Fennia - International Journal of Geography https://fennia.journal.fi/ <p align="left">Fennia is a non-profit peer-review journal published by the Geographical Society of Finland since 1889. It is an international scientific publication dedicated to all fields of geography with attentiveness to northern dimensions. In 2010, Fennia became an open access electronic journal with two yearly issues. It is devoted to a fast publication process, including the open access publication of forthcoming papers before inclusion in an issue. The journal has no submission or article processing charges, and authors retain all rights to their work throughout the publication process and after publication. We appreciate that authors clearly bring up that the text has been originally published in Fennia. We also offer the opportunity to publish short, popularized texts based on research articles through the <a href="https://www.versuslehti.fi/english/">Versus</a> platform that aims to make research more visible, dialogical and effective in societies.</p> <p align="left">Fennia publishes papers of high scholarly merit in three categories: Research Papers, Reviews and Essays, and Reflections. Research Papers are original full-length articles that make a significant contribution to geographic and related research. Reviews and Essays introduce empirical, theoretical or methodological insights from ongoing research, including literature reviews and lectures. Reflections section includes commentaries, debates, discussion pieces, interventions and other argumentative short texts related to contemporary issues. With these three publication formats, Fennia seeks to take forward geographical research and discussion in a critical and responsible spirit. In addition to individual contributions, the journal welcomes proposals for special issues and sections.</p> <p align="left">The fully open access Fennia publications are under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CC BY 4.0</a>). The journal is member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (<a href="http://publicationethics.org/about" target="_blank" rel="noopener">COPE</a>) and follows the peer review standards set by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (<a href="http://www.tsv.fi/en/services/label-for-peer-reviewed-scholarly-publications" target="_blank" rel="noopener">TSV</a><a href="http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/cgi-bin/jrnlst/jlresults.cgi?PC=MASTER&amp;Word=fennia" target="_self">)</a>. It is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (<a href="https://doaj.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DOAJ</a>) and the Thomson Reuters Emerging Sources Citation Index (<a href="http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/cgi-bin/jrnlst/jlresults.cgi?PC=MASTER&amp;Word=fennia" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ESCI</a>), and is part of the <a href="http://freejournals.org/">Free Journal Network</a>. The main language of the journal is English.</p> en-US <p>Authors who publish with Fennia agree to the following terms:</p> <ol type="a"> <li>Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Creative Commons Attribution License</a> that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. The license of the published metadata is Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0). </li> <li>Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a doctoral dissertation or book compilation), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.</li> <li>Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See <a href="http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html" target="_new">The Effect of Open Access</a>).</li> </ol> editor.fennia@geography.fi (Kirsi Pauliina Kallio) managing.fennia@geography.fi (Henrik Nielsen) Mon, 18 Dec 2023 13:33:10 +0200 OJS 3.2.1.4 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60 Practising refusal as relating otherwise: engagements with knowledge production, ‘activist’ praxis, and borders https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/137167 <p>This special issue explores the concept of refusal through academic and personal reflections, conversation, poetry, activism, and performative practice. In this introduction, we first situate practices of refusal within very specific locations of struggle and then frame these refusals as a practice of <em>relating otherwise</em>. Relating otherwise is a ‘mode of engagement’ – not a theory or method – that shapes relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world. The introduction goes on to discuss how refusal practices engage with (1) decolonial modes of knowing, (2) embodied, situated, and relational ways of meaning-making, and (3) the undoing of existing dichotomies within ‘activist’ practice.</p> Aila Spathopoulou, Isabel Meier Copyright (c) 2023 Aila Spathopoulou, Isabel Meier http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/137167 Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Refusal – opening otherwise forms of research https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/120482 <p>An increasing interest towards researching other forms of knowledges is taking place, expanding the boundaries of knowledge to include forms that have been historically marginalised, negated, and neglected by the Western academy. Parallel to this, we have identified a rising critique of how voices marginalized by colonial modes of academic knowledge production are included, through a single-sided focus on pain and suffering (Tuck &amp; Yang 2014). Yet there are less discussions around the process of research itself and what it entails. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to challenge the concept of ‘discovery’ and the unproblematic and inherent right of knowing granted to the Western academy, to argue for a kind of research that refuses. Interrogating instances of refusal in different contexts of Indigenous sovereignty and migration studies, this collective work creates a dialogue across different disciplines and reveals that refusal turns the gaze at colonial modalities of knowing. The empirical analysis of our work also demonstrates that refusal is a generative process that redirects the attention to ideas otherwise unacknowledged, thus making space for relationality, reciprocity, solidarity, community, and care.</p> Lena Gross, Sepandarmaz Mashreghi, Emma Söderman Copyright (c) 2023 Lena Gross, Sepandarmaz Mashreghi, Emma Söderman http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/120482 Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200 The unruly arts of ethnographic refusal: power, politics, performativity https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/121832 <p>Refusal remains a core concern in processes of research across the sciences. Drawing on previous anthropological theorisations, this paper contemplates on the manifold ‘arts’ of refusal during ethnographic research praxis, drawing on diverse thematic experiences and contexts across coastal India, Malaysia, and Uganda. We argue for a concerted engagement with refusal as more than an act of withholding co-operation and as an expression of resistance. While recognizing refusal as a locally situated and historically contingent sensibility, we ask in what other ways might the more generative qualities of refusal be explored, paying particular attention to the performative nature of refusal itself that may entrench as much as reverse power differentials in the ‘field’. Drawing on decolonial and post-development epistemologies and diverse experiences as scholars situated and working across different geographies and disciplines, we explore the many entanglements, articulations, and enactments that remain ubiquitous in everyday ethnographic research praxis through several thematic angles. These include the negotiation of uneven (and often violent) forms of research collaboration and co-optation, the enactment of benevolent sexism as an ‘ethics of care’, and embodied practices such as silence(-ing), together with play and humour in participants’ critiques of scientific truth-telling. While illustrating subtler manifestations of refusal across ethnographic research-based encounters, we also contemplate pedagogical practices of un/learning (to ‘read’) and to teach the arts of identifying and productively working with the many appearances of refusal – both manifest and less visible.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa, PhD, Vani Sreekanta, David Mwambari, PhD, Simi Mehta, PhD, Madhurima Majumder Copyright (c) 2023 Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa, PhD, Vani Sreekanta, David Mwambari, PhD, Simi Mehta, PhD, Madhurima Majumder http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/121832 Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200 A generative refusal: body inclusive methods with racialized women in knowledge creation https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/127224 <p>This paper illustrates the moving body’s direct engagement with discursive and material spaces, as well encounters in theatre methods used in knowledge production. Body-inclusive theatre-based methods aim to address two paradoxes. First, the racialised and gendered body in feminist epistemology is often theorised without the body being actively engaged in the methods that produce its theorisations, and therefore neither are body-inclusive methodological practices. This has an impact on feminist epistemologies as corporeal modes of existence, such as lived experiences, self-definition and agency require the presence of and an engagement with the moving body. This knowledge project offers another way of being in knowledge acquisition. It recognises that research often refuses the agency and personhood of the ‘researched’, and it also sets limits on epistemologies (Tuck 2009; Ng 2018; Salami 2020). There is an epistemological refusal taking place in this theatre practice: through the enactment of lived experiences with an aim to transform them; a non-binary way of making meaning of them; creativity as a process of becoming anew; and activating the agency driven human body. In this practice, racialised and migrant women explore their subjugated bodies through kinaesthetic means, namely with, from, and through their bodies. The co-creators explored the playfulness and creativity of their bodies through theatre games, living images and the creation of Physical and Forum Theatre performances (Boal 1992/2005; Lecoq <em>et al.</em> 2000) linked with the experience of having a female, racialised, migrant and othered body.</p> Erene Kaptani Copyright (c) 2023 Erene Kaptani http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/127224 Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Reading for refusal in UK maternity care: entangling struggles for border and reproductive justice https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/127866 <p>Research has shown that women with insecure immigration statuses in the United Kingdom (UK) are more likely to register later in their pregnancy with National Health Service (NHS) maternity care providers. This late engagement with healthcare services is framed in academic debates as one of the key reasons for poor outcomes for these women and their children during and after birth. Interventions, therefore, have focused on how to remove barriers to accessing maternity care for these women. In this paper, we argue that this approach fails to account for the agency of the women adequately, which needs to be understood in the context of state harms and violence towards women with insecure immigration statuses and, in particular, their reproductive lives.