This special issue is produced within an Academy of Finland funded research project Writing Cultures and Traditions at Borders (2010-2014) that has examined writing practices, texts, and amateur and professional writers in the Finland-Russia and Estonia-Russia borderlands. The aim has been to give voice to those people whose perceptions of the borders and borderlands have often been neglected within institutionalised and dominant scholarly and artistic discourses. The research project has focused on the late 20 th and early 21 st century, and examines writing practices on the borderlands in their societal and historical contexts. Furthermore, the research has recognized the national borderlands as areas home to unique forms of writing cultures.In this special issue, the practices of writing at borders are presented in an introductory article and four different article pairs. The introductory article written by the Writing Cultures and Traditions at Borders research project leader Tuulikki Kurki (University of Eastern Finland), claims that cultural studies and the humanist point of view has significant explanatory potential concerning the various borders and border crossings addressed in multidisciplinary border studies. Cultural and human understandings of borders and border crossings grow on one hand from the research of ethnographic particularities, and of the universal and culturally expressed human experiences of borders and border crossings on the other.The first article pair examines territory-making and linguistic spaces relating to borders. Tiiu Jaago (University of Tartu) observes how Estonians have described political changes, especially the establishment of the Soviet rule in Estonia in the 1940s, in their autobiographical narratives. In the narratives, the relationship between the borders of Estonian territory, the borders of cultural space, and state borders are analyzed with the concepts of 'continuity' and 'discontinuity'. Jaago claims that the entangled interplay of territorial, political and cultural borders reveals the polysemic and ambivalent nature of the concept of 'border'. She argues that ideas of borders are constructed by three factors: the narrator's experience of political change in Estonia, the method of narration, and the interpretation of the autobiographical narratives. Tuulikki Kurki (University of Eastern Finland) focuses on the construction of a non-Russian language space on the Soviet side of the Russian-Finnish national borderland from the 1940s until the 1970s. The article claims that the non-Russian language space and the national border differ from the official decrees dictated by Moscow, as can be determined from literature stemming from the late 1950s and early 1960s. She claims that the non-Russian language space and
This paper analyses the nature of the border. The paper poses the question of whether a border, in this case the national border between Finland and Russia in the Finnish Karelian border region, can have its own distinctive identity [ies], and if so, could the border itself be or become a hybrid -a border subject. To examine the hybridization process of the border, this paper draws on individual experiences of the border that are illustrated using interview material. In addition, by analysing historical documents, literature and historiography, the paper shows how the border has affected people's relationship with the border itself and also their perception of regional landscapes, regional memories and identity. On the other hand, this process can be reversed by exploring how people have changed and embodied the border. The paper utilises the framework of John Perry's theory of "reflective knowledge", where both conscious experience and the knowledge it yields differ from physical knowledge that is explicitly characterized in terms of empirical facts. Exploring these relationships enhances our understanding of the role of "private knowledge" and its contribution to the understanding of borders.
The new mobility paradigm has expanded from geographically related mobility to various forms of sociocultural and intercultural mobility, which are studied through multidisciplinary approaches. This article focuses on the individual experiences of mobility and various embodied border crossings represented in artistic genres and performances in the context of Finland. The theoretical background of the article draws on literature research and cultural anthropology, which both include the discussions initiated by the affective and iconic turn in cultural studies. The affective turn promotes the move from constructionism to the broad framework of new materialism that links critical theory and cultural criticism to bodily matter and matter in general. The iconic turn seeks to acknowledge that artistic and visual cognition of reality is to be understood as equal to scientific forms of representation. People's understanding of the world is based on experiences that have a bodily and material foundation and consist of both individually formed and culturally learned elements. Because artistic genres constitute a specific form of knowledge that has its foundation in (bodily) experiences, this article claims that studying artistic genres in the context of mobility can provide a new understanding and ways of conceptualizing of a mobile subject and mobility experience.
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