Walking with Soldiers: How I learned to stop worrying and love cadets

Susanna Hast

“Walking with Soldiers” examines an auto-ethnographic moment of marching across the city of Helsinki with first-year cadets of the Finnish National Defence University. In a reparative reading, the walk dismantles boundaries of bodies, critiques, and affects. Through a walking methodology and autoethnography, the present exposition demonstrates how the author began orienteering within military structures through an affective investment. The exposition is a researcher’s journey across subjectivities and difference in a female civilian body. Epistemologically, it brings theory closer to the skin; and empirically, it offers insight into the affective world of belonging. “Walking with Soldiers” is multimodal and polyphonic: it consists of a text for reading, three audio tracks for listening and co-walking, as well as illustrations created by Julia Järvelä based on photographs taken by the author. The provided materials can be selectively attended to. The artistic technique used in the exposition is seduction: the reader/listener is invited into an experience. The exposition is a conversation between critical military studies and artistic research: it gives artistic attention to a military march and places importance on the acoustic and vibrating qualities of academic research. The writing itself subverts the practice of authoritative scholarly writing by presenting descriptive work as theoretical work, and by using citations as companions from the outside.

Writing from an autoethnographic perspective gives my performance an authentic touch. I really do begin to walk with conformity, and I do it because it feels good. I become seduced by the care, command and marching. This is the power of autoethnography, the power of spoken autoethnography. And this is how it speaks back:

I have to tip my hat to you. "Walking with Soldiers" is awakening, and what is funny, I had similar thoughts during the march. (Cadet from the march).

A cadet heard Track two and felt connected to it. She reminded me that gender always matters, sometimes it is the thing which matters the most. I had to reorientate and confront my paranoia again. Reparation is a confrontation with paranoia.

the title of this writing proposes love for cadets,

not soldiers

love as a political force and a multitude

walking instead of marching

a refusal to disclose and fully arrive,

but keep on searching

this is how I stopped worrying

and learned to love

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the panelists of EISA 2019 in Sofia, especially Annick Wibben, as well as the audience at Carpa 6 in Helsinki, for their valuable and supportive comments on this manuscript and Track two. Thank you, Henri Lavi and Juha Mäkinen from the National Defence University, for your support and for granting me access. It would have been impossible to make this research happen without your help. Thank you, cadets of the 105th course, for sharing your journey and your stories with me. Thank you, Noora Kotilainen, for listening and caring. I want to thank Julia Järvelä for the illustrations and Gennady Kurushin from Cobalt Studio for the design of this exposition. I also wish to thank the reviewers of this exposition for their helpful comments.

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Acknowledgements