Books by Teija Rantala
Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 2022
Returning is a paradox; even more so as an orientation to(wards) the seductive forces that we ret... more Returning is a paradox; even more so as an orientation to(wards) the seductive forces that we return (to) throughout this special Issue. One can return and never return all at once. Return is like a wave; it turns itself – returns that never return to how it was in the beginning. There is no clearly identifiable beginning; there is no end or ending. This introduction desires to do exactly that: to fold our academic-writing-matter in the mess and mass of such academic workings. Theory and theoretical contexts seduce us and we would like to share some forces of that seduction with you, our readers. And yet! We sit in this writing with the (im)possibilities in such desires for sharing. Seduction might not communicate itself, might not show its character and elements, and it might not even produce something tangible and sharable. In such absence, will seduction be at work then? Will diffractive forces of seduction be muted and decapitated? Might the seduced and seductive body of academic-writing-matter matter in its absence? This introduction will … [hmmm! This impulse to identify a neat start, an originary point, operates as a such a strong force]
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Darkness Matter, 2017
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Exploring Data Production in Motion Fluidity and Feminist Poststructuralism, 2019
Exploring Data Production in Motion facilitates the use of feminist critical qualitative methodol... more Exploring Data Production in Motion facilitates the use of feminist critical qualitative methodologies. With open-ended methods and poststructuralist theory and analysis, this book offers tools to approach and to examine challenging and controversial topics ethically. It argues that to examine data of 'individual' experience and aspirations requires examining the process of the data production in which these were 'produced.' Therefore, this book will form an understanding of data production as a process, which in its fluidity enables us also to form an understanding of difference and change as inevitable parts of social processes. It welcomes change and uncertainty by allowing the data production processes, their intensities and fluctuations, to take the lead in the inquiry. This compels the methods to adjust to the requirements of the data production processes. The book demonstrates the use of feminist methodology and illuminates how the feminist critical inquiry is essential in examining issues of minority and difference, so the focus is in the differences. As a feminist inquiry, this book contributes to recognizing differences within while examining minority worldviews and perceiving difference as an essential force in striving for sustainable ethics in the times of political polarization.
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Book Reviews by Teija Rantala
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Journal Articles by Teija Rantala
NORANordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 2022
Religion strongly in uences the rules and norms imposed on sexual relations, contraceptive use, a... more Religion strongly in uences the rules and norms imposed on sexual relations, contraceptive use, and family planning. Religious convictions and communal obligations are also often involved in women's struggles with reproductive choices. The Conservative Laestadians in Finland are one example of a conservative procreational religious movement that requires abstinence from premarital sex and upholds a negative attitude towards the use of birth control. In this article, I follow young former Conservative Laestadian women's views on reproductive freedom, procreational ethos, and pronatalist politics. I propose that there is an ongoing upsurge among young former Conservative Laestadian women who resist the movement's procreational ethos. I also suggest that the Laestadian procreational ethos has a nities with the nationalist and pronatalist aims of promoting limitless human reproduction. The article's data is based on conversational interviews produced with young former Laestadian women in the spring of 2021. The women's views assist in understanding religious procreation politics in a light of reproductive justice and ecological sustenance.
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Work (Reading, Mass.), 2012
BIM is targeted at providing information about the entire building and a complete set of design d... more BIM is targeted at providing information about the entire building and a complete set of design documents and data stored in an integrated database. In this paper, we study the use of BIM in two life-cycle construction projects in Kuopio, Finland during 2011. The analysis of uses of BIM and their main problems will constitute a foundation for an intervention. We will focus on the following questions: (1) How different partners use the composite BIM model? (2) What are the major contradictions or problems in the BIM use? The preliminary findings reported in this study show that BIM has been adopted quite generally to design use but the old ways of collaboration seem to prevail, especially between designers and between designers and building sites. BIM has provided new means and demands for collaboration but expansive uses of BIM for providing new interactive processes across professional fields have not much come true.
