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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how rural – urban transitions are connected to elderly people’s lives and how these transitions are reflected in their more-than-human narratives in remote areas of Finland.

Paper long abstract

During the life histories of the aged, transitions from rural to urban (and back) can be subtle, abrupt or even involuntary. Events which lead to these transitions become an essential part of their life stories, part of their own biographical narratives which intertwine tightly with nature. Our study focuses on elderly people and their multispecies everyday lives. These 75+ aged people live in sparsely populated areas in Finland where forests, peatlands, hills and fells, rivers, lakes and the sea are their everyday landscapes. Currently, we have conducted ethnographic fieldwork with 14 elderly participants from different backgrounds. All of them are residents of rural areas, but their living conditions vary from a nursing home to their childhood homes, usually small farms, where some of them have recently returned to from cities. In our study, we ask: How do the life courses of these elderly people affect the ways they view and value their more-than-human environment, and what kind of emotions and affects are connected to their narrations on nature? To answer these questions, we use the methodology of sensory ethnography since sensory processes are significant in human engagement with and originate from the more-than-human world (Pink 2015; Vannini 2023). In our sensory ethnographic fieldwork, we move and spend time with the elderly in their everyday environments, and we document these with GoPro video camera. In our presentation, we will discuss how the verbal and the embodied experiences become entangled and construct narratives of nature.