Back to the texts, not yet the fields

My article on women’s mining labor in Russian Karelia was recently published in Laboratorium journal; the longest I’ve ever spent working on a single text.

Its first life began in 2018, when I shared an early draft at a workshop on gender and materiality in Aarhus. Later, I reworked it for a special issue on gender, design, and material culture in (post-)Soviet Russia. That work ended abruptly in March 2022, soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

I returned to it through personal experiences of motherhood, which prompted me to think more deeply about gender, femininity, and the intersections of the intimate and the political. The stories of the women I had interviewed years earlier began to fill my mind again. I felt that I needed to finalize this work.

Looking at the text now, I see its many layers, shaped by my own changes in perspective over seven years of writing and revising. Although the article is now published, it doesn’t feel entirely finished, as the story has more to say. I strongly hope it will continue, whenever I once again take an old PAZik bus to the mining settlement, returning to the field.