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The autophotographic images in this work depict the connection between mother and daughter. This ... more The autophotographic images in this work depict the connection between mother and daughter. This connection comprises intensities and affects that resonate through movement. The desire to connect folds these intensities and affects into movement and towards ‘matter’ as momentary enactments, modalities of subjectivity, for instance, in bodily and facial expressions (Guattari 1995; Braidotti 2005/2006; Barad 2003). The purpose of this work is to enable us to consider the maternal as a ‘sphere’ in which the desire to connect is explicit, and enables movement between separation and connection. I employ Bracha L. Ettinger’s (2006) concept of ‘encounter-event’ to create an understanding of motherhood as a sphere for this significant affective relationality. Erin Manning’s (2013) theorization of movement is also utilized to help to make sense of how the various ‘shifting perspectives of one’s being’ take place in such encounters; in other words, how these temporary identifications and subjective formations occur and become possible. This is to understand these human and non-human processes relationally, constantly creating us as more than one. These maternal encounter-events subjectivize us within processes that occur beyond traditional developmental narratives. According to Ettinger, we cannot talk about the development of subjects, since we are always in the process of transformation and co-production as we are (separately) connected to one another, and to our mother-as-the-other, being born, that is, of a female body (Ettinger 2006, p. 4, 123).
In this co-production, ‘the maternal’ denotes neither motherhood nor becoming or being a mother; instead, the maternal is the ‘in-between’ connection in which the subject is perceived as attuned and transformingly connected to an adult female subject (Kristeva 1985; Ettinger 1992, 2006, 2009). ‘Subject’ is constantly and differently formed in relation to others. In the early stages, this occurs in relation to the mother, since bodily functions are shared with the mother as the separate other. Mother-as-the-other is therefore part of our embodied historical subjectivity, which is constantly changing. This enables us to consider the maternal as a ‘sphere’ that is able to ‘embrace’ and ‘nurture’ these connections in everyday encounters. Hence, femaleness does not denote femininity or womanhood as gendered identity; rather, it signifies a process that is both actively embodied and metaphorical. Motherhood is the multitude of elements in this process, producing collective pre-subjective images, points of reference, and enactments. These are the images we keep generating. They become arrangements and dispositions that are recognisable as feminine or masculine, but always in their ‘mattering’ depend on momentary arrangements and the various events in which they emerge (Braidotti 2006; Ettinger 2005, 2006; Massumi 2006). As the maternal relational ‘sphere’ fosters sustainable ways of being and becoming, it also endorses femaleness as a fundamental element of identity construction, regardless of one’s sex.
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Taboo: Journal of Culture and Education, 2020
In this article, we conceptualize and exemplify how we, as academics, might write with our always... more In this article, we conceptualize and exemplify how we, as academics, might write with our always-already gendered (leaky) bodies. We form assemblages of writing by following Erin Manning’s (2013) theorization of leaky bodies and leaky-writing. Here, the mucosity and the leakiness of our storylines, narratives of affects and processes, work as an anchor through which we process our dif- ferenciating materialized bodily realities in academia. Therefore, the focus is on the materialized narrative intensities, which, through academic writing practices, the movement of affects in academia fold into acts of writing, hand-pens, and thinking-feelings. Our aim is to offer fresh academic narratives by following what happens to storytelling in this composition of various kinds of lines. These narratives do not fold neatly into chapters because they stem from storylines of vitality, materiality, and molar and molecular lines. They leak into one another, creating lines out of utterings, expressions, and words—as well as visual, mov- ing, and troubling experiences. The writing academic mind-bodies leak emo- tions, materialities, fluids, and uncertainties to the neo-liberalist outcome-orien- tated academic writing-machines (see Massumi, 2017). They contest the idea of academia as a molar structure that works on rational logic by allowing vitality, porosity, and leakiness to transform academic writing practices.
