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This article uses a relationality-sensitive perspective to analyse long-term breastfeeding. The data was gathered through open invitations to write, and the article is based on the written reflections of 39 long-term breastfeeding Finnish mothers. In Finland, the breastfeeding of babies is strongly supported, but long-term breastfeeding (over 12 months) is a more conflicted issue, and the cultural norm of one year of breastfeeding is strong. Through qualitative content analysis, the article shows how mothers reflect on long-term breastfeeding's effects on their relations with their breastfed children, partners (if any), relatives and healthcare professionals. The findings show that long-term breastfeeding is often a rewarding experience, but that it takes place in a network of relations and has effects on those relations. With a relationality-sensitive approach to breastfeeding, we can better understand how mothering is done in and through relations with others, and how mothers express the need for a change in attitudes towards long-term breastfeeding. This article gives a voice to mothers who are often silent in our society, and therefore participates in the feminist empowerment of women and especially mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earlier studies show that experiencing life as meaningful in old age promotes holistic wellbeing and health among older people. As more and more people are living with reduced capacities in their own homes, there is an urgent need to find new ways of promoting holistic wellbeing of the ageing population. Analysing data gathered from existential discussion groups on Service TV (STV), we show how strongly relationality and meaning in life are intertwined for older people. Our findings indicate that respect and support for the autonomy of older people is very important: in order to continue living at home, and prepare for a future with reduced capacities, they need family members for support. Autonomy of ageing becomes relational as choices and wishes are negotiated with family members. Relationships also contribute to loss of meaning. When older people felt that they were not close enough to their family, longed for friends of the same age, were bereaved or widowed, the relational gap caused a violation of meaning. In contrast, participation and activities with peers brought deep joy and connectedness to the lives of the participants. STV provided a new channel for participants to find and form meaningful relationships. Therefore, it is concluded that relationality can be supported by technological means of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary planetary multi-crisis can arguably be attributed to the failure of humans' relationship with nature. Reconnecting humans with nature is therefore a crucial lever for the sustainability transformation and to achieve the long-term well-being of both humans and nature. While nature connectedness (NC) has been studied quantitatively using various measures and scales, there is a need to complement this work with qualitative research that broadens and deepens the understanding of this phenomenon. This article is a qualitative inquiry into NC among 29 unemployed young adults (aged 20-29) in Finland. The data were collected in group interviews and it is noteworthy that the respondents lived in cities, since urbanites are often represented as disconnected from nature. The participants' discourse on nature is analyzed with the help of a typology of NC constructed on the basis on three NC typologies found in recent research. NC's linkage to a relational, multi-dimensional, and need-based conceptualization of well-being is also discussed, as is whether NC should be conceived of as a separate need category. All six dimensions of the typology of NC used in the analysis (material, cognitive, experiential, sensual/emotional, philosophical/spiritual, and compassion, care and commitment) could be detected in the respondents' accounts. The article closes with a discussion of the implications of such manifestations of NC for promoting sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mounted police units around the world have entered social media, with the aim of bringing the police closer to the public. In this paper, I analyze the Facebook page of the mounted police in the city of Helsinki, the capital of Finland. I ask how equine agency, animal work, interspecies care, and the relational networks of memory are interpreted, communicated, and performed on social media, contributing to the co-production of urban imaginaries. I approach the material as performances of animality and human–animal relations, concentrating on shared interpretations and representations of the horses and their agency. To be able to analyze human–animal encounters and interaction in urban space as they are experienced, imagined, remembered, and collectively shared, I suggest a novel concept of multispecies urban imaginary. Developing the concept widens the focus of understanding the multispecies nature of urban environments and includes animals in the experiences and perceptions of city space – where they belong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Contact with nature is increasingly being recognized as contributing to humans' mental and physical health. This study explores how Finnish children, young people and families engage with nature during outdoor recreation. We apply a relational approach with the concept of affordance to understand better how engagement with nature affects their well-being. The study is based on thematic writings of 15- to 21-year-olds and on an ethnographic study of camping. Findings indicate that engagement with nature enables young people to calm down and to get away from the pressures of everyday life and affords close interaction for families. The relational approach makes visible that the more young people and families spend time in nature, the more they are able to perceive affordances that enhance their well-being. In future research and policy, the focus should be on how to support families' engagement with nature by securing time and places for encountering nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the bonds between the living and the dead in contemporary Finland. The research data consists of approximately 100 letters collected via a writing call asking respondents to describe their understandings, memories and lived experiences related to deceased loved ones. By using qualitative analysis, the study endeavours to investigate the kinds of relational dimensions that emerge in these continuing bonds. This article looks at the ways in which the dead continue to be embedded in the lives of the living and contribute to the sense of self; it also considers the role of lived experiences, such as encounters with the dead, in creating and maintaining a sense of ongoing connectedness. However, relationships sometimes involve complex and even damaging histories, and this may affect a person's willingness to continue the bond beyond the grave. Due to this, some relationships are preferably buried with the person. This paper adds to existing studies on continuing bonds by investigating relationality in constructing, maintaining and severing such bonds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers of childhood have variously accounted for the experiences of mobile children. Less has been said about the practices of becoming mobile, including the acquisition of skills, engagement with travel technologies and the shifting child-parent relations implicated in the process. This article explores the making of mobile children through ethnographic research with 7-12-year-olds practising the journey between home and school in Helsinki, Finland. Elaborating on the work of psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott, it argues that families enact flexible spatial arrangements-transitional spaces-to experiment with their attachments to urban environments. Transitional spaces foreground the diverse relations between children, parents and the world, allowing the replacement of standard notions about growing up with situated accounts of how families make space for children's expanding mobilities. Against a cultural atmosphere stressing the risks and uncertainties of childhood, this view opens an affirmative approach to children's geographies-one that emphasises the trust, play and collaboration between adults, children and environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: It is widely recognized that folk beliefs flourished in early modern Finland which had formally been Christianized for centuries. These folk beliefs seem to propose, in the modern view, that people in the past believed in the existence of non-human beings, such as trolls and spirits, and considered a variety of material things from artefacts to landscape elements to have special properties, such as agency, consciousness, and personality. Folk beliefs, however, may have been misrepresented due to the assumption that they originate in religious-like thinking. This paper reconsiders the nature of folk beliefs, their relationship with religion, and their significance to archaeological interpretation both theoretically and through a case study. It is argued that folk beliefs in early modern northern Finland – and in other similar contexts – can be understood in terms of local perception and engagement with the material world. Folk beliefs, in this view, were embedded in the dynamics of everyday life, and they are, at least in the specific case discussed in this paper, indicative of two-way relatedness between people and various constituents of the material world. The archaeological implications of this view are discussed in the context of the 17th-century town of Tornio on the northern Gulf of Bothnia. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]