Keynote Speakers and Panelists

Get to know more about the keynote speakers and panelists of Museums and Emotional Sustainability in a Time of Polycrisis Conference.
Dr. Angela Failler

 is Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and former Canada Research Chair in Culture and Public Memory at the University of Winnipeg where she also directed the Centre for Research in Cultural Studies. Her research is focused on how practices of culture and public memory are used to grapple with “difficult knowledge” and the reverberations of historical traumas and injustices. Her projects pay special attention to creative, unofficial, and counter-memorial practices of remembrance that challenge official memory and denialist accounts, seeking justice for communities whose losses have been silenced and/or strategically appropriated. She is the Principal Investigator of a long-term study on public memory and the cultural afterlife of the 1985 Air India bombings and is helping to develop a public exhibit on this under-represented yet world-changing event. 

Failler is also a founding member of the  research network and Museum Queeries, a project that prioritizes Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and queer (2S+LGBTTQ) contributions and interventions into museums and museum studies. Most recently, as the grandchild of a Chinese immigrant to Canada, she has begun to explore what it means to inherit and remember histories of Chinese immigration, exclusion, and resistance through archives, museums, and other sites of cultural memory.  
Dr. Marzia Varutti

is a museologist working at the intersection of environmental humanities and emotions studies. After working for a few years as Associate Professor in Museology at the University of Oslo, she moved to Switzerland to gain transdisciplinary expertise on the study of emotions at the Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, and has recently moved back to Scandinavia, at the University of Gothenburg (GU), where she is now based. 

Varutti’s current research develops around a few interconnected topics: She has been experimenting with the application of insights from emotion studies into the realm of museums, notably to explore the role of emotions in environmental communication in museums, and to advance the theorization of emotions in museums (with writings on the affective turn in museums; specific emotions such as awe and hope; and museum professionals’ emotion work). This research connects with parallel work in the Environmental Humanities on the significance of the public expression of ecological grief and mourning, and on pathways to more care-full and ethical relationships with the more-than-human. Varutti is also engaged in science-humanities research on the bio-cultural significance of glaciers – which ties back into a side strand of ecocritical work on ecopoetry as a medium to communicate the environmental urgency. 

Bringing all this back to museums, Varutti is drawn to explore how environmental humanities perspectives (theories, concepts, methods...) can be applied to museums, and what happens when we do so: for instance, what would a ‘more-than-human museum’ look and feel like? 
Panelists

Charlotte Engman is a Swedish cultural analyst, ethnologist, and museology researcher affiliated with Umeå University. Her research focuses on museums, cultural heritage, democracy, colonialism, and decoloniality, with a particular interest in the emotional and political complexities of museum labour. Engman’s work explores topics such as museum education, public engagement, and the challenges posed by hate, threats, and violence in museums. She has also examined Sweden’s historical connections to the Congo Free State, investigating how new archival methods can contribute to understanding colonial histories and heritage. 

 

Áile Aikio is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Lapland, Finland. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences and a MA in Ethnology. Her research interests include Sámi cultural heritage and art, decolonization and indigenization of heritage practices, and most recently multibeing coexistence. Currently Aikio is working in the MultiBEING Centre of Excellence in Indigenous Societies, that examines multibeing justice and human’s responsibility for ensuring a good and just life for all life forms. Before her Ph.D. Aikio worked at the Sámi Museum Siida, first as a Curator of collections and later overseeing exhibitions, museum education, and the development of educational programs. 

 

Riikka Haapalainen, PhD, BEd, title of docent, is an art historian and educational scientist specialising in adult education. She is the senior university lecturer in exhibition pedagogy at the  Department of art and media at Aalto University. She is also the co-editor in chief of the Finnish Journal of Cultural Studies (Kulttuurintutkimus-lehti). Previously, she as worked, among others, as a professor of contemporary art research at the University of the Arts' Academy of Fine Art. Haapalainen's research interests is focused on the histories and theories of contemporary art, as well as critical museum research and societal meanings of art.   

 

Panel host: 

Johanna Turunen works as a senior grant researcher at the University of Jyväskylä. She holds a doctorate in contemporary culture studies and a title of docent in critical heritage studies. Her research focuses on the societal agency of museums and the intersection of difficult heritage, emotions and transformative learning. She is currently leading the Uncomfortable Museum: Towards Safe, Brave Spaces research project funded by the Kone Foundation.