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Special Issue Feminist Genealogies: Specific Political Intersections, 2020
In this article the storylines of a religious mother are read with Rosi Braidotti's formulation o... more In this article the storylines of a religious mother are read with Rosi Braidotti's formulation of joyful and affirmative ethics. This ethics sets these storylines in motion and illuminates the changes that occur concerning devotion, resistance, and resilience in the face of the expectations of religious motherhood. This diffractive reading makes explicit the changing affects functioning in non-normative narratives and the compound and polyvocal ethics of becoming concerning (religious) motherhood, reproduction, and sustenance in these troubling times-times which compel us to live within compassionate ethics. The ethics of joy brings forward affective elements by allowing also the negative affects entangled in pain and trauma to be recognised as resistance. Besides assisting in reading the storylines for possible breaks, turns, and changes, diffractive reading makes often-neglected tacit elements matter. The forces fuelling the movement in the storylines bring forth equally symmetries, disparities, and changes, and the complex but also complementary relation of resilience and resistance as a part of feminist genealogies of affect.
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Creating Response-able Futures? Discussing the Conservative Laestadian Desire to Mother within Reproductive Justice, 2020
This article discusses the Conservative Laestadian women's desire to mother and the procreational... more This article discusses the Conservative Laestadian women's desire to mother and the procreational ethos of the Conservative Laestadian religious movement in the framework of reproductive justice and ecological crisis. The data draws from my doctoral study in which I examined the aspirations of women who belonged in the Conservative Laestadian religious revival movement in Finland. In my attempt to understand the Laestadian women's desire to mother within the procreational ethos of this conservative religion, and to form an alternative approach to the issue in feminist ethico-ecological framework, I employ Donna J. Haraway's concept of response-ability together with Bracha L. Ettinger's theory of matrixial feminine transconnectivity. With this article, I propose that in their multivocality, diversity, and intertwined nature, the Laestadian women's accounts of motherhood assist in understanding the many aspirations, intentions, agencies, and affects that operate within the desire to mother in this conservative religious movement. The Laestadian women's diverging accounts enable us to consider motherhood as a manifold issue for a pious woman: a natural duty and an obligation, but also a position through which to claim the status of a subject. This invites us to think of the Laestadian women's desire to mother more broadly as an entangled ethics of relationality, care, and kin-making beyond human reproduction. To promote a response-able approach to the issue of the desire to mother on the edge of the ecological disaster, we must address the unquestioned transgenerational and procreational models of motherhood and how these complicate the discussion on the reproductive rights of religious female subjects in the Western world. However, as the desire to mother extends toward shared response-ability and more inclusive futures, it requires questioning the human desire to reproduce.
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This paper attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of 'the academic conference' and thereby of... more This paper attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of 'the academic conference' and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work that seek to ask what if (Haraway, 2016) and what else (Manning, 2016). This 'what if' and 'what else' thinking has manifested in experimental and subversive doings otherwise at a series of academic conferences. The storying practices presented in this paper were made possible by the vital materialism (Bennett, 2010) of a shared google.doc. It was within this virtual environment that we attempted to weave diffractive accounts of what conferencing otherwise produces. This writing experiment offers a series of speculative provocations and counter-provocations to ask what else does conferencing make possible. This article is an invitation to the reader to plunge in and wallow (Taylor, 2016) within the speculative accounts which ensue and to contemplate the possibilities of breaking free from sedimented ways of neoliberal conferencing. Introduction We are a collective of academics committed to pushing against the normative parameters and expectations of the neo-liberal conference. The twelve of us have, on various occasions and in different permutations, facilitated workshops, given performances, organised events and hosted conferences that have sought to disrupt and offer a means to 'conference otherwise'. We do this because conferences are difficult spaces in which academics are required to undertake considerable emotional, physical and academic labour in attempts to 'fit in' and perform the unspoken rules of the conferencing game which tends to privilege the white, western, middle-class unencumbered male academic. Together our work has been shaped by a range of philosophers and theorists including Haraway, Barad, Bennett and Deleuze & Guattari amongst others. We recognise that drawing upon concepts and practices that are broadly defined as post-humanist or new materialist presents tensions and incongruences; however, our aim is to work with the potential that theoretical pluralism can bring to our shared project of 'conferencing otherwise'. Collectively, we are committed to a new materialism that is feminist (Osgood, 2019; Taylor, 2019), and our project is a political one that seeks to expose, problematise and challenge injustices, inequalities and prejudices that are embedded within and routinely play out in conferencing.
