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

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: 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

Walter Gam Nkwi: Violent Encounters and Lived Realities: Everyday Experiences during the Anglophone War of Independence in Cameroon since 2017

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

Ofer Idels: Toward an Experiential Turn: Renewing the Humanistic Promise of History

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

Aytac Yurukcu: Wars, Empires, and Nationhood: Political and National Transformations

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 Between Godly Power and Everyday Life, 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

Pirjo Ovaskainen: The beginning of the depression in Jyväskylä 1991–1993

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)

Leena Sharma: Founding without Belonging: Experiential Friction and Alienation in Making of India’s Skateboarding Scene

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

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

Anton Runesson: The suffering of others: perpetrators and by-standers in an 18 century investigation into torture

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