Freedom to Change Gears – An Interview with HCAS Alumna Josephine Hoegaerts

By Kaisa Kaakinen 

In 2017, Josephine Hoegaerts received good news. Being a Core Fellow at HCAS at the time, she would be able to stay in Helsinki with her ERC project “CALLIOPE: Vocal Articulations of Parliamentary Identity and Empire”, which she conceived at HCAS. We had a conversation about the impact of the HCAS Fellowship on her career and about tensions inherent in her current role as a Principal Investigator, who sets the research agenda not only for herself but also for others.

Portrait of Josephine Hoegaerts

Josephine Hoegaerts (Photo by Veikko Somerpuro)

 “It was a deeply uninformed decision”, says Josephine Hoegaerts and laughs, when asked about her reasons for coming to HCAS in 2015 to work on a postdoctoral project on the history of voice, after her first postdoc in Belgium. Hoegaerts now holds a position as Associate Professor at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki, but back then she did not know much about the University of Helsinki or about Finland. But, in addition to the prospect of learning a completely new language, Finnish, she was attracted to Helsinki by the opportunity to do research in the interdisciplinary and international environment of HCAS.  

Hoegaerts turned down another postdoc in Germany connected to an archive of popular music, which would have directed her work more specifically towards musicology. The Core Fellowship at HCAS gave her the time and freedom to step back and look for a wider interdisciplinary framework.

“I was trying to get out of strictly doing history, and into interacting with musicology, sound studies, literary studies, and HCAS seemed like an environment in which people would let me get on with that.”

 

Intellectual stimulation and collegial support at HCAS 

It turned out that HCAS was an excellent environment for shifting gears as a researcher. Hoegaerts found that she could engage with people from different fields in a particularly meaningful way 

“My postdoc project was on history of voice but was mainly looking at educational scientific manuals. It had a very specific, history of science approach. I was looking to pull it more in a political and social direction. At HCAS I had the time to attend different reading groups with people from different disciplines, reading up on stuff that I otherwise would not have planned.”  

Many of Hoegaerts’ collaborations at the Collegium began by chance, at lunch discussions with colleagues, whose work resonated in interesting ways with her own. One of these discussions led to the symposium “Embodiment and Emancipation,” co- organized with political philosopher Leszek Koczanowicz and literary scholar Ulrika Maude. Another HCAS Symposium “Writing Voice and Speaking Text” was a collaboration with Mari Wiklund, French philologist specializing on prosody and university lecturer at the University of Helsinki, with whom Hoegaerts is now co-editing a publication. 

Hoegaerts also stresses the impact of the collegial and supportive atmosphere of HCAS. The career phase after the PhD is plagued by insecurities that, in her view, are related less to the content of one’s research than to institutional conditions. She found it rewarding to be constantly challenged in terms of content, as fellows from various disciplines posed questions about the very foundations of her project. The same people, however, were extremely supportive as colleagues.  

When I arrived at HCAS, there was a large group of youngish female postdocs, six or seven of us, very much in the same situation, going for sushi every week, complaining. But we were not competing for the same jobs, which meant that if you got a grant or if you got something published, everything was celebrated. There was this enormously supportive atmosphere.”  

Hoegaerts also praises the director Sari Kivistö and other HCAS administrators of the time, who were well prepared to assist researchers coming to work in a new country. She remarks that support structures for international researchers are too often lacking in other units of the university, especially after the centralization of the administrative services. There is nobody in her current unit responsible for answering questions about the structure of the MA program or the Finnish tax system, for instance. As a new employee coming from abroad, you do not initially even know which questions you should be asking, she adds. 

But what made Josephine Hoegaerts decide to stay in Helsinki, when she could have taken her coveted ERC funding to another European university?  

“A sense of loyalty, she says. “I had been supported really well by the funding services as well as by the Collegium.”  

She was also simply tired of moving, a sentiment shared by many early-career academics. And finally, University of Helsinki offered her career opportunities that were not available everywhere: a tenure-track professorship. 

Curiosity-driven research for the lucky few? 

When Hoegaerts thinks back to her career path, she cannot help but notice a contradiction in her current position as a Principal Investigator of an ERC project, who employs PhD students and postdocs. While she herself has always been able to find funding that does not limit scholars’ freedom to set their own research agendas, she is now, in a sense, forced to limit the freedom of others. 

“I get the impression that particularly at the postdoc stage, it is becoming more and more difficult to find a place that is not within a project. At the same time, there is a demand for people to be autonomous, and this is a very odd tension.” 