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Book Chapters by Teija Rantala
Interaction in Educational Domains, 2013
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Knowledge Production in Material Spaces. Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events, 2021
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Knowledge Production in Material Spaces. Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events, 2021
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Academic Articles by Teija Rantala
Approaching Religion , 2024
Women often embody the central values and practices of their religious tradition. When they leave... more Women often embody the central values and practices of their religious tradition. When they leave their community, women find a part of the “religious tapestry” remaining with them long after their disengagement. In this article, we draw from research in the UK and Finland to explore women’s efforts to unlearn parts of their former religious belonging. We draw on in total thirty-five interviews with women who disengaged from the Mormon Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Conservative Laestadianism. We conceptualize un/learning as a multi-layered process consisting of both un-learning and re-learning. We explore women’s narratives about negotiating bodily limits, conduct and belonging, and understand these as suggesting experiences of a threefold un/learning: gendered, spatial-social and epistemic. We argue that examining gendered and embodied un/learning helps to understand women’s disengagement processes from minority Christian traditions in Western and Northern European secularized contexts such as the UK and Finland.
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Books by Teija Rantala
Book Reviews by Teija Rantala
Journal Articles by Teija Rantala
In this co-production, ‘the maternal’ denotes neither motherhood nor becoming or being a mother; instead, the maternal is the ‘in-between’ connection in which the subject is perceived as attuned and transformingly connected to an adult female subject (Kristeva 1985; Ettinger 1992, 2006, 2009). ‘Subject’ is constantly and differently formed in relation to others. In the early stages, this occurs in relation to the mother, since bodily functions are shared with the mother as the separate other. Mother-as-the-other is therefore part of our embodied historical subjectivity, which is constantly changing. This enables us to consider the maternal as a ‘sphere’ that is able to ‘embrace’ and ‘nurture’ these connections in everyday encounters. Hence, femaleness does not denote femininity or womanhood as gendered identity; rather, it signifies a process that is both actively embodied and metaphorical. Motherhood is the multitude of elements in this process, producing collective pre-subjective images, points of reference, and enactments. These are the images we keep generating. They become arrangements and dispositions that are recognisable as feminine or masculine, but always in their ‘mattering’ depend on momentary arrangements and the various events in which they emerge (Braidotti 2006; Ettinger 2005, 2006; Massumi 2006). As the maternal relational ‘sphere’ fosters sustainable ways of being and becoming, it also endorses femaleness as a fundamental element of identity construction, regardless of one’s sex.
Book Chapters by Teija Rantala
Academic Articles by Teija Rantala
In this co-production, ‘the maternal’ denotes neither motherhood nor becoming or being a mother; instead, the maternal is the ‘in-between’ connection in which the subject is perceived as attuned and transformingly connected to an adult female subject (Kristeva 1985; Ettinger 1992, 2006, 2009). ‘Subject’ is constantly and differently formed in relation to others. In the early stages, this occurs in relation to the mother, since bodily functions are shared with the mother as the separate other. Mother-as-the-other is therefore part of our embodied historical subjectivity, which is constantly changing. This enables us to consider the maternal as a ‘sphere’ that is able to ‘embrace’ and ‘nurture’ these connections in everyday encounters. Hence, femaleness does not denote femininity or womanhood as gendered identity; rather, it signifies a process that is both actively embodied and metaphorical. Motherhood is the multitude of elements in this process, producing collective pre-subjective images, points of reference, and enactments. These are the images we keep generating. They become arrangements and dispositions that are recognisable as feminine or masculine, but always in their ‘mattering’ depend on momentary arrangements and the various events in which they emerge (Braidotti 2006; Ettinger 2005, 2006; Massumi 2006). As the maternal relational ‘sphere’ fosters sustainable ways of being and becoming, it also endorses femaleness as a fundamental element of identity construction, regardless of one’s sex.