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Paper short abstract:

The paper will explore the influence of perceived urban change on resident’s place attachment, but especially, focusing on the dialectic between leaving and staying, place attachment disruptions, such as forced or voluntary relocation due to flooding, new/larger apartment allocations, etc.

Paper long abstract:

Joining the emerging field of environmental humanities, the paper aims at studying the lives and narratives of urban communities neighboring the Riga port. Strongly attached to their places and historical identities, these communities constantly confront change that affects their lifestyle and environmental quality. The decline of Baltic fisheries and industrialization of the port over the past decades have substantially transformed what once were fishing suburbs, rural enclaves within a city, islands providing their inhabitants with access to natural resources and water in particular.

By using the oral-historical study of place-attachment I will explore the influence of perceived urban change on resident’s place attachment, but especially, focusing on the dialectic between leaving and staying, place attachment disruptions, such as forced or voluntary relocation due to new/larger apartment allocations (customary in Soviet times), and other.

The particular research is based on the framework of environmental oral history, which enables us to more fully and critically understand the ways cultural and individual memory and experience shapes human interactions with the more-than-human world, just as it enables us to identify the ways human memory, identity and experience is molded by the landscapes and environments in which people live and work. Life stories are seen as an important resource in the study of the people’s perceptions, experiences and beliefs about environments, constant changes over time, and place attachment.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Appalachians display memory markers of a 2001 flood as forms of strategic resistance to suggested out-migration. In the absence of official support for (re)building livability after disaster, how do residents aesthetically force continuous witnessing to trauma and survival?

Paper long abstract:

In July 2001, a flash flood wiped out southern West Virginia’s Wyoming County. Twenty years later, residents still remember and tell stories about the flood and their ongoing attempts to overcome and endure the insidious social and environmental effects that linger. The year 2001 also brought other traumas like the rise of the opioid epidemic and 9/11, so storytellers often relate this local flood to larger disasters, especially as the area lost institutional aid and attention to more inter/national problems. In the heart of rural Appalachia, the county experienced increased out-migration after the flood; yet, others stayed put, dedicated to resiling and creating a livable future despite both capitalist and environmental ruins and constant calls to abandon the economically failing coalfields. This paper will explore some aesthetic expressions and reminders—like unofficial memorials and flood markers—of the 2001 flood that residents continue to publicly display as forms of resistance to suggested out-migration after disaster. In the absence of official support for (re)building livability after destruction, how do residents force continuous witnessing to both their trauma and their endurance of the flood? What do intentional (like a framed flood photo) and unintentional (like a lingering flood line) memory markers reveal about how residents negotiate precarity, marginality, power, and resistance in a stigmatized place? In maintaining public memory of environmental disaster and ongoing life despite institutional abandonment, how do residents frame attachment and local investment despite ruin as forms of strategic resistance?

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the caregiving/receiving practice among Finnish seniors who live at home in the Archipelago region and Lapland. By questioning when does the choice to live alone in frail conditions in remote areas become unusual, the relationship between the rural carescapes and the people’s attachment to their homes will be analysed.

Paper long abstract:

In Finland, home care is regarded as a progressive social service

compared to the old-fashioned institutional care. According to the

Ministry of Health and Welfare, it is more humane and cost-effective

approach because it promotes autonomy of senior citizens. It is customer

-oriented, thus suits the neoliberal ideology of the policy. However,

this scheme is not applicable to all the senior citizens. The ideal home

care customer would be those who live in apartment rooms in urban

location with relatively good health. Municipalities doesn’t actively

recommend senior citizens to stay at home if their house is situated in

extremely remote location or they are dangerously fragile. Delivering

home care service to those customers is costly.

Still, after the Finnish welfare state taking neoliberal turn, number of

seniors who chose to stay home with difficulty is more prominent than

before. Then, when does the choice to live alone in frail conditions in

remote areas become counter-progressive to the eyes of public service?

What kind of attachment to the place does senior citizens bring out to

assert their decision to stay? This paper examines the amalgam of

informal/formal care practice among Finnish seniors in rural regions.

The ethnographic data is based on research in Finnish Archipelago and

Lapland where geographical disadvantage and the minority languages limit

the access to public/private care service. By comparing the local

carescapes (Milligan and Wiles 2010) which are consists of kinship ties,

neighbourhood, geographical prerequisite, politico-economic condition

and morality, people’s attachment to their homes will be analysed.