BESTROM held its 2nd Seminar at the University of Helsinki (Finland) on 12th and 13th December 2019. Our purpose for this meeting was to check the progress of our respective case studies and to plan the collective schedule for the months ahead.
We therefore started with an update about the last HERA meeting in Gdansk (Poland) and the project website, and then we devoted some time to concrete the design of the online exhibition and the research-based performances. These two are most important outputs for BESTROM project, because they will contribute to the dissemination of the inquiries we are currently working on, so our team is sparing no efforts to create something original and engaging. Other academic deliverables, such as one collaborative book to be published by Liverpool University Press, or the Special Issue we will prepare for a European journal, were discussed too in order to exchange views about methodologies and sources.
We also had the opportunity of meeting two new colleagues who provided us with remarkable insights about the topics we are tackling and helped us to better define some of our future activities. They were Marko Stenroos, anthropologist currently working on his Ph.D., who gave us an inspiring lecture about the Finnish Roma community, and Paulina Räsänen, circus performer and director who runs a Circus Studio in Kustavi (Finland), with who BESTROM will collaborate this year. The two-days highly productive workshop would certainly not have been possible without the efficient preparation and coordination of our Finnish partners, to whom we wish to thank for their efforts and hospitality.