HomeFront

HomeFront examines how Finland’s rapid militarisation since 2022 is experienced, negotiated and sometimes challenged in everyday life. Using the concept of home as a key lens, the project explores how gender, care and domestic spaces shape, and are shaped by, broader security shifts linked to geopolitical disruption, Finland’s NATO membership and militarization at all levels of society.

The project combines feminist peace research, visual and ethnographic methods and memory studies to analyse how militarisation becomes normalized in homes, neighbourhoods and home like spaces. At the same time, it investigates how the home as a space for care, privacy and community can offer alternatives to militarised ways of thinking.

HomeFront consists of four interconnected work packages:

1. everyday impacts of NATO presence in Mikkeli, focusing on how residents experience the arrival of NATO’s Northern European Land Command.
2. gendered care in “soldiers’ homes”, examining the voluntary work of “green sisters” as providers of home like care within military environments.
3. memory politics of home in war museums, analysing how museum narratives shape ideas of belonging, national identity and militarisation.
4. feminist utopias of home, imagining alternative, demilitarised futures through participatory methods