Embracing water, healing pine : touch-walking and transcorporeal worldings

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Embracing water, healing pine : touch-walking and transcorporeal worldings © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published version Nätynki, Maria; Kinnunen, Taina; Kolehmainen, Marjo Nätynki, M., Kinnunen, T., & Kolehmainen, M. (2023). Embracing water, healing pine : touchwalking and transcorporeal worldings. Senses and Society, 18(3), 299-316. https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2023.2180864 2023 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfss20 The Senses and Society ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfss20 Embracing water, healing pine: touch-walking and transcorporeal worldings Maria Nätynki, Taina Kinnunen & Marjo Kolehmainen To cite this article: Maria Nätynki, Taina Kinnunen & Marjo Kolehmainen (2023): Embracing water, healing pine: touch-walking and transcorporeal worldings, The Senses and Society, DOI: 10.1080/17458927.2023.2180864 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2023.2180864 © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published online: 07 Mar 2023. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 200 View related articles View Crossmark data Embracing water, healing pine: touch-walking and transcorporeal worldings Maria Nätynki a , Taina Kinnunen a and Marjo Kolehmainen b a University of Oulu, Finland; b University of Jyväskylä, Finland ABSTRACT This article considers touch as an embodied worlding practice in the context of humans intentionally seeking tactile trans-species contact. In particular, it examines three co-researchers’ tactile relations with tree(s) and water which were explored by “touchwalking,” an immersive method developed for this study. The method opened possibilities for examining transcorporeal sensory matterings and affective flows between the researcher’s body, coresearchers’ bodies and more-than-human bodies. This experimental micro-research brings knowledge about how people form deeply meaningful relationships with natural bodies, making worlds by cherishing tactile contact with them. Theoretically, we “posthumanize” touch by bringing insights from cultural touch and skin studies, feminist new materialisms and affect theory. We propose that our co-researchers’ specific companionships entail multilayered, more-than-human intimacies. The co-becomings fostered by tactile and sensual more-than-human intimacies are affective, material, and psychic. The study inspired us to propose that rethinking ways of engaging with matter through touch may advance alternative environmental ethics and necessitates the development of further multisensory research methodologies. KEYWORDS Touch; worlding; touchwalking method; transcorporeality; more-than -human; natural bodies; affect; intimacy Touching nature What sensory engagements – in particular, tactile relations – with natural “elements” or bodies do people intentionally seek out, and how are these encounters affectively charged? How do these sensory engagements come to matter, and how can we make sense of these matterings – becomings of matter and meaning (Barad 2012) – as researchers? To engage with these questions, we immersed ourselves in tactile relations with natural bodies introduced to us by three research participants as their precious companions. Our exploration is based on the method of “touch-walking” which Nätynki developed for this experimental micro-research. The participants who attended touch-walks are called “co-researchers” in this study, since we wish to emphasize the process of co-creating our field of study as places, events, sensory practices, and reflections in dialogue with the participants (Given 2008). We introduce touch-walking as a method where tactile experiences, haptic knowledges, memories, and affects emerge CONTACT Maria Nätynki [email protected] THE SENSES AND SOCIETY https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2023.2180864 © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. between and across bodies when walking together and touching nonhuman bodies. Thus, this article draws upon the rich methodological and epistemological discussions associated with other “walk along” methods in sensory studies, to which we also make a new contribution. Touch is constantly “on”: we cannot help but always be touching something (Paterson 2009; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). In its varying positions and movements, the body is always literally bound to the environmental settings and material objects that carry and cover it, and which the body weighs, grasps, and strokes. Touch has been acknowledged as a spatial and environmental practice that provides profound experiences of place (Paterson et al. 2012; Rickard and White 2021; Rodaway 1994). However, active search for tactile stimulation by nature or, as in our case, intentional touching of natural bodies in itself, is often marginalized or othered. In his study of “touching the beach,” Obrador (2012, 49) states that in the search for tactile stimulation by natural elements – such as through “sun, sea and sand” tourism – touch is vulgarized and categorized as a lower “animalistic” activity by contrast with cool “post-tourism.” We take it that meanings and experiences of those activities can be more