Sámi Child-Adult/Past-Present Assemblages in a Painful Lecture at University

• In Event: 66.061 - Intersectional Examinations of Race, Class, and Gender Structured Poster Session

Abstract

We explore how affective energies are transmitted intergenerationally and through material objects by focusing on a lecture which turned unprecedentedly painful for the lecturer, who is a Sàmi woman. We also look at her childhood experiences in a rural Sàmi community in Finland, focusing on affects that leap across time-space domains, created in a complex and shifting material-discursive assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). In this assemblage, utterances, human and non-human bodies and atmospheres among other fragments pulse and vibrate. These vibrations link to the lecturer’s personal history coloured by gender violence and Sámi families’ traumatic past. The study is a part of the new feminist materialist scholarship which brings into question and surpasses the dichotomous child-adult and past-present divisions.

Authors

• Tuija Huuki, University of Oulu

• Maija-Liisa Lanas, University of Oulu