Outi Kähäri: Transnational Insecurity among the Ingrian Community – Oral History from Sweden
Johanna Leinonen: Refugee Journey as an Experience, Memory, and a Metaphor
Ulla Savolainen: Approaching Memory Ideologies: Ingrian Finnish Experiences and Testimonies of the Soviet Terror
14.00–14.30: Coffee (Gallery)
14.30–16.00: Joint Session (D11)
23) Panel discussion: Methodologies and Practices in Studying Experience
Chair: Pertti Haapala
Josephine Hoegaerts
Stephanie Olsen
Javier Moscoso
Ann-Catrin Östman