fully understood when considered as parts of complex cultural “skinscapes” – (dis) entanglements of human and nonhuman agents (Howes 2018). Touch is culturally, socially, and materially shaped, including environmental touch (Rickard and White 2021). In traditional forms of primary production, such as farming, forestry, and agriculture, haptic knowledge about nature has been crucial and inherent to everyday practices. In an urban skinscape, however, which consists mainly of plain surfaces, “cold” screens, and static temperatures (Classen 2005), tactile stimuli from natural bodies are often something “extra” or even extraordinary and need to be specially arranged. This is the case with many outdoor activities that are based (albeit often implicitly) on haptic practices, such as wild swimming, recreational walking, sports fishing, hunting, and berryor mushroom-picking. In sports such as golf, hiking, mountain biking and climbing, nature provides a neutral setting for activities or is an object to be battled or conquered. Yet the sensory matterings that foster (re)connection to natural environments undoubtedly explain much of the enjoyability of these activities and can lead to new kinds of agential engagements with natural bodies (Brymer and Gray 2010). By posthumanizing touch and prevailing notions of intimacy (Lykke 2018), we want to further an idea of meaningful sensory trans-species relations. Our study is a reminder of the nature of touch as a primal way of communicating togetherness, comfort, and affection, including interspecies relations, of humans and other mammals (e.g. Binfet, Green, and Draper 2022; Keltner 2009; Montagu 1971). In what follows, we address how touching natural bodies provides opportunities for interspecies communication (Lykke 2022), and how these encounters are also experienced as a site of transcorporeal energies – as a possibility of vibrating together – and, even beyond that, as a means of giving and receiving nurturing care and comfort, providing an experience of togetherness and being held. These experiences have tremendous value for individuals and may also provide a gateway to tactile environmentalism (Lorimer 2012) and posthumanist ethics (Neimanis 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) at a more general level, as we will propose. Theoretically, we combine insights from cultural touch and skin studies (Classen 2005; Howes 2018; Lafrance 2018; Obrador 2012; Obrador-Pons 2007; Paterson 2007a, 2007b, 2009), posthumanistically oriented affect studies (Seyfert 2012; Stewart 2012) and feminist new materialisms (Alaimo 2008, 2018; Lykke 2018; Neimanis 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa 2M. NÄTYNKI ET AL. 2017). Despite their varied philosophical backgrounds and empirical focuses, all these strands stress the relationality of more-than-human bodies. Touch makes our bodies more-than-one: one cannot touch without being touched (Merleau-Ponty 1968). Touch, as well as affect, inherently calls attention to the porosity and permeability of bodies, as well as their ambivalence and their simultaneous activity and passivity in transcorporeal operations (Kinnunen and Kolehmainen 2019). In a touch, an infinity of others – other beings, other spaces, other times – is aroused (Barad 2012). Touching is also a matter of response, demonstrating how each of “us” is constituted in response-ability (Barad 2012). The article thus brings together cultural sensory studies’ theorization of skin as “open, relational, sentient and processual” as well as “human and non-human, material and immaterial” (Lafrance 2018, 4) and Alaimo’s (2008, 2018) notion of transcorporeality. Transcorporeality – rather than intercorporeality – refers to the co-constitution of bodies, both human and nonhuman, through material corporeality across species. It stresses the ways the dynamic, material world crosses through bodies, transforms them, and is transformed by them (Alaimo 2008, 2018). In this study, the concept enables recognition of the co-researchers’ processual, tactile, affectively charged matterings with water and tree(s). We consider touch to be a site of tremendous affective capacities that extend deeply into the psychosocial affective realm (Kolehmainen and Kinnunen 2020; Paterson 2007a), being a vital mode of becoming with animate and inanimate nonhuman bodies. In this way, we seek to advance an understanding of the affective transcorporeality related to touch that extends beyond human or singular bodies. From the perspective of the lived sensory body, Merleau-Ponty’s idea of a “mesh” of elemental being in which all beings participate, entangle, and entwine – the “flesh of the world” – provides one key to understanding the more-than-human transcorporeality of touching: “My body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is a perceived), and moreover [. . .] this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world (the felt [senti] at the same time the culmination of subjectivity and the culmination of materiality), they are in a relation of transgression or of overlapping” (1968, 248). We take touch as an embodied worlding practice, a way to engage with human and nonhuman bodies in constantly reconstituted assemblages (cf. Stewart 2012). Through touch, particular “worlds” emerge for the individual through their engagement with a number of interrelated phenomena (ibid.; Palmer and Hunter 2018). Touch, we argue, is a vital mode of worlding and, through tactile relations, particular worlds emerge for individuals – caring, violent, complex (Kinnunen and Kolehmainen 2019) – even though the significance of these worldings has not been fully understood and remains under-researched. Touch-walking: a hybrid experiencing-with method A friend of Maria Nätynki, the first author of this article, frequently walks to touch and greet a majestic pine she calls “Mrs. Tree,” which stands in a primeval Finnish forest. She visits “Her Majesty” throughout the year, but especially when she is down or sad. She hugs its broad trunk, or rests against it, because it brings her solace. Apparently, there is something about this tree. It has powers that “spoke to her instantly” when she encountered “her” for the first time. Nätynki was intrigued by this relationship, especially as she herself does not have that kind of tie to natural bodies. Inspired by this peculiar “urge” to THE SENSES AND SOCIETY 3 touch a natural body, she wanted to explore similar meaningful touches, or affective tactile practices, by conducting a methodological experiment. The aim was to understand the co-researchers’ sensory engagements with the natural bodies in all their richness, so Nätynki decided to expose herself to first-hand tactile experiences through “thick participation” (Samudra 2008) in the co-researchers’ practices in situ (e.g. Samudra 2008; Stoller 1997). The method thus allows a researcher not only to observe but also to sensitize oneself to and “feel with” the field (Kolehmainen 2019). It thereby provides a researcher with the possibility of accessing the co-researcher’s affective engagements with a chosen natural body on site, and simultaneously of using their own embodied experiences and interpretations as sources of knowledge production. In December 2020, Nätynki posted a call on social media for people who regarded themselves as having a meaningful tactile connection with some natural body. These bodies were not predefined, so the call was open to tactile relationships with any kinds of natural elements. Water, pines, birch trunks, bark, moss, lichen, and rocks were mentioned as important natural bodies in the received 13 responses, 12 of which were from female respondents. All respondents lived in places with easy access to nature, and are accustomed to going outdoors and enjoying leisure landscapes (cf. MacNaghten and Urry 2001) such as trails in the woods or maintained winter swimming places. Three people who described themselves as regularly going out to touch their meaningful natural body were invited to participate in a touch-walk to carry out further elaborations. In sensory studies, walking methods have previously been utilized to explore olfaction (Henshaw 2013; Low 2009; Tan 2013), soundscapes (Adams et al. 2008; Järviluoma 2002), hapticity of walking (Ingold 2004), and multisensorial experiences (Ingold and Vergunst 2016; Järviluoma and Vikman 2013; Järviluoma 2017, 2022; Lee and Ingold 2006). In human geography these methods have been used to perceive landscapes by foot (Edensor 2000; MacNaghten and Urry 2000; Macpherson 2009; Somoza Medina, Lois González, and Somoza Medina 2022). This study was inspired by the possibility offered by walking methods for investigating the embodied and site-specific emergence of sensory experiences and recollection. In sensory walking methods, the surrounding environment is taken not only as an actor which initiates reminiscence and narration (e.g. Järviluoma 2017) but, we propose, as a part of the transcorporeal sensory matterings that emerge between the bodies involved; the coresearchers’, researchers’ and natural bodies. In this research, walking and touching both formed part of the transcorporeal co-becomings with natural environments, elements, and beings. Since the co-researchers’ relationships with their natural bodies had lasted for years and were saturated with memories, Nätynki asked the co-researchers to narrate their “touch biographies” of tactile histories with their chosen natural bodies prior to the touchwalk. The idea of touch biography stems from Kinnunen’s (2013) study, for which she collected ordinary Finnish people’s written accounts of their lifelong experiences of touch and which Kinnunen and Kolehmainen later analyzed by applying affect theory (2019). It was anticipated that gathering touch biographies from this study’s co-researchers would enrich the touch-walks. Two of the three co-researchers sent video diaries in which they recollected their tactile more-than-human relationship. They talked about the rituals and routines that inhered to touching, the history of this specific tactile relationship, and their overall relationship to the natural environment. 4M. NÄTYNKI ET AL. In February and March 2021, touch-walks were realized with three participants: Beth, Tina and Annie (all pseudonyms). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, only two of the walks could be conducted in physical proximity. One took place via a FaceTime call across two continents. In this distant touch-walk, “authenticity” was simulated by walking in similar kind of environments and weather conditions, mediating facial expressions and other bodily gestures through smart phone. In this experiment, Nätynki wanted to explore how far tactile relations could be researched remotely via technology. Relying upon mediated perception, Nätynki could only witness and sense what technology permitted. The FaceTime call was thus more dependent on narration, as access to shared sensory matterings was limited, although it also provided valuable insights into tactical intercorporeal relations. Walking in nature was an integral part of the co-researchers’ touching rituals. They all were accustomed to walk and took great pleasure in doing so. The walking routes and touched natural bodies meant enjoyable places for the co-researchers; something other than work or domestic routines, and sites of relaxation, togetherness, comfort, and calm (cf. MacNaghten and Urry 2001, 7). Walking to the sites worked as a “gateway” to the most cherished tactile contact with a natural body, since walking method attunes the participants to embodied ways of knowing where movement connects mind, body, and environment (Springgay and Truman 2018, 4). The co-researchers had chosen the routes and the sites, and Nätynki followed their lead. She had no prior information on how the tactile encounters would occur. In the case of the distant touch-walk done across two sites via FaceTime call, Nätynki was told beforehand what kind of landscape the co-researcher had chosen so she could mimic it as closely as she could in her site. The walks, and the acts of touching that occurred during them, were recorded with a GoPro action camera. In the co-researchers’ recreational landscapes, they encountered corporeal and material, intimate and meaningful relationships with the ground, trees, streambeds, and water through touch. The co-researchers had established tactile contact with their significant natural environments through contact of their feet with the ground and touching the chosen natural bodies with their different body parts. Therefore, Nätynki tried to open herself up to the studied “others” and absorb their sensory worlds as fully as possible (Stoller 1997, 45) by both walking and touching natural bodies, organic and inorganic, with her hands, cheeks, back, and feet. She sensitized herself to the earth beneath her feet, the rough texture of bark, cold water nipping her bare skin. Touch expanded into a whole-body awareness that incorporated the surface and composition of the natural bodies, the ground where Nätynki and the co-researchers were moving, the breeze and sun on their skin, and the clothing (or lack of it) against their bodies. Thus, touch-walking attempts to grasp the more-than-representational; expressions, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, affective intensities, unexceptional interactions, and sensuous dispositions from these shared experiences (Lorimer 2005, 84). Nätynki harnessed her senses to attune also to sonic impressions from the environment, hints in the co-researchers’ speech, such as pitch, volume, intonation, cadence, and rhythm, and the co-researchers’ facial expressions and other gestures (Springgay and Truman 2018, 19–20). Such sensory engagements generated insights into transcorporeal, transmaterial tactile relations and their affective value. The documented touch-walks produced embodied-affective data (Kinnunen and Kolehmainen 2019), where sensory matterings were present in narrations, body language, affective experiences, and sensory THE SENSES AND SOCIETY 5 perceptions. The co-researchers were not asked to identify the affects related to their tactile relations, because that would have required familiarity with the term. Affects are sensations, feelings, and embodied emotions, as well as registers of experience best described as transsubjective, nonconscious, invisible, immaterial, and more-thanrepresentational (Blackman 2012; Seigworth and Gregg 2010; Seyfert 2012). As an embodied, pervasive sensory experience, touch certainly evokes memories and utopias, and it (re)actualizes related meanings and affects (see Obrador 2012, 56). The emerging affective registers have their own temporalities: they carry past, present, and future, in partly unpredictable ways (Kinnunen and Kolehmainen 2019). Beth Beth is a Canadian pensioner aged 60 + . This calm, unassuming woman enjoys traveling, hiking, and walking. She is a person who absolutely loves trees. She goes to the woods approximately twice a week, often alone, and especially when she is stressed. This touchwalk took place in two locations: Beth walked on the Grand Trunk Trail in Canada, and Nätynki in North Ostrobothnia, Finland. The weather was almost identical in both locations, with light frost and partial cloud, and the walk took place in coniferous forests resembling each other. Nätynki called Beth via FaceTime so they could see fractions of each other’s surroundings and share their sensory impressions, bodily expressions, and motions during the walk. Despite the distance, it was possible for Nätynki and Beth to sense each other’s presence by hearing breathing, talking and the sounds of walking and the surroundings, and by seeing facial expressions and movements of the body through the effective use of cameras in mobile phones. Prior to the touch-walk, Beth sent a short introductory video to Nätynki, in which Beth reminisced about her long-time fascination with trees. At the age of ten, the school had given Beth and her sister seedling trees, which they had planted. Beth’s sister’s