Programme

8th Annual HEX Conference: Histories of Experience in Society: Frictions, Margins, Ruptures
9–11 March 2026, Tampere University, Linna building (Kalevantie 5, ground floor)

Info: City Centre Campus

Download PDF: HEX2026Programme

MONDAY, 9 MARCH 2026 

10:00–10:15 Welcome and opening words by Pirjo Markkola (director of HEX) Auditorium K103

10:15–11:15 Keynote 1: Benno Gammerl: Narrating queer experiences, Auditorium K103

11:15–11:30 Coffee break

11:30–13:00 Parallel Sessions 1

1a. Women’s Magazines as a Space for Discussing Gendered Experiences, Auditorium K103 (Chair: Louise Settle)

Anna Niiranen: From Personal to Print: Male Politicians in Finnish Women’s Magazines in the 1970s

Heidi Kurvinen: Women’s Magazines as a Dialogic Space for Experiencing Feminism

Arja Turunen: The personal is Political: Debating Abortion Liberation in Women’s Magazines

1b. Experiencing Colonialism and Discipline, Room K108 (Chair: Lauri Uusitalo)

Emilie Luther Valentin: Experiencing Discipline between Church and State: Parish Priests and Punitive Pluralism in Early Modern Denmark

Ritu Khanduri: Impertinence and Nonsense: Cartoon Humor and Visual Frictions in Colonial India

1c. Reconfiguring Lived Experience , Room K109 (Chair: Tanja Vahtikari)

Mikkel Thelle: Not in my back garden. Experiences from the silent majority in Danish urban-rural areas

Eeva Nikkilä: Vulnerabilities in the margins of society: exploring how wartime shaped animals’ lives and experiences in Finland in the early 1940s

Marjaana Niemi: Urban Experience and Urbanity on Helsinki’s Outskirts at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

1d. Normativity, Frictions and Subjectivities in the Histories of Science and Experiences, Room K110 (Chair: Ranjana Saha)

Heli Rantala: How to Marginalize a Professor – Norms of the Finnish Science Community

Juha Haavisto: Fighting Friction – Intellectual Developments of Normative Forestry in the Nordics at the turn of the 20th Century

Ranjana Saha: Engendered Experiences, Norms and Frictions in Colonial Bengal

13:00–14:30 Lunch break at restaurant Juvenes, main building

14:30–16:00 Parallel sessions 2 

2a. Theoretical and methodological approaches to queer visual history, Auditorium K103 (Chair: Olli Kleemola)

Joseph Jukes: Queer Possibility and Asexualities – speculating at the margins of photography.

Tuula Juvonen: Representing Independence – Early Feminist Activist in Photographic Images

Kaisa Tolvanen: Materiality in Photographs

2b. Wartime Marginalized Experiences, Room K108 (Ilari Taskinen)

Ann-Catrin Östman: Jägers in the shadow: marginalised experiences and public memorialization

William Foster: A Tammela Correspondence and Nationalism during the Continuation War

2c. Memory and  Experience, Room K109 (Chair: Antti Malinen)

Pia Koivunen: Cultural, collective and individual memories of living with a giant neighbour. Reimagining entangled histories with Russia

Sofia Silfvast: Remembering village celebrations in Orthodox Karelia – temporalities of experience and remembrance

Satu Sorvali: Readers’ Letters as Emotional Experience in the Late Nineteenth-Century Finnish Press

2d. Embodied Marginalization, Room K110 (Chair: Riikka Miettinen)

Bianca Frohne: Crip Aesthetics and Embodied Knowledge in Premodern Europe: Rethinking Disability Experience in Early and High Medieval Sources

Evelina Wilson: An honored and peaceful old age? Experiences of aging in social elite families in 19th-century Finland

Marja Rautaharju: Architect Maija Könkkölä and the marginality, visibility, and invisibility of disability within the discourses of the architectural profession (Finland, 1973–1982)

16:15–17:45 Parallel sessions 3

3a. The Experience of Non-persecution in Witchcraft Trials, Auditorium K103 (Chair: Päivi Räisänen-Schröder)

Raisa Toivo: And he was so glad to go away as a soldier! Experiences of witchcraft, witch-hunt and de-escalation in 16th century Finland

Marko Lamberg: How Shared Were the Experiences of Witch Trials?

