Interview with Dr. Heidi Kosonen, visiting scholar
Precious Gauthier: What direction do you see the future of your research and the future of planetary death research moving to?
Heidi Kosonen: I’ll start with the planetary death research, because I feel I’ve only scratched the surface, so far having worked mostly with the theoretical/conceptual framework I discussed in my talk, and with the volatility related to death’s tabooed cultural position through a focused case study with anti-environmentalist affects and hate speech in the context of .
With a colleague from Aalto University, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, I have one article underway in which we are assuming a more self-reflexive approach in looking at two recent follow-up documentary films about non-human animals, and what it feels like to witness and co-watch the deaths of the two quite different animals followed, a wild octopus and a cow subjected to humans’ exploitation and killing for profit.
Aside from this, I’m applying for funding for an extension of this project, where I would incorporate my artistic practice with my scholarly work and explore these topics by using dance, crafts, and mixed-media visual artistic processes. Assuming a different “language” like this alongside the scientific ones available to me, I think, is particularly relevant if we wish to move forward from pointing at the problems, which are often wicked in their complexity, making them difficult to solve. They also cause polarization and these hostile counter-reactions manifest also in the case of anti-environmentalist movements and their hypermasculine dimensions recognized by scholars like . Assuming a more subjective and non-verbal approach to some of the highly affective and difficult topics I’m dealing with might help to align detecting the problems with more reparative and bridge-building approaches.
Through my other ongoing or sleeping projects, I continue working with both hate speech and counterspeech from intersectional feminist perspectives, and hope to be able to return to sometime soon – perhaps in relation to hate speech or planetary death, since it often features in the affective registers and rhetorics which hate speech uses but is also potent from more resistant angles, for instance in looking at the awakening to varied harmful phenomena like hegemonic carnism.
PG: What other research projects are you currently working on or plan to work on in the future?
HK: Currently I’m finishing my last six months in a about the affective practices related to online hate speech and the related social media platform economies and cultures. This is the project that brought me to Winnipeg last Fall, and aided by this mobility, Professor Pauline Greenhill and I are currently collaborating on two research articles dealing with the misogynous and racist hate campaigns caused by Disney’s casting decision to hire Rachel Zegler, of Colombian heritage, as Snow White in their upcoming live action rendition of this well-known fairytale and their classic 1937 animation.
Next, Summer 2025, I will transition to a about how artistic and other museum-exhibitions could spark transformative learning about difficult socio-cultural topics through the uncomfortable emotions they evoke and the space and tools they offer for their encountering.
After this, I have no fixed plans, which is a good opportunity to dream a little and apply for funding for my planetary death and disgust related projects. At some point – since I’ve been so lucky and blessed with funding that I have been busy with these other topics and projects ever since I defended my doctoral dissertation in Fall 2020 – I would like to return to my PhD era discoveries and write a book about my work related to suicide cinema.
PG: Do you see a way to incorporate your research into a Canadian or North American context?
HK: Easily. I think all the projects I’ve been working on are such that they are not tied to the European and/or Finnish context but rather pertain to global phenomena, and as such benefit from comparative outlooks and international collaborations. For instance, if we look at a wicked problem like planetary death, which is such a complex and demanding topic, touching upon the entire planet and humans (and non-human animals) across its corners, it demands that surprising collaborations take place.
This is actually the idea behind using the concept “planetary” to the ongoing mass-extinction event: these phenomena are so complex partially because they arise from our interconnectedness with everything else that lives and western humanity’s failure to recognize this in its fossil-capitalist, colonial, and existence-threatening expansion. The first step must be to recognize this interconnectedness and assume it as a starting point for all actions.
PG: What has been one of your most meaningful research encounters?
HK: Meeting Professor Greenhill in the polar night of Longyearbyen, Svalbard, back in January 2017 is surely one of the most meaningful ones. I know Pauline told this story when introducing me to the CRiCS folks before my talk, but without knowing of one another, we were presenting on the same Canadian film, feminist film-maker Mary Harron’s The Moth Diaries (2011) – which, especially from my Finnish viewpoint, appears as a fairly niche piece of cinema that not many people know of, not to talk of directing their academic interest toward it. It was such an unexpected and absolutely fateful coincidence that I gathered my courage and asked Professor Greenhill to collaborate with me, and we have been collaborating on different projects non-stop ever since.
Like in every other type relationship, academic co-authorships (and co-thinkingships, which should be a concept, I think) require chemistry and certain pieces between the two (and sometimes more) people to click. Collaborations with Professor Greenhill are the ones I expect the most, because no matter the topic, our collaborations are always fun, efficient, highly inspiring, sparkling, and in many ways effortless because we work so well together. Beyond this, when meeting Professor Greenhill I was such a junior scholar, so it is easy to nominate her as one of the most meaningful research encounters also because I’ve obviously been graced with her tremendous generosity, gaining her help in different ways and learning lots through our collaborations.
PG: Has any particular work, person, art, etc. influenced your approach to your academic work and your perspective more generally?
HK: This is a tricky question, because in my early days I struggled with finding a discipline to house my quite feminist, multi-dimensional, and niche interests within a university system that seemed quite rigid in many ways, so I’ve needed to draw inspiration and courage from wherever I could. For instance, Finnish gender studies pioneer Leena-Maija Rossi’s Heterotehdas (Hetero Factory, 2003) was my first touchpoint with both gender studies and visual studies, and it indicated towards fields where I felt my approach and perspective were not that marginal. Sara Ahmed’s oeuvre is obviously a great influence, both because of her highly inspiring affect studies approach but also in the permission her work gives for “feminist killjoy” activities also within the university system. Currently – in relation to planetary death related research – I am in awe of Deborah Bird Rose’s work, whose oeuvre is marked by empathy, horror at the face of violence, and this way of speaking and writing from one’s full humanity – not from this academic pretense of being an uninfluenced, unfeeling brain on a stick, but from a position that weaves both emotion and thinking inseparably together. There would be so many more influences, both academic, artistic, and personal, but these three academics come first to my mind in this moment.