Public lecture with Mercator Fellow Kaisa Kuurne: „When Life Happens“
28 November, 2024 @ 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
This lecture is open for interested people from the scientific community.
In her talk, she will examine ways in which unfamiliar or unanticipated moments become transformative and intertwine in our lives and the making of belonging. By ‘transformative moments’ she refers to events which rupture or stand out of the ordinary in personal lives (e.g. birth, death and illness) or collective lives (e.g. 9/11, war, covid-19 and political conflict) and overturn our lives and relations. Drawing on different multi-sited ethnographic studies on transformative moments on one hand in urban neighborhoods in Helsinki and NYC, and on the other, in Finnish health care and community settings, the talk discusses how unanticipated moments of life may be consequential for belonging, revealing its unexpected frailty and emergence.
About the lecturer:
Kaisa Kuurne is an university lecturer in Sociology at the University of Turku & University of Helsinki. Her research foci include reproductive politics, birth and care practices as well as belonging, social bonds and community, family, friendship, intimacy and urban sociology (more information here: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/kkuurne/in-english/).