Tiina Miettinen: Ancient Bear-Raising vs. Witchcraft in Tavastia Region

3b. Experience and Emotions in Literature, Room K108 (Chair: Johanna Annola)

Ramunė Bleizgienė: Reordering of Experience: The Decline of Women’s Communal World in Žemaitė’s Fiction

Jasmin Flinkman: Historical Atmosphere and Marginal Emotions in Finnish Contemporary Novel on the Lapland War

Yoel Castillo Botello: Figures of Passing: Frictions Between Representation and Experience in the Character of the Gitana from Cervantes’s La gitanilla (1613) to Soler’s Lola vende cá (2000)

3c. Lived Experience and Resistance, Room K109 (Chair: Sinikka Selin)

Lauri Uusitalo: Lived resistance of Indigenous peoples in colonial New Granada and Quito

Karissa Patton: Expert or Interloper? Colliding Reproductive Experiences and Expectations & Birth Control Centres in Alberta, Canada, 1969-1979

Shreya Kundu: Experiencing Precariat Childhood(s) in British India: Health and Technology at the Crossroads, 1870s-1940s

18.00-20.00 Get-together, Café Toivo (Tampere University main building, second floor, Kalevantie 4)

TUESDAY, 10 MARCH 2026

10:00–11:00 Keynote 2: Louise Nyholm Kallestrup: Margins of Experience: Witch Trials, Conspiracy, and Godly Power, Auditorium K103

11:00–11:30 Coffee break

11:30–13:00 Parallel sessions 4

4a. Soviet Union and Post-socialist Experiences, Auditorium K103 (Chair: Pia Koivunen)

Marta Kurkowska-Budzan: Non-verbal sources and the rupture of experience: documenting embodied labor in post-socialist transformation

Tamar Demurishvili: Religion and Religiosity: Lived, Experienced, Remembered. Case of (Post-)Soviet Georgia, 1970s to the Present

Anna Laakkonen: Remembering Violence. The History of Finns in the Soviet Union in Punalippu Journal During the Glasnost Years

4b. Ruptures and Changes of the Welfare State, Room K108 (Chair: Sinikka Selin)

Pirjo Markkola: From Invisible to Visible Margins. Deaconess Institutes as Sites of Experience of Intellectual Disability in Finland in the early 20th Century

Riku Luostari: The 1980s Experience of the “Crisis of the Welfare State” as a Key to Interpreting the History of the Finnish Welfare State and the Political Conflicts of Our Time

4c. Experience, Martyrs & Resistance, Room K109 (Chair: Sami Suodenjoki)

Evie Nash: ‘Have Ye Not Ploughed Furrows on My Back Already?’ The Experience of Whipping in the Seventeenth Century Anglo-Atlantic World

Mia Edwards: Performing Identity: Physical Disability, Survival, and Resistance amongst Enslaved Men in the Antebellum South

Pierre Delpu: Antagonistic Experiences of Sacrifice: the polemic birth of “martyrdom for liberty” (Atlantic world, 1770-1848)

4d. Experience, Age and Disability, Room K110 (Kaisa Tolvanen)

Godelinde Gertrude Perk: Having the Time of Their Lives – Experiencing Advanced Age, Care, and Community in Medieval Sisterbooks

Virva Liski: Wounds of victory. Psychological disability, veteran experience, and community responses after civil war

Emmeline Burdett: Who are ‘we’? Modern Disability Activists and the Victims of the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ Programme

13:00–14:30 Lunch break at restaurant Juvenes, main building

14:30–16:30 Parallel sessions 5

5a. Conflicts and Disruptive Emotions: Women’s anger and anxiety in early modern Europe, Auditorium K103 (Chair: Raisa Maria Toivo)

Päivi Räisänen-Schröder: Women Navigating Anger in Reformation Germany

Riikka Miettinen: Women’s Marginalized Religious Anxieties in Early Modern Sweden

Iris Fleßenkämper: The Angry Wife. Female Deviance in the Marital Household of 17th Century Germany

Jonas Stephan: The Angry Countess And Her Wicked Minister. Experiencing And Evaluating Female Rule in 17th Century Hohenlohe

5b. Childhood and Marginalized Experiences, Room K108 (Chair: Stephanie Olsen)