tree had died, but her own had continued to thrive, even though it had been transplanted about 100 km away from its original location, into her sister’s yard. This was about 60 years ago, but when I go to my sister’s house, I’ll always have to look at my tree [emphasizing the words] – my tree [elongating the words]. When she talked about that tree, which had sprouted from seed and kept growing throughout the years, she repeated the words “my tree” and broke into a hearty smile. The affective recollection made her emphasize her achievement – her pride that the tree had survived all those transplantations. The walk started with Nätynki and Beth showing each other the surroundings at their own location. This technology-mediated touch-walking was heavily dependent on sight and hearing. Nätynki had to tune into the sound of Beth’s voice and scrutinize her slight facial expressions and subtle body language to detect affectively charged moments from both her narration and the acts of touch. Nätynki asked Beth to describe her tactile experiences, which seemed challenging for her. Indeed, tactile experiences may be difficult to convey, describe and articulate through a common language and with the existing, insufficient lexicon (Guest et al. 2011; Macpherson 2009). Even though people easily recognize sensations that arise from within the body during activities like walking, there is a difficulty in communicating these corporeal feelings and haptic sensations. As 6M. NÄTYNKI ET AL. Paterson (2009, 766) states, “language is lacking, terms desert us, and such instantly recognizable experiences become barely articulated, or articulated barely.” This difficulty manifested itself as heavy sighs and bursts of nervous laughter several times during the walk, apparently when Beth felt uncertain. It seemed as if she thought her own narration was naïve or superficial. She apologized for her inability to verbalize her sensations by stating “I haven’t been analyzing this,” or “I don’t know what words to use.” Touch-walk is about empathic attuning to multisensory and emplaced aspects of the (co-)researchers’ experiences (cf. Pink 2009, 63). Nätynki attempted to ease Beth’s anxiety by suggesting that they just keep walking and talk about trees. After all, touch-walk is a form of “sentient participation” which opens an opportunity to the researcher and the co-researcher to share streams of perceptions, emotions, affective flows, and interpretations in embodied and verbal ways (cf. Kusenbach 2016, 154–155). This happened with Beth when she suddenly started to describe a springtime phenomenon, the circulation of sap, even though the walks were taking place at a time when the trees were dormant. For her, it was a moment when she especially enjoyed touching trees. As the sap runs, you get little bubbles on the bark, and you push them. If you push them hard enough, you get the sap, and you get the smell of the balsam. So just even feeling the tree, the bark, you can see when the bubbles are small, and they get larger, and you feel they are getting softer and softer, so to me it’s the start of life, like the tree is coming back. Something brought the circulation of sap to Beth’s mind, which speaks to the simultaneously determinate and indeterminate nature of sensory matterings (Barad 2012) and the multitemporality of affective sensations (Kinnunen and Kolehmainen 2019). In touchwalks, deliberate walking (through the forest) and intentional touching (of the trees) evoked various memories which may have lacked a clear sense of chronological time, and memories may also rush through subconsciously and unintendedly, through a fleeting glance, smell, or a quick brush. Hearing Beth’s joyful yet sudden recollections of pushing the sap bubbles with her fingertips made Nätynki feel the same pushing in her own fingertips, too, and the need to experience this childlike play corporeally. Sap carries energy out into the branches in springtime when new buds are forming. These life-sustaining liquids circulate in trees and, by touching the oozing sap, Beth connects to the “liquid” vitality of the tree. She felt that some sort of energy flowed to her body from trees, or even from single leaves on the ground; thus, she recognized trees as “vibrant matter” (Bennett 2004). She also felt that she received a part of the trees’ shared energy. Indeed, touch reveals our “withness with things” (Paterson 2007b, 95), “our being in a vibrant, quirky, overflowing material world” (Obrador 2012, 56). Almost every time, I’m stopping and touching the leaf or the needles. I pick the leaves which have fallen. [. . .] Maybe I get their energy, I don’t know. [Sighing]. Trees interconnect with each other, and when I’m here, I feel part of the connection. I feel an energy coming from the trees. The walk continued. Nätynki asked Beth if she could touch a tree the way she would usually. She was at a spot where the trees were visible but out of reach, so she had to move elsewhere. She started walking faster, to a place where the branches would be reachable, and Nätynki quickened her own pace too. Despite the distance and the ocean between them, the researchers were in sync with their walking rhythm, deepening their THE SENSES AND SOCIETY 7 and their significant natural bodies entail multilayered, more-than-human intimacies. The co-researchers had very personal attachments