“A Farewell to Arms”: Anti-Nuclear Protest, Emotion and Gender in Finland, 1979-1987
Main funder
Funder's project number: 348332
Funds granted by main funder (€)
- 229 667,00
Funding program
Project timetable
Project start date: 01/09/2022
Project end date: 31/08/2025
Summary
From Extinction Rebellion to #MeToo and the alt-right, the last decade has witnessed an increase in transnational, gendered and emotive socio-political protest. The COVID-19 pandemic has similarly resulted in threats to our wellbeing and disrupted our plans for the future. I propose to add a historical dimension to contemporary conversations regarding the survival of humankind by producing the first study examining anti-nuclear protest in Finland during the 1980s, a transformative yet understudied era of 20th century Cold War history.
This project uses archival, media and oral history sources, and brings together two theoretical frameworks: emotion and gender. I approach anti-nuclear protest as a broad socio-political phenomenon rather than a clearly definable social movement, emphasising the plurality of voices and activities brought together by the threat of nuclear apocalypse. The focus is therefore on the ways in which emotions were central to everyday acts of anti-nuclear resistance. What makes 1980s anti-nuclear protest particularly interesting is how emotional expressions and experiences became intertwined with questions concerning gender. This project will produce the first scholarly mapping of women’s anti-nuclear protest in 1980s Finland, and also assess men’s anti-nuclear activities through a gendered lens, shifting away from an approach that views masculinity as the genderless norm.
My postdoctoral project has the following three core aims: 1) to write a history of Finnish anti-nuclear protest and its transnational links during the ‘Second Cold War’ (1979-1987); 2) to develop a new theoretical framework that integrates gender and emotion as central analytical components into the study of post-war socio-political protest; and 3) to provoke conversations within and beyond academia regarding the different ways in which historical research into earlier eras of ecological uncertainty has utility in informing current and future environmental debates.
The project examines Finnish anti-nuclear protest between the years 1979 and 1987 via a focus on three interlinked categories of primary sources: 1) organisational archives, 2) mainstream media sources and 3) oral history interviews. From a methodological perspective, this project makes two significant contributions: 1) it places transnational and spatial approaches into dialogue, highlighting how internationally interconnected protest opposing a nuclear holocaust that knew no geopolitical boundaries was nonetheless shaped by its local and national situatedness, and 2) it explores how interviews provide narratives that are influenced as much by the interviewees’ current emotional condition as by their past emotional experiences. This project does not shy away from this methodological challenge, instead tackling it head on, experimenting how contemporary events and discourses can mediate memories of 1980s anti-nuclear protest.
The proposed 36-month project (2022-2025) will produce four academic articles (three in English and one in Finnish); a monograph proposal, book deal and working draft; collaboration in the form of written work and workshops with the think-tank Demos Helsinki; a consistent social media presence; a methodological-theoretical academic workshop focused on the history of emotions. During the project I will complete a 5-month visiting researcher post at at the History of Emotions Research Centre at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and an online virtual fellow post for 3 months at the University of Adelaide, in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions.
