Bio

Her educational background lies in fields of arts and aesthetics. Since 2000 Irina has been teaching history and theory of arts. At the same time her research interest was mostly in phenomenology of ethics and temporality, she has been studying philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. In 2010 Irina have defended PhD with the monograph ‘Temporality of the Face-to-Face in Levinas’ Ethics’ (University of Helsinki). Since then, her post-doctoral research at the University of Helsinki has focused on the ethics of temporality, temporality of justice, pain, shame, gilt, suffering and the phenomenology of embodiment, the feminine and maternity.

Project

In the project “Chronic pain in temporality of mother-child relation: alienation, displacement, and ethical challenges,” I seek to reflect on how different modes of chronic pain can affect ethical content of maternal relation, its temporality and different temporal modes (being present for the child, being with the child in the future, being dephased, being late) of mother-child relation. The project launches a discussion how experience of pain influences ethical modalities of mother-child relation. I will explore how chronic pain is constructed and is appearing in temporalizing maternal subjectivity and I will concentrate on woman’s temporality in context of community while being affected by pain experience. Thus, I accentuate how pain constructs and/or deconstructs ethical maternal subjectivity and a sense of responsibility.