In her own career, the freedom to set one’s own agenda meant that she could come to her current research on citizenship, political influence, and empire from an unusual angle: through thinking about voice and sound.  

It takes time to build confidence, particularly as a woman in academia, to want to talk about politics. Five years ago, I definitely would not have felt I could say anything about citizenship. I was doing something quite weird, and I am still doing something weird, but I am now moving in a direction that could be considered a big and important topic. I feel that this was a better way of coming to such topics than being in a project, in which you are forced to think about big issues.” 

Hoegaerts finds it problematic, particularly in the humanities, that research is now so strongly connected to projects, in which resources are concentrated around a few PIs. The researchers employed by the PIs do not get to define their research focus freely, which makes it difficult for them to build a career.  

“The idea behind this is that they want us to be more collaborative. But I am not sure that is the result, because collaboration should be more horizontal than what we have now. There seems to be a growing gap, at least to a degree, between the haves and the have-nots. A few people are lucky at some point and start to get money and get to define the research agenda to a much larger degree than is perhaps necessary.” 

Hoegaerts wants to make sure she supports the people employed in her project in a way that brings them forward in their own careers. At the same time, she is held accountable to the ERC to stay within the limits she “defined one summer in Helsinki,” as she puts it.  

She is currently planning a new research project that tackles the problem of professionalization and the notion of excellence, taking a critical view on the frequent talk about the latter. She adds, smiling, that this effectively means that she is asking funding agencies to give her money so that her team can tell them why their whole rationale is wrong.  

Those lunches and coffees 

When asked what it means now for her to be a Collegium alumna, Hoegaerts says that there definitely is a “bizarre bond” between people who have been at the Collegium. As for how this has come about, we – as so often when talking to fellows of institutes of advanced study – come back to how shared lunches build a sense of community and spark bottom-up forms of academic collaboration.  

 This is the one thing I really miss from the Collegium”, Hoegaerts confesses. 

Helsinki Collegium fellows sitting at the lunch table in the Common Room of HCAS during Orientation Week in September 2019.

HCAS Fellows at lunch during Orientation Week in early September 2019.

This article has also been published in the HCAS Newsletter 2019-2020

Collaborative methods at the Collegium: Working together on a study of boys and masculinities

By Ann Phoenix and Marja Peltola

One of the dreams of a stay at the Collegium is of time to focus intensively on one’s own work, bringing long-dormant writing to publication and having space to do exciting new research and think fresh, fruitful thoughts fueled by discussions with outstanding fellows and other university colleagues. This is certainly to be prized but, for us, our sojourn also enabled a different version of collective working that would not have been possible without the Collegium investment of space, money and time that has been enormously productive and hugely enjoyable. Our experience underlines the point that collaboration is an important method that, in itself, informs the methods of fieldwork and analysis. We tell the story of those methods below.

In many continents, the media, politicians and organisations periodically raise moral panics about boys and masculinities. In particular, concern focuses on boys’ poor educational attainment in relation to girls, their disengagement from schoolwork and their propensity for violence.  While many researchers have explained that the picture is more complex than a ‘poor boys’ discourse would warrant, there remains relatively little research on boys and masculinities in Finland. We brought together histories of doing youth research and of studying masculinities in 11-14-year-old boys.

Stephen Frosh, Ann Phoenix and Rob Pattman: Young Masculinities (Palgrave, 2001)            Marja Peltola: Kunnollisia perheitä (Nuorisotutkimusseura, 2014)

We focused on masculinities and ethnicities in three Helsinki schools; this intersection was especially interesting since the ‘migrant crisis’ of 2015 had accelerated a shift in Finnish national identity so that multiculturalism, at least in Helsinki, became more prominent than previously. The three schools we selected differed, amongst other things, with regard to the pupils’ ethnic and class backgrounds.

We first asked boys and girls who brought back signed consent forms to take part in group interviews and then invited them to be interviewed individually. The group interviews allowed us to learn about the breadth of issues and opinions on masculinities that were important for boys, girls and particular schools before we explored these issues in depth with individual boys and girls. We asked about the meanings of gender, (masculinity and femininity), about life in school and at home, and general everyday practices for young people.

Marja Peltola (Photo by Ann Phoenix)

Collaboration was crucial throughout this process. Working as a British-Finnish team enabled us to take a more “international” perspective on the Finnish context while also benefitting from “insider” linguistic skills and knowledge of the Finnish schooling system and society. Since Ann does not speak Finnish, it was Marja, for whom Finnish is her first language, who communicated with the schools and conducted the interviews. Marja wrote fieldnotes of each school visit and each interview and we began a practice of discussing the minutiae of school visits and any issues or interesting points that had arisen as soon as possible afterwards.