Daniel Grey: ‘She Was An Excellent Mother To All Her Children’: Infanticide in England and Wales during the Second World War

Edina Gal: Experiencing Abandonment: Transylvanian Children under the Protection of the State Children’s Asylums 1903−1940

Essi Jouhki: Crossing the Boundary: Exploring Past Childhoods Through Remembered Imagination

Ruth Beecher: Experiences of ‘Recovery’ from child sexual abuse

5c. Emerging Approaches to Experiences, Room K109 (Chair: Virva Liski)

Anouk Orillion: Remembrance and Reparation: The Importance of Indigenous Self-Governance in Northern Quebec

Emilia Ruuhinen: Experiencing Loneliness in the Diaries of Ageing Author Helvi Hämäläinen

Oksana Volovodiuk: The Enthusiasm That the Mere Sight of the Polish Soldiers Aroused in You…” Polish Experiences of Encountering Patriotic Enthusiasm in Galicia During the Austro-Polish War of 1809

Jaakko Leinonen: The lived ideology of Finnish Labor Party (SDP) meetings in 1918 and 1919 – Negotiations about ideological meanings of ’government’ -institution

19:00–23:00 Conference dinner at Finlayson Palace (address: Kuninkaankatu 1)

WEDNESDAY, 11 MARCH 2026

9:00–10:00 Keynote 3: Dolores Martin Moruno: Experiencing Humanitarianism Through Images, Auditorium K103

10:00–10:30 Coffee break

10:30–12:00 Parallel sessions 6

6a. Class Experiences in Literature, Auditorium K103 (Chair: Godelinde Gertrude Perk)

Jussi Lahtinen: Working-Class Literature and Ruptures in the Working-Class Experience

Konsta Kajander: Experiences of education in the late 19th and early 20th century correspondent letters of Finnish working-class press

Tinashe Mushakavanhu: African Writers and the Experiential Margins of Oxford

6b. Experiences and Frictions in Space, Room K108 (Chair: Silke Holmqvist)

Sini Väisänen: The Problematic Barracks – Finnish Experiences of Former Russian Garrison Areas, 1918-1930

Kristian Aarup: A complex transition between two cities: The curious case of moving to Bornholm in the late 19th century

John Bessai: Frictions of the Settler Order: Aporetic Experience, Art as Public Service, and Counterpolicy in Canada

6c. Marginalized Individuals, Room K109 (Chair: Kaisa Tolvanen)

Anastasiia Morozova: Marginalizing Emotional ‘Barbarians’: Emotions, Alienation, and Romanness of Italo-Romans and Goths in sixth-century Italy in the Variae

Noora Viljamaa: Exiled to Siberia: Tracing and Constructing the Silent Experiences of Marginalization in Igantius Nikolai Törnroos’ (1837‒1861?)

Jacob Preene: Transvestitism – What is that? Experience and Identity in the Nordic Transvestite Movement, 1966-2012

12:00–13:30 Lunch break at restaurant Juvenes, main building

13:30–15:00 Parallel sessions 7

7a. Experience, Art and Agency, Auditorium K103 (Chair: Jussi Lahtinen)

CANCELLED -> Dorota Wiśniewska´s paper moved to session 7b

7b. Embodied Suffering, Room K108 (Chair: Rob Boddice)

Oana-Maria Cojocaru: Embodied Suffering and Unruly Empathy: Experiencing Religious Madness in Byzantine Holy Fool Narratives

Maryse Simon: “Being a Witch”: A Forced Experience and a Claim

Dorota Wiśniewska: The Formative Power of Experience: French and Polish Noblewomen Reflecting on Political Agency in the Post-Revolutionary Era

7c. Communities and Subjects in the Margins of Historiography, Room K109 (Chair: Mikko Kemppainen)

Hrafnkell Lárusson: Free citizens or marginalized subjects?

Bertha del Valle Díaz: “Men of Sentiments”: Feelings as Political Weapons Against Oppression in the Experience of Cuban Nationalists (1835-1959)

Sara Hidalgo García de Orellán: The emotions of the “socialization of suffering”. Why political pluralism survived ETA terrorism? Solidarity, emotional refuge and commitment

15:00–15:15 Coffee break

15:15–16:00 Final discussion