On what felt like a warm spring morning for a Helsinkian, we met with Lotta who had flown in from California, and was escaping the cold outside air into the warmth of the cafe. We sat down for a coffee to talk about Lotta’s career path and her current microhistory research project, which she worked on during her month-long visit at CENS.
Lotta: My home university is the University of Berkeley, where I teach at the Department of Scandinavian. I first went to California to work as a sabbatical replacement between 2007–2008, and stayed as an adjunct lecturer until 2016, when I became part of permanent teaching faculty. So, I have been there for a pretty long time.
I teach classes in Finnish language and history. The classes are part of something called ‘breadth studies’. They are general studies in many North American universities that all students must take. My class goes into international breadth and historical breadth, and so these are undergraduate courses for the whole campus. It means I can have students from applied math to psychology and archaeology, art practice...anything! These are really fun classes to teach.
I’m also a language programme coordination in our department. We teach Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Finnish, and sometimes also modern Icelandic. You can study Old Norse, but teaching that goes to the medievalists. And so my job is to oversee the programming, training and planning within the modern Nordic languages. Our graduate students who teach modern languages are under my supervision as well. In connection with the language programme coordination, I also teach pedagogy classes.
An additional small part of my job is the Nordic Centre, which is a collaborative project with the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. We have established a scholarship programme, and Berkeley has study abroad opportunities to Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland.
During Lotta’s stay as a visiting researcher at CENS, she is conducting a microhistory research project inspired by family stories she heard from her elderly relatives as a child.
Their sentences were commuted if they came and did forced labour for the Russians, in the very western parts of the Russian empire. And that happened to be Söderkulla and Sipoo.
Lotta: I am here on a discovery and data collection trip! I’m doing a microhistory on a region in the south of Finland, in a small region near Helsinki called Gesterby, Söderkulla. It’s in Sipoo, a neighbouring municipality to Helsinki. I have narrowed the time period down to 1915–1917. At that time, Finland was under Russian rule. The World War I was going on, and some military fortifications were built in the area during that time.
My father’s side of the family comes from that area, so this project has some family roots as well. I remember when I was a child, my elderly relatives talked about Chinese people on the farm. I didn't pay much attention to these stories back then, for a child they were just stories like any other family lore.
But then later on, when I was teaching history classes at Berkeley, I wanted to bring lived experiences of people who are in the cross waters of big historical events. And then I started thinking about the small villages where our family farm is, and these stories came back to my mind.
And it turns out that the Russian military had brought imprisoned people from the very eastern expand of their realm, from the Chinese border. Their sentences were commuted if they came and did forced labour for the Russians, in the very western parts of the Russian empire. And that happened to be Söderkulla and Sipoo. Their job was to cut down and clear-cut big areas of the forest. Sipoonkorpi was taken completely down, and Nuuksio that is now a national forest was also completely cut clean. The fear was that the Germans would come from that side. They never came but this fortress was built, and that took enormous amounts of manpower of course. I’m interested in who came here, where did they come from? So now I’ve been here at the National library (Kansalliskirjasto) and the university library, and it's really cool!
I started my undergrad in Finland, but very quickly went for an Erasmus exchange, which was new in the mid 90s.
Lotta’s career has been both international and interdisciplinary. She tells how her international academic path began already during her Bachelor’s studies, when an Erasmus+ exchange took her abroad to Berlin.
Lotta: My journey has been long, and it’s not a straightforward line at all. I started my undergrad in Finland, but very quickly went for an Erasmus exchange, which was new in the mid 90s. And I went to Berlin with that Erasmus and ended up staying there for three or four years and finishing my Bachelor’s studies there. During my Master’s I got this idea to study the second and third generation of Finns in Sweden (eventually leading to her academic dissertation Representations of Finnishness in Sweden, 2008). I did my fieldwork over multiple years and interviewed the same people over multiple times about their language identities and how it was to grow up in Sweden with a Finnish background. I was always very happy to go there [Sweden], it was fantastically interesting research for me at that time.
When I was in that process, I lived in the Netherlands and worked at Utrecht University College, and did my advanced studies at the University of Amsterdam. And from there I went to UC Berkeley.
...there has been a big change. Twenty years ago there was no Hygge or ice iglus all students knew about...
Lotta continues to reflect on the changes and shifts she has observed during her time at UC Berkeley.
Lotta: Ways of teaching and the contents have changed quite a bit over the years I have taught at Berkeley. Clearly Finnish language doesn’t change a lot, the grammar is the same, but the method of delivery is different. The possibilities for students to have access to semi naturally and naturally occurring Finnish language are really different than 20 years ago.
But for the history classes and what we teach about culture and history, there has been a big change. Twenty years ago there were no Hygge or ice iglus all students knew about from their social media feeds. These days they come with a set of things they already think they know about the Nordic countries. Many of them can place these countries on the map, but many things they think they know are based on their social media algorithms and might actually not be accurate at all. There was also a TV series called the Vikings, which shaped students’ understanding and expectations of what they will study if they come to our department.
So we do a lot of disappointing unpacking. We teach a similar class that you teach here, Nordic colonialism, and it is somber reading for the students. And every year I have a conversation about the claim that ‘Finland is the happiest country in the world’. I go yes, but how do you define happiness? What do different cultures defines as happiness? We look at the questions and we look at the organisation that designs the questionnaire and processes the results.
It's definitely interesting and sobering at times to teach Nordic Studies in North America. Already for multiple years, we have had a pedagogy panel in the SASS (Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study) conference, where we talk about how it is to teach these types of regional studies in North America. You can situate the studies in an old historical context, or you can teach contemporary topics from a critical standpoint and talk about “uncomfortable things” ...so it’s a big responsibility too.
My students are amazing and they want to have these discussions. UC Berkeley is huge, but our classes are small, and that is a perk because then it is actually possible to have these conversations. I really like teaching undergrads, in my experience many of them come to lectures with a genuine openness and interest in discussing.
I'm enjoying the fact that I'm in the same time zone, as I'm usually 10 hours removed.
Lastly, Lotta was asked whether there was something she was particularly looking forward to during her visit?
Lotta: Yes! I look forward to auditing the Nordic Colonialism lecture course. I’m of course completely in awe of the facilities, the access to libraries and the archives. And of course also being able to talk to people, it’s very different to exchange emails with someone you met at a conference or have never met at all. I'm enjoying the fact that I'm in the same time zone, as I'm usually 10 hours removed.
This is a terrible season for a visit so luckily I’m not here for tourism purposes...but Helsinki is beautiful. It is a wonderful opportunity to be able to do full time research, I haven't had this mode of library work since my doctorate and I love it!
Photo: Lotta Weckström