The old saying ‘a man of many trades’ should now be fixed to read ‘a woman of even more.’ At least that is how I feel when trying to remember all the things that I have been involved in. For almost forty years I served in various university-related positions of trust in addition to teaching and research.

The last one was my term as full-time Dean of the Faculty of Arts for the three years before my retirement. As I had not studied at Helsinki and even my professorship here was rather short, being the Dean offered me the chance to get better acquainted not only with the Faculty and its departments but also the people working here. While serving in various cooperation committees, I even got to know the other faculties and their activities.

As Dean, I therefore got quite a good picture of the whole university and its functioning. There were certain large administrative reforms during my tenure, such as the adoption of a new salary system and the drafting of a so called quality management system. These kinds of changes, especially when they are implemented in a spirit that is rather alien to the goals and functioning of universities, are not easy nor always successful as far as the outcome is concerned. Even as a Dean I sometimes wanted to protest, but that was limited to the minutes of some committee meetings. The changes went through and there was more to come, but at that point I was already elsewhere.

In any case, and despite the difficulty of the task, I was and I am glad that I had the chance to participate in and get to know humanistic research and teaching in all its wide-reaching vibrancy and wisdom from this perspective as well.

Another way and another context for familiarising myself with Finnish research in the humanities and social sciences came to me when I worked in the research council of these fields at the Academy of Finland. When preparing and making the funding decisions, we read hundreds of applications and research proposals that participated in the competition.

In addition, the research council planned and carried out at least one targeted call for applications that I am really happy with. The theme was ‘Gender, Power, and Violence’ and the programme funded eleven projects on gendered violence and violence against women, which had a profound effect not only on research in the field but also the way in which the issues are approached in Finnish society. Probably because of this project I had to represent Finland in the programme committee of Kön och våld, a Nordic research project on gender and violence. The programme was carried out in 2002–2005, and many scholars from Finland took part in the cooperation.

This was not my first experience of Nordic cooperation. I had already started it while I was at the University of Turku in 1972, when the Nordic Institute of Folklore (NIF) was moved there from Denmark. It was one of the institutions that were permanently kept up by the Nordic Council of Ministers at the time. I took part in the teaching and research activities of the institute during the whole time that it was located in Turku. I also worked as its research secretary for a couple of years in the early 1980s and founded its group of women’s studies scholars, which was called KvinnFolk, and published a collection of articles under the same name in 1980. Later I served in NIF’s board as one of the Finnish representatives and during its last year 1996 I was its chair. NIF and a couple of other such institutes were closed down and funding became project-based. The idea of innovations and centres of excellence, with money moving swiftly, was on its way.

 

‘Research visits without funding’

As a folklorist, I also ended up participating in an official committee for cooperation between Finland and the Soviet Union when I served as the academic secretary and member of the working group for the study of literature and folklore in the 1980s and 1990s. Our purpose was to make researchers come to Finland from the Soviet Union and vice versa.

The programme was called, amusingly enough, ‘research visits without money’, which meant that the sender paid for travel expenses and the receiver for living costs and a daily allowance. Researchers in the field were mostly interested in nearby Karelia and Estonia, and this programme enabled many of them to get to know colleagues in these areas and to work in the archives and libraries of Petrozavodsk, Tallinn and Tarto – some were even allowed to do field work. A select few Karelian and Estonian researchers could visit Finland. I went to Karelia and Estonia as well, to collect lamentations and to meet Karelian, Estonian and even some Russian scholars of these texts.

The first academic society that was of interest to me was the Finnish Society for the Study of Religion, on which I served for the whole 1970s as secretary and editorial secretary of the Temenos: The Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion. Later, I held positions of trust at the Finnish Literature Society for 30 years, until 2013. I have also been a member of the Association for Gender Studies in Finland, which was founded in the 1980s. I have also been a board member there for a few years, and for two years I was editor-in-chief of their journal, Naistutkimus – Kvinnoforskning.

The Study of Religions was introduced in Finnish universities as a separate subject in the 1960s. Women’s studies became a subject a couple of decades later. Since I was involved in both processes in some way or another, I am convinced that without academic societies for these fields to support them and to spread the word about them, the road would have been much longer and windier.