Programme

The detailed program for the Workshop on the concept of the makeshift economy is below. The workshop will take place in Room F3010 of the Main Building at the University of Helsinki, located at Fabianinkatu 33. The event is open to anyone interested in the topic.
Thursday, 28 August 2025

10:00 Welcome words

10:15–11:15 Keynote, Maïka De Keyzer

A peasant makeshift economy: avoiding precariousness or building economic resilience? Different income strategies of peasant households in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Campine area, Southern Low Countries)

11:30–13:00 Session 1: Alternative and Diverse Sources of Income

Ville-Pekka Kääriäinen (University of Helsinki): A Poorer Class of Peasants? Torpare and Makeshift Livelihoods in Eastern Finland

Jonas Lindström: (Uppsala University): The poor of eighteenth-century Sweden: How did they survive?

Henrik Forsberg (University of Helsinki): Making bark bread affordable for the poor: An accounting exercise on tar economy and its invisible side incomes in Kauhajoki (Western Finland) in the 1760s 

13:00–14:00 Lunch

14:00–15:30 Session 2: Household Economies in Times of Shocks and Crises

Heikki Kämäräinen (University of Jyväskylä): Debt and private credit in 1830s agrarian community 

Opeyemi Afolabi Femi-Oladunni (Universidad Europea Madrid): The Inequality Harvest: How Social Tables Defined Rural Spain (1906–1936) 

Eeva Houtbeckers (University of Eastern Finland): The need for paradigm shifts: Conceptualisations of work in socio-ecological crises, the standpoint of workers, and the makeshift economy 

15:30–16:00 Coffee break

16:00–17:30 Session 3: Criminality, social control and shadow economies

Monia O’Brien Castro (Tours University): Making a Living in the Margins: British County Lines 

Beate Althammer (Trier University): Poverty, Mobility and Petty Delinquency: Makeshifts in the Prussian Rhineland (Nineteenth Century) 

Ulla Ijäs (University of Turku): Makeshift economy, space and body. Experiences in the early 19th century Finland 

19:00 Dinner
 

Friday, 29 August 2025

9:00 Keynote, Mikko Jakonen

Making a Living in the Margins of the Post-Industrial Welfare State

10:15–12:15 Session 4: Precarity and working life transformation

Ella Viitaniemi (University of Tampere): Precarious clergy and struggling career-paths              

Gabi Wüthrich (University of Zurich): Making a living in the middle of rural society: Investigating plural occupations in early-modern Switzerland through proto-statistical survey 

Xin Liu (Turku Institute for Advanced Studies & Karlstad University): The experts of savings lottery. The Unsung heroes of China’s Economic Warfare (1949-1952) 

Ossi Laaksamo (University of Jyväskylä): Strands of makeshift economy and self-sufficiency in a Finnish workfare scheme and its historical background

12:15–13:15 Lunch

13:15–15:15 Session 5: Earning Strategies and Incomes of Women and Children

Noora Viljamaa (University of Turku): Child poverty in urban 19th-century Finland 

Sofia Gustafsson (University of Helsinki): The soldier families' makeshift economy in Helsinki in the mid-eighteenth century 

Riina Turunen (University of Jyväskylä): Between wages and subsistence: Women’s earnings in estate labor on the western coast of Finland, ca. 1830 

Leena Enbom (University of Helsinki): Makeshift Economies in a Changing Society: Methodological Reflections Based on Welfare Archives

15:15–15:45 Coffee break

15:45–16:15 — Closing remarks and discussion