The Collegium enabled both fairly fast transcriptions of interviews and translations into English, done by the Collegium paid interns Linda Sivander, Anna Koivukoski and Olli Heiniö.

The interviews were very different in nature. In a group interview with four boys, for example, jokes were a key way to cope with the potential risks of losing face and place in the hierarchy of popularity; whereas in a mixed-gender interview of two girls and two boys, everybody took care to avoid absolute categorizations and to present uncontroversial views. Gender organized physical positioning and interactions in both groups, but in different ways. In the former group, the boys used joking to signal their distance from girls in general and the woman interviewer in particular, and to try to establish power relations over her. In the latter group, the boys and the girls sat separately and indicated difference from each other by organizing the interaction in “the girls’ turns” and “the boys’ turns”.

Another group interview with five boys illuminates well how narratives on gender difference were created collectively. There was a lot of echoing and in the fast-paced discussion, the boys often finished, or tried to finish, each other’s sentences, when creating the story that was presumed to be shared by all the boys present. This meant that they often cut each other off. At the same time, there was (some) room for negotiating acceptable, but exceptional, differences.

Luka: Boys do not use any–

Elias: Dresses or–

Luka: Do not use any, face lotion things.

Mikael: I do sometimes apply some lotion [laughs] if it is dry but otherwise I do not.

Luka: No but the kinda masks you know–

Mikael: Yea I know.

Luka: –to the face so–

Oliver: Yea the kinda, girly clothes and stuff.

Marja: You said about the makeup that sometimes boys do makeup-

Bikram: Yea.

Marja: Is it well is it then girly anyway, or?

Elias: Not like that

Mikael: Well depends on how you do it, slightly.

Luka: Famous people, men, they do makeup.

Bikram: Yea they do use makeup.

Mikael: They do put it on so that they are more visible [laughs] in the photos and so on.

Marja: So nobody here in the school?

Mikael: No, no no! [laughter]

Bikram: I do not know anyone.

We conducted joint narrative analysis of the English translations of the focus groups with Marja checking translations against the Finnish transcriptions, sometimes against the audio recording and with her memory of the interaction. We began the analysis of the first focus group interview by reading the whole interview together out loud and so staging it.  We first did the reading line by line, covering up the lines below so that we could not see them and read on. We spent a great deal of time analysing the meaning of each line and using the analysis of one line to anticipate what we expected to happen next in the transcript.

This method was developed from Marine Burgos’s notion, drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s narratology, that narrators have the difficult task of bringing together disparate events into an ordered and relatively coherent narrative so that there is always a struggle when people have to start telling stories. Even if they are not aware of it, Burgos argues that conflicts are often evident at the start of stories, as are the key issues that animate people’s narratives and the subjective positions that narrators take up in relation to their subject matter.  While line-by-line reading was too time-consuming a method to apply to the whole corpus of data, we continued reading the interviews out loud, staging them and discussing our interpretations to ensure that we shared understandings. We analysed both the researcher’s questions and the participants’ responses and comments in this way, on the basis that social interactions are co-constructions where comments and questions produce particular possibilities for response and new narratives.

All this sounds rather dry and earnest, but we were often to be found in the Collegium Common Room laughing and drinking tea/coffee around the sun lamp in the winter as we puzzled out what something meant and considered the dynamics of interviews. Having established the habit of Common Room convivial working, we frequently also worked there in the summer when the sun lamp had long been put away.

Photo by Meri Parkkinen

Ann Phoenix and Marja Peltola in the Collegium Common Room (Photo by Meri Parkkinen)

Our point in combining focus groups and individual interviews lies not in comparing the “authenticity” of the different types of data but in increasing understanding of how social context and ways of asking influence narratives of masculinity. Collaboration throughout the process has provided us with a more nuanced understanding and interpretations that each of us might have missed alone. It ensured that our stay at the Collegium was maximally productive.

Ann Phoenix held the Jane and Aatos Erkko Professorship at HCAS in 2016-2018. During the 2017-2018 academic year, she collaborated with postdoctoral researcher Marja Peltola on the research project “Masculinities in New Times: 11-14-year-olds in Helsinki schools”. 

