Here are a few links to past descriptions of my interest in documenting the Puotinen family farm, located in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (near Amasa and between Crystal Falls and Iron River).
- My funding proposal for the second farm film
- Some thoughts on a conference presentation with my sister about the films
- A reflection on creating the series of shorts from old footage of my dad telling farm stories
And, here’s a description of the importance of the first two farm videos in enabling me to resist and intervene in academics-as-usual:
To counter the effects of this academic training, I decided to create a project that would enable me to take many of the theories about storytelling, women’s agency, identity, selfhood, memory and home and experiment with them in a different medium. Instead of writing an esoteric academic paper, I, along with my husband Scott Anderson, created a digital video about my family’s most treasured homespace, the Puotinen family farm in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The themes that I had been studying for years (like the tension between wanting to belong and needing to critique simplistic notions of belonging) served as the foundation for our project.
After completing and screening the first video, The Farm: An Autobiography, in 2001, we created another one the next summer, The Puotinen Women. This video, which was a continuation of themes and questions raised in the first one, also focused on the contradictory roles that women played in Finnish immigrant households and was heavily shaped by the miscarriage I suffered just before we started filming.
These two digital videos enabled me to experiment with communicating my ever-increasing feminist theoretical knowledge to audiences outside of academic spaces. And, they allowed me to use these theories to make sense of my relationship to the farm and generations of Puotinens. These videos reminded me that theories weren’t just abstract ideas and academic knowledge wasn’t just academic! They could help me understand and connect with my family and heritage.
Due to the success of those digital videos, I briefly considered shifting the focus of my dissertation so as to include them. But I didn’t. I can’t remember the thought process that went into that decision, but I imagine that I was reluctant to subject my highly personal work to the rigid (and often stultifying) demands of academic scholarship.
Finally, here are a few pictures of the schedule for a conference at which I screened and discussed the second farm video for the first time. Just hours after presenting, my water broke and I went into labor with my first child. I recall being a little disappointed at my panel; at least one other panelist and a few audience members didn’t seem to think that my auto/biographical video was academic enough. Sigh.
