This time, the JYU.Wisdom Coffee Conversations combines two related presentations as we focus on the role and transformative potential of museums for sustainability transformations. Welcome!
Presentation 1: Killjoy Museums, Animal Production Controversies, and Multispecies Agencies as Sites of Ecological-Cultural Transformation
A radical shift toward sustainable culture demands undoing anthropocentric worldviews and maintaining the capacity to engage with complex questions and difficult feelings. This presentation explores theoretical and practical examples of the transformative potential of cultural institutions and art in this work. Focusing on the distancing mechanisms of non-human agencies in society, the presentation explores the practices museums and other cultural actors can use to “kill joy” in business as usual and to foster new perspectives on multispecies coexistence.
The presenter Sanna Karimäki-Nuutinen (D.Soc.Sc.) is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of cultural policy, museum studies, and human-animal studies. Her research examines nuanced societal challenges and emotional responses related to cultural sustainability and multispecies relationships. She currently conducts her postdoctoral research in the project Excluded from Cultural Policy: Public Power as an Underminer of Cultural Bridges in Finland (Ponte), funded by the Kone Foundation. In this event, she will integrate elements of her current and developing research agenda, transitioning from her doctoral work (2026) on an art exhibition critical of animal production to a broader investigation of cultural agency in sustainability transformations.
Presentation 2: Natural history collections and their contradictory heritage – insights to an ongoing exhibition project at the Jyväskylä University Museum
The Jyväskylä University Museum is currently working on a project about the sensitive and contentious areas in the history of science and how these areas are visible in the museum collections. In the project, the Jyväskylä University Museum focuses on the difficult heritage of the natural history specimens, particularly on the methods with which the specimens have been collected in the past. In this talk, presenters Pirita Frigren, Anna-Elina Hintikka and Jonna Timonen from the museum will give an overview of the theoretical background of the project and about the current stage of the exhibition production. The exhibition, opening in January 2027, will consist of both a curated theme path in the permanent exhibition Environment as our heritage and a temporary exhibition at the Natural History Museum (Vesilinna).
We will also present the conference poster Towards Interdisciplinary and Multispecies Sustainability in Museums (Hintikka, A.-E. & Timonen, J. (2026)). In the poster, the exhibition project and contested natural heritage are approached through the lenses of planetary well-being and decoloniality, as well as by examining how a multidisciplinary museum exhibition can create dialogue between ecological and socio-cultural sustainability perspectives.
Join the event on-site or online
We encourage you to take a moment away from your desk and participate on-site, where coffee and tea will be served and the discussion may flow freely. However, remote participation is also possible. You are warmly welcome to join the event either way!
To join online, use the link below. In addition, use your own name as you join to be let in from the waiting room.
Zoom-link for remote participants (passcode: 212649)
For on-site participants, the room P105 is inside the P-building on Seminaarinmäki, downstairs of the Lozzi restaurant.
