Postdoctoral researcher Anna Heinonen started in the project

Anna Heinonen is a Kone Foundation postdoctoral researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. In the project, she studies LGBTIQ+ people’s separation experiences from a communal perspective. The perspective allows to investigate how the separations are produced in the seminar participants’ speech as a product of various experiences, changing situations, societal positions, and the mutual action of the seminar group.

Heinonen’s doctoral dissertation ‘Queering intimacies at home: Friendship and roommate relations in Finnish small-scale communes’ (to be defended in summer 2024) examines intimacy in friendship and roommate relations in Finnish communal living. In the dissertation, Heinonen analyzes how intimacies are forged in a complex manner through intimate contacts, meanings given to the relationships and spatial and temporal contexts. The dissertation consists of articles published in Gender, Place and Culture, Time & Society, and Families, Relationships and Societies.