Search Results (3)

In this paper I reflect on the methodological concepts of youth research, utilizing a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to the interpretation of interview data from young adults who have been on short-term work or distant education at Finnish ski resorts in Lapland during the coronacirus pandemic. The study received background from a previous study “From higher education to working life: Work values of young Finns in changing labor markets". I try to distance myself from this research by interpreting young people’s coronavirus experiences and future perspectives hermeneutic-phenomenologically. In the spring of 2021, I interviewed a total of ten (5 women and 5 men) young people aged 19 to 27 I met at the ski resorts. Interviews on young people’s coronavirus experiences and their implications for the transitions from education to employment and future orientations were semi-structured, partly discussions of topics related to education, work and transition to adulthood combined with young people’s COVID-19 experiences and their implications. In the interviews, young people combined their previous life experiences and perceptions of the world with the coronavirus experiences. The coronavirus experiences of young people were situational. The study analyzes the individual experiences of young people with the COVID-19 pandemic, describing them with own youth spoken language, and interpreting the essential contents of the meanings hermeneutic-phenomenologically. The COVID-19 interpretations of young people had positive and negative meanings to their transitions in education and the labor market. The basic themes that cut across the entire material were: (1) The small impact of the pandemic on the young person’s own life. (2) The uncertainty of life and uncertain future and (3) the experienced loneliness, which can provide for youth to confront their true selves. The implications of these results are discussed in the article, which also critically considers the applicability of the hermeneutic-phenomenological research, and discusses about ethical points of the study of young people in exceptional contexts. Full article

My paper examines Mieke Bal’s concept of migratory aesthetics through the prism of hospitality. Critical of academic and institutional tendencies that either deny particularism or pin agents and artefacts to their alleged context, Bal develops her concept as a way of accommodating contemporary mobility without undermining cultural specificity. While arguing that “there is no such thing as site-unspecific art”, Bal is also critical of new historicism’s and traditional art history’s overemphasis on “provenance”, and underscores the political ramifications of this approach. Her critique can be read through the framework of hospitality. The notion of “provenance” frames the guest as the other and limits her ability to participate in the host’s culture. Hospitality, however, as Jacques Derrida maintains, is an ambivalent concept. While extending a friendly welcome, it also preserves hierarchy between the host and the guest. In my paper, I examine this other side of hospitality in Yael Bartana’s film True Finn (2014) and in Lost in Space (2005) of Mieke Bal and Shahram Entekhabi. I explore how these films organise the host/guest relation and how they deal with the political entanglement of hospitality. Full article

Fibrinogen is a highly pleiotropic protein that is involved in the final step of the coagulation cascade, wound healing, inflammation, and angiogenesis. Heterozygous mutations in Aα, Bβ, or γ fibrinogen-chain genes (FGA, FGB, FGG) have been described as being responsible for fibrinogen deficiencies (hypofibrinogenemia, hypo-dysfibrinogenemia, dysfibrinogenemia) and for more rare conditions, such as fibrinogen storage disease and hereditary renal amyloidosis. Instead, biallelic mutations have been associated with afibrinogenemia/severe hypofibrinogenemia, i.e., the severest forms of fibrinogen deficiency, affecting approximately 1–2 cases per million people. However, the “true” prevalence for these conditions on a global scale is currently not available. Here, we defined the mutational burden of the FGA, FGB, and FGG genes, and estimated the prevalence of inherited fibrinogen disorders through a systematic analysis of exome/genome data from ~140,000 individuals belonging to the genome Aggregation Database. Our analysis showed that the world-wide prevalence for recessively-inherited fibrinogen deficiencies could be 10-fold higher than that reported so far (prevalence rates vary from 1 in 10⁶ in East Asians to 24.5 in 10⁶ in non-Finnish Europeans). The global prevalence for autosomal-dominant fibrinogen disorders was estimated to be ~11 in 1000 individuals, with heterozygous carriers present at a frequency varying from 3 every 1000 individuals in Finns, to 1–2 every 100 individuals among non-Finnish Europeans and Africans/African Americans. Our analysis also allowed for the identification of recurrent (i.e., FGG-p.Ala108Gly, FGG-Thr47Ile) or ethnic-specific mutations (e.g., FGB-p.Gly103Arg in Admixed Americans, FGG-p.Ser245Phe in Africans/African Americans). Full article