Current Intersections of Culture, Language and Wellbeing Online Seminar Series
Conversations on: Forests and Wellbeing. Wednesday 19th November, 14:15-16:00. Online only.
What does wellbeing mean? And whose wellbeing matters today? Can forests be sites of wellbeing? Or should forests themselves be the focus of contemporary healthcare concerns? How can the humanities and social sciences complement ecological and medical approaches to forest wellbeing?
Hosted by the online seminar series Current Intersections of Culture, Language and Wellbeing, this seminar raises questions and invites exchanges across the humanities and social sciences. With interventions by three invited panelists, Dr Olga Cielemęcka (UEF), Dr Lena Gottelier (UTU) and Dr Attila Krizsan (UTU), these conversations bring culture, language and wellbeing into dialogue with our natural and constructed environments.
More information about our speakers’ research interests and expertise can be found below.
Wednesday, 19th November, 14:15-16:00
Join us online for this tree-mendous event!
Meeting ID: 624 5817 1577
The seminar series is a multidisciplinary online seminar organized by three networks from the University of Turku: the Cultural Interaction Researcher Network KULTVA, the Centre for the Study of Language and Wellbeing (LaWe), and the Research Center for Culture and Healthhttps://sites.utu.fi/kulttuurin-ja-terveyden-tutkimusyksikko/en/.
Olga Cielemęcka is a feminist philosopher. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland, and a visiting researcher at the Migration Institute of Finland. Olga’s work weaves together plant philosophy, posthumanist ethics of relationality and healing, and feminist and anti-racist traditions of dreaming and cultivating more just worlds. In her current work, forest ecologies serve as a onto-political model that inspire ways to overgrow our collective wounds and seek reparative ways of living together in an imperfect world.
Lena Gottelier is a literary researcher in the department of Finnish literature, University of Turku. Her research interests include understanding the role of poetry in the common landscape of wellbeing of human and nature. Her perspective on the connection between the forest and wellbeing follows the approach of planetary health, and her research material consists in Finnish contemporary poetry published in the 21st century. In her work she explores the ways in which contemporary forest-themed poetry makes visible the reciprocity between human wellbeing and the wellbeing of forest nature.
Attila Krizsán is a critical linguist researching and teaching on topics related to language and politics, language and identity and language and the environment. Attila works as a lecturer at the Department of English, University of Turku. He is also a member of the Network for Critical Animal Studies in Finland, and his perspectives on forests and wellbeing are guided by sentientism. Currently Attila is participating in the SeedLING: From Forest Words to Forest Actions project. The project explores forest-related discourses in Finland and aims to go beyond our current anthropocentric ways of thinking via finding––as the ecolinguist Arran Stibbe puts it––“new narratives to live by”.