On population genetics, emotions, and entangled differences

Venla Oikkonen

My first year at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies was intense, inspiring and rewarding. While starting a new research project on cultural debates about vaccines, I had the opportunity to finish my second monograph on the cultural dimensions of human population genetics. The book, Population Genetics and Belonging: A Cultural Analysis of Genetic Ancestry, was published in October by Palgrave Macmillan. Many of the final details of the book reflect discussions I had with my wonderful colleagues in the Collegium hallways, at coffee breaks, and in our Brown Bag seminars.

As the title suggests, the book is an account of population genetics as a means of making communities, identities, and belonging. Human population genetics is a field of science that studies genetic variation within and between populations. The book explores technological practices and cultural imaginaries that population genetics has engendered in contemporary societies. For example, population genetics underlies commercial genetic ancestry tests, which promise to trace our personal roots to prehistoric communities and connect us to people who share genetic markers with us. Population genetics provides the basis for national genome initiatives. Population genetics informs the study of DNA retrieved from ancient human remains, playing a crucial role in attempts to imagine human evolution. Population genetics structures the ongoing building of biobanks, which are meant to accelerate scientific research and pharmaceutical development through faster circulation of samples and information. Population genetics is also present in the marketing of pharmaceutical products to specific ethnic communities on the basis of assumed population-level genetic differences. Moreover, population genetics has been invoked in both pro- and anti-immigration campaigns, revealing the ambivalent relationship between population genetics and politics of inclusion and exclusion.

How has population genetics become part of all these diverse projects? How can it support opposite political and social agendas? Why are the tensions and connections between these projects and practices seldom discussed? In Population Genetics and Belonging, I investigate the mutability and persistence of population genetic imaginaries by tracing shifts and continuities in the uses of population genetics from the late 1980s until today. The book explores these shifts and continuities through a range of materials including scientific articles, journalism, popular science books, online genetics websites, and fiction.

Throughout the book, my analysis of shifts and continuities in the uses of population genetics focuses on two issues: affect and intersectional differences. Affect refers to the cultural circulation of emotions and the emergence of emotional intensities around objects such as genetic technologies or biological samples. By intersectional differences I refer to how technologies are entangled with assumptions of gender, sexuality, race and class, and how these differences are constituted through one another. I argue that in order to understand the potential impact of population genetics in society, we need to pay attention to how population genetic technologies shape gendered, racialized, classed and sexualized differences, and how these differences become emotionally charged.

The theory of “Mitochondrial Eve” developed in the 1980s provides an illustrative example. “Mitochondrial Eve” is the most recent maternal ancestor of all currently living humans traced through mitochondrial DNA inside our cells. Eve is not a specific woman but rather a statistical point of origins in the past where mitochondrial variation among modern humans originates. Through an analysis of scientific, media, and fictional texts, I trace how the theory of Mitochondrial Eve becomes contested, celebrated, and gradually routinized in the early 1990s. I also explore the appearance of another gendered figure, “Y-Chromosome Adam”, in the mid-1990s. While Mitochondrial Eve draws on the idea of an unbroken maternal chain between us and our evolutionary past, Y-chromosome Adam is the most recent patrilineal ancestor of currently living men traced through Y-chromosome DNA. In cultural discourses surrounding population genetics, Y-Chromosome Adam became almost immediately portrayed as Eve’s counterpart, partner, and even boyfriend. This portrayal questioned the initial cultural representations of Eve as a strong and independent woman, as well as contradicted the scientific evidence that placed Eve and Adam at different prehistoric times.

Population Genetics and Belonging shows how the figures of Eve and Adam mobilize cultural assumptions of gendered, sexual and racialized differences while traveling across science and culture. The first chapter demonstrates how the pro-feminist and multicultural undertones of the figure of Mitochondrial Eve evoked strong emotional responses in science journalism, mainstream media, popular science, and fiction, and how some of the underlying cultural anxieties were alleviated through heteronormative narratives involving Adam. In subsequent chapters, I ask what happens to these emotionally charged differences when mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA is used in commercial genetic ancestry tests, ancient DNA research, or debates about the roots of national populations.

All in all, the book argues that genetics and emotions are thoroughly entangled: emotions shape as well as reflect developments around population genetics in society. In particular, emotions arise around cultural perceptions of how genetic accounts of human evolution may reshape social categories of difference such as gender, class, sexuality, and ethnicity. Finally, the book suggests that formations of affect and difference around biotechnologies call for critical exploration also beyond the field of population genetics.

Venla Oikkonen is Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her research interests include evolutionary theory, genetics, vaccine controversies, pandemics, and theoretical questions related to affect and intersectionality. Her first book Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives was published by Routledge in 2013.

TUHAT research profile: https://tuhat.helsinki.fi/portal/en/person/voikkone