Collective residencies / FEMINISMS II / Olot
TIINA SIHTO
From Monday, 15 October 2018 to Monday, 29 October 2018
Bio
Tiina Sihto works as a doctoral candidate of social and public policy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She is also part of the research team in the Centre of Excellence in Research on Ageing and Care (CoE AgeCare, Academy of Finland, 2018-2025). She is currently finalizing her PhD dissertation in which she analyses the local conditions of women’s work-care reconciliation in the city of Jyväskylä. Her research interests include care, gender inequality, intimate relationships, locality, social class, sociology of emotions and work-care reconciliation. She has published on emotional geographies of care, local childcare policy, class and mothers return-to-work decisions, female complaint as an expression of gender inequality and regretting motherhood. Moreover, she has taught undergraduate courses on social and public policy and given lectures in social and public policy and gender studies.
Project
During the residency, I will be working on finalizing my PhD thesis and planning my post doctoral research. Both these project are connected by my interest in questions regarding feminist ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies in researching care.
Reflections on my stay in Faber
I attended Faber as part of thematic residency on feminisms from mid-October until the end of the month. I arrived in Olot with little expectations regarding the residency or the work I would actually get done during my stay in Faber. I had been intensively working on my PhD for the last months, so in all honesty, I was quite tired and fed up with my work, and felt that I just want to rest for a few weeks, take long walks in the mountains and enjoy the sun (which we see very rarely in late October in Finland!). In the end, I did manage to do a considerable amount of resting, walking and sunbathing, but what surprised my was the energy boost I got into my work whilst being in Faber. For that, I can only thank the extremely friendly and open atmosphere of Faber, and the inspiring people I got to meet during my stay.
When I got into Faber, the complication chapter of my PhD, which focuses on women’s work-care reconciliation from a local perspective, was at its finalizing stages, as well as two article manuscripts. In addition, I had been thinking and writing on the themes that I would like to do research on in my hopefully not-so-distant post-doc future. These topics involve care and caring from a feminist perspective, as well as regretting motherhood. So, a lot of things were on my mind.
In the end, I was amazed by how much work I got done during my two-week stay. During my stay, I also realised how much I needed new surroundings and new people, as well as just time and space to think and write. Being in Faber gave me all that, and it felt like a breath of fresh air. Even now, when I’m writing this at the end of a very grey November, I still feel the energising effect Faber had on me. Even getting my PhD done does not feel like such a distant goal as what it was one and half months ago.
Last, but not least, the most important thing during the residency was getting to meet a group of wonderful feminist researchers, activists and writers. Sharing ideas and experiences with them and discussing the events taking place around the world was eye-opening and a lot of fun, even though the topics (often were related to the anti-feminist developments taking place around the world) were often quite gloomy. In the end, thanks Angela Fitzgerald, the residency resulted in a book proposal. Now we’re hoping for good news from the publisher. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!