</p> <p>We seek to shift these debates by framing this lack of early engagement with state-provided maternity services as a form of refusal that denotes an active disengagement by bordered women from intersecting structures of harm and oppression that are embedded in the UK’s National Health Service, particularly through the charging regime. We argue that the politics of refusal in this case are embedded in struggles not only for border but also reproductive justice. Drawing on participant observation and data from secondary sources, we illustrate how refusal of early antenatal care opens pathways for bordered women to seek the care-ful conditions they need and want during pregnancy.</p> Kathryn Cassidy, Rana Amiri, Gill Davidson Copyright (c) 2023 Kathryn Cassidy, Rana Amiri, Gill Davidson http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/127866 Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Languaging as refusal https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/122372 <p>How are we refusing to be the bridge in ‘diversity’ responses in academia? What processes open up when we refuse the word and the singular language of ‘borders’ circulating in border studies and gender studies in the Netherlands? Where are we refusing from? Who is the subject-object of refusal? What is the language of refusal? How to speak from our burning guts that refuse to refuse in a language that doesn’t speak to our daily lives and struggles? How are we refusing the violence of research processes promoting the individual ‘trophy’ academic/artist in academic and cultural institutions while holding one’s own and each other’s bodies and power asymmetries shaping our writing processes for healing? How does one listen to the silences in histories of slavery, war, patriarchy, colonial trauma, and gender violence passing through our bodies while writing? In this essay we reflect on these questions by interspersing pieces of texts, experiences, excerpts (from thesis/thesis-related events), visuals, and poetry, by entangling biographies, traumas and memories situated in our everyday contexts and processes of teaching, writing for healing and for a living. Languaging becomes a location where we speak from, inspired and yet in tension with <em>Anzaldúa</em> (Hamzah 2020). Languaging (Kramsch <em>et al.</em> 2015) is our practice of refusal to refuse in one dominant language. We <em>language </em>a call for a poetics of refusal. We intentionally make the fleeting process known to each other and open it up to the reader, in holding each other’s bodies as they are collapsing and healing. In doing so we invite the reader to struggle with us in the process of naming our struggles that emerge from refusing to refuse singularly in English, refusing to write by partitioning our guts and everyday battles with patriarchy, refusing the writing subject as fully <em>knowing </em>what one is refusing.</p> Kolar Aparna, Saba Hamzah Copyright (c) 2023 Kolar Aparna, Saba Hamzah http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/122372 Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Performing arts of embodied refusal amid anthropogenic climate change: the Salim Ali Biodiversity Park and Bird Sanctuary, Pune, India https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/120219 <p>Birds twitter, flap their wings or wade in the gurgling water of the Mula-Mutha river in a special place, named after Salim Ali, the world famous, award-winning ornithologist and ‘Birdman of India’ (1896–1987). Yet, bird habitat, migratory routes, species diversity and songs are affected by the slow violence of global warming and environmental pollution. Urban citizens or Punekars including artists, women, children and ornithologists refuse the brutality of this slow violence by enacting forms of activism that centre birdlife and affirm thriving more-than-human worlds. This co-authored piece focuses on the embodied performances of refusal at the Salim Ali Biodiversity Park and Bird Sanctuary, Pune, a rapidly growing city in the western state of Maharashtra, India. Activism takes the form of poetry, city walks, participatory mural art and other forms of resistance by the Save Salim Ali Sanctuary Action Group (SSASAG). Our co-authorship collective consists of an activist/ornithologist of the SSASAG, an internationally acclaimed mural artist, and an Australian geographer of Indian heritage who went on daily ‘nature walks’ while visiting family in Pune. We craft this piece as a continuation of our activist refusals of anthropogenic climate change and toxic environmental pollution, and to illuminate solidarity with the brilliance of human and more-than-human worlds in and beyond Pune.