Alumni of the Month: Natalya Bekhta and Alan Warde

I am Academy Research Fellow at Tampere University and Docent in Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki. Currently, I lead a  on utopian imagination and “second-world” literatures, supported by the Research Council of Finland and Kone Foundation.

Looking back at my time at HCAS, it was clearly some of the best years in my academic life. The Collegium gave me the community, the time and, very importantly, space – a “room of my own” as it were – to develop the ideas that became the foundation for my current research and my sprawling network of connections, collaborations, and projects. The word “sprawling” might suggest negative connotations of disorder, but I think that scientific innovation and creativity do not work without a certain dose of unpredictability, openness to external ideas, and freedom to explore. HCAS as an academic institution offered a perfect balance between the (infra)structural affordances, work obligations, and scholarly freedom needed for effective growth and development of ideas.  

This balance, I believe, was key not only to developing my research within the field of narratology into new interdisciplinary directions, but also to enabling professional collaborations that developed into friendships. Moreover, it enabled me to make several interventions in the field of narrative studies. During my time at the Collegium, I convened and guest edited a special issue of  on “We-Narratives and We-Discourses Across Genres” and wrote a pilot article of my current research project, titled “Narrating the Future: A World-Literary Take on the Crisis of Imagination and the Novel”, which was subsequently published with . My contribution to the 2020 special issue – the article on “‘We’ and the Language of War: On the Poetry of Serhiy Zhadan” – gained renewed relevance in 2022 with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and was published in Finnish translation in .

I remember with great fondness my two years at the Collegium between 2010 and 2012. I was fortunate enough to be the recipient of the . I am a sociologist who was working at the time on consumption, cultural taste and participation, and food and eating. I was able to (almost) bring two substantial programs of research to fruition due to the luxury of a scholarly environment and a lot of time to think and write. 

I spent a full 6 months reading during a beautifully snowy winter, ranging across a much wider range of literature than a normally busy schedule would allow. From that I learned a great deal about pragmatism, a favorite approach of some members of the Sociology Department at the University of Helsinki, and wove it into a book eventually entitled It took another couple of years to complete the manuscript, but the serious work was done at HCAS. 

I also was able to compile a book that was published as , which drew on some already published material and some new pieces. It represented a culmination of twenty years work trying to fashion a sociology of consumption. During my visit I had access to the resources of the Collegium to organize three international seminars, which brought scholars from across Europe together to discuss matters such as the nature of taste and developments in sociology. 

In career terms I was already well established, but the stay in Helsinki gave me time to develop a new tranche of ideas which continue to inspire my research and writing. In the process I got to love Helsinki and Finland and learn the pleasures of seasonal food like berries, crayfish, and mushrooms, and the art of walking on ice. My stay was an enjoyable and productive privilege.