to the trees and water, yet they cherished those bonds in privacy, without the presence of other humans. The tactile relations discussed in this paper also exemplify how intimacy is made and unmade of and with multiple entangled materialities (Kolehmainen 2022) – and beyond, since experiences of becoming one with natural bodies are also material intimacies in situ, multivocal and multitextural entanglements between the human and nonhuman (Rajan-Rankin 2021). Thus, this article highlights the importance of seeing intimacy as a more-than-human matter that offers possibilities for sustainable and ethical coexistence across species. The touch-walks opened sites of affective socionatural encounters (cf. Singh 2017) that were saturated with feelings of reciprocal care, but also reminded us that there are other ways of touching nature: violent, neglectful, uncaring ways. We agree with Puig de la Bellacasa (2017, 32), who stresses the reversibility of touch and thus forces us to rethink the complex circulation of care between human and nonhuman bodies from the perspective of relational obligation. We think that the ongoing unprecedented ecological crises and accelerated extinctions force us to elaborate more sensitive and sensible environmental ethics (see Lorimer 2012; Obrador 2012) by asking how we relate to animals, plants, and inanimate bodies through touch, and what kind of agency we accept from them (cf. Alaimo 2008). Plants, water, rocks, and sand do not touch us intentionally, but they do respond to our touch, and they are part of the composition of tactile assemblages charged with affects. We believe that alternative conceptions and ways of encountering matter, such as through tactile and multisensory engagements, may be one way to “accentuate the lively, active, emergent, agential aspects of nature” and “foster ethical/epistemological stances that generate concern, care, wonder, respect, caution (or precaution), epistemological humility, kinship, difference, and deviance,” as Alaimo (2010, 143) urges. Thinking across bodies may catalyze the recognition that the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a resource for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions. By emphasizing the movement across bodies, transcorporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures (Alaimo 2010, 3). All touching entails an infinite alterity, so that touching the other is touching all others, including the “self” (Barad 2012). The touch-walks with the coresearchers indeed brought insights of being touched and transformed by natural bodies. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Funding University of Oulu, Finland and Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, TIAS, Finland. Notes on contributors Maria Nätynki B.B.A, M.A, Master of Culture and Arts Maria P. Nätynki is an early-stage doctoral researcher at the University of Oulu Graduate School, UniOGS. Nätynki is working with her 14 M. NÄTYNKI ET AL. dissertation on touch between human and more-than-human bodies and on methodologies for exploring touch empirically. Her multidisciplinary education background includes Indigenous studies, cultural history, and cultural competences. Nätynki’s research is situated in the fields of anthropology of body and senses, feminist posthumanism(s) and multispecies ethnography, and her research interests are touch, affect, more-than-human approach, and sensory matterings. Taina Kinnunen Adjunct Professor, University Lecturer Taina Kinnunen published the monograph Vahvat yksin, heikot sylityksin (2013) on Finnish touching culture and an article together with Marjo Kolehmainen on touch and affect (Body & Society 2019). Recently, she has studied touch as a professional skill and ethics in client work. A Finnish textbook on the subject was published in 2019 and a revised version of it in English will come out in 2023 by Palgrave McMillan. Besides exploring touch, Kinnunen has empirically studied winter swimming, bodybuilding, cosmetic surgery, and affective work of teachers and recruitment consultants, in particular, from several theoretical perspectives and published dozens of scientific articles, as well as several pier-refereed monographs, collaboration works, and popular science books on those issues. Her articles have been published in e. g. Body & Society, Sociology of Health & Illness, Ethnologie Française, Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies, International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology and Norma. Dr Marjo Kolehmainen is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland and Adjunct Professor (Docent) in Gender Studies at the Tampere University, Finland. Her current project ‘Networked Care: Explorations of Intimacy in Digital Therapy’ (NetCare) explores digital healthcare practices, aiming at producing novel insights into how human well-being is co-constituted with technological infrastructures. Kolehmainen’s research is situated at the crossroads of feminist posthumanism(s) and science and technology studies, and her research interests include e. g. intimacy, affect, more-than-human care, and sensory matterings. Kolehmainen has published articles in e.g. Gender & Society, Science, Technology, and Human Values, Body & Society, and The Sociological Review, to name a few. 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