</p> Michele Lobo, Abha Bhagwat, Dharmaraj Patil Copyright (c) 2023 Michele Lobo, Abha Bhagwat, Dharmaraj Patil http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/120219 Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200 On reading non-participation as refusal https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/126844 <p>Within the UK (the United Kingdom) charity sector, challenges persist in involving asylum seekers, migrants, and refugees in shaping services aimed at supporting and facilitating their everyday experiences. In that context, the study reframes non-participation as refusals of two kinds: noncompliance and departure. It challenges traditional participation models by exposing non-participation as a form of non-explicit agency for marginalised people. Looking at refusals though the lens of a two-year immersive study involving institutional ethnography and participatory research, it emphasises nuanced micropolitical dynamics in a charity supporting migrants and refugees’ ‘integration’ in a city of Northeast England. By examining and reinterpreting what stands behind people’s non-participation, the paper argues that the charity’s engagement with its internal politics and social dynamics is essential if it wants to foster active participation. It suggests these insights can uncover participation paradoxes and offer alternative engagement approaches. Ultimately, the research illuminates the gap between organizational intent and outcomes, contributing to debates on migration, critical humanitarianism and charity, as well as participation.</p> Kahina Meziant Copyright (c) 2023 Kahina Meziant http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/126844 Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Radical understanding: reflections on knowledge production, power, positionality, and practices of refusal within academic research https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/124992 <p>By looking at scholarly research as well as my own experience of practicing refusal in my research and documentary work, this article focuses on how refusal practices can challenge dominant methods of knowledge production and lead to what I want to conceptualize in this paper as <em>radical</em> <em>understanding</em>; a way of practicing and relating to research otherwise. I propose radical understanding as methodological and epistemological tool to contest the imperialist and capitalist -dominant machinery of knowledge production.</p> Esfandyar Torkaman Rad Copyright (c) 2023 Esfandyar Torkaman Rad http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/124992 Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200 An article that refuses to write itself https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/138059 <p>The essay discusses the failure of the author to theorise refusal in relation to the politics of migration. As I try to understand why theorising refusal failed, I am reminded of the all-too-familiar trope of ethnography: the romanticisation of the resistant subject. Taking Tina Campt’s definition of refusal as a starting point, I proceed with autoethnographic critique. I emphasise the stakes of the refusal to accept the terms of the system that “renders you illegible”, (Campt 2019, 83) while arguing against the instrumentalisation of detention experiences.</p> Vita Zelenska Copyright (c) 2023 Vita Zelenska http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/138059 Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Refusals, radical vulnerability, and hungry translations – a conversation with Richa Nagar https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/121797 <p>Richa Nagar is Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and holds the title of Professor of the College at the University of Minnesota. Her multilingual and multi-genre work blends scholarship, creative writing, theatre, and activism to build alliances with people’s struggles and to engage questions of ethics, responsibility, and justice. We contacted Richa in December 2021 with a request to contribute to our special issue. Richa kindly agreed to engage in a written conversation on questions of refusal as they emerge in her intellectual and political journey and in her trilogy, <em>Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India</em> (2006), <em>Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism</em> (2014), and <em>Hungry Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability </em>(2019). We present that conversation in this article.</p> Richa Nagar, Isabel Meier, Aila Spathopoulou Copyright (c) 2023 Richa Nagar, Isabel Meier, Aila Spathopoulou http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/121797 Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Pedagogy of ‘Refusing’ – commentary to Siriwardane-de Zoysa, Sreekanta, Mwambari, Mehta and Majumder https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/126102 <p>This commentary is a critical response to the dialogic essay “The unruly arts of ethnographic refusal: power, politics, performativity” that unpacks the complex performances of hierarchies and violence as performed during ethnographic research works in anthropology. During ethno-graphic research works, the encounter between the researchers and the research participants are often underlaid with tensions that either compel the participants to speak in definite patterns to satisfy the demands of the researchers or force the researchers to conduct field works according to the advisable guidelines of the academic institutions, funding agencies and contact persons. On the basis of my personal experiences and the ethnographic experiences of the authors of the essay, this commentary argues how the performance and acknowledgment of ‘refusal’ can be adopted as a research methodology in anthropology and other academic disciplines to counter the colonial/Eurocentric parameters of knowledge production.</p> Sayan Dey Copyright (c) 2023 Sayan Dey http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/126102 Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200