Alicja Staniszewska

Having recently concluded a long period of fieldwork, the Saari Residence offers me a great gateway to switch my focus towards analysis and writing. I plan to dedicate myself to writing and making significant progress on my monograph dissertation, which will braid together stories of human and non-human entanglements with a focus on ticks and forests. I explore them through the lenses of immigrant experiences and I look closer at how they reshape the understanding of Finnish forests and climate change. During my residency, I will also work on a co-authored article that explores the speculative ethics of conducting research with non-human beings, particularly those that are often considered unwanted or unloved. This article will draw on my fieldwork and propose ways to include non-humans in ethical considerations within social and humanistic research.

I’m looking forward to spending two months immersed in a routine of reading, writing, walking, and reflecting. For me, this time in Mynämäki is also important for deepening my attentiveness towards ticks’ perspectives, as Southern Finland is one of the most densely populated by them in Finland. I’m looking forward to wandering, encountering and experimenting in the outdoors.

My methods often involve multispecies ethnography and experimental art practices, such as sensory walks, where I invite participants to engage with their surroundings on both a micro and macro scale – from observing the interactions of the surface of human skin with insects to sensing with breathing of the forest.

Alicja Staniszewska (she/her) is an anthropologist and a doctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She holds a master’s degree in Cultural Ethnology and Anthropology from the University of Warsaw, where she completed a project on embodied experiences in Finnish forests. Her current PhD research, funded by the Kone Foundation, explores the perspectives of people of immigrant backgrounds on Finnish forests, ticks, and climate change. Staniszewska’s research interests include environmental anthropology, migration, and the notions of imagination and disgust. She uses creative and experimental methods like sensory walks to explore human-nature relations. She works in subarctic and Arctic regions, where the effects of climate change are happening most rapidly.