NNDR Conference 2025: Part 1

The Research Training Support Grant from the SCDTP funded my trip to Helsinki, Finland, to attend the Nordic Network on Disability Research (NNDR) Conference 2025 held at the University of Helsinki in May 2025. The conference was attended by over 670 delegates representing 41 countries. I arrived in Helsinki a few days early to attend the in-person elements of the pre-conference PhD course, which also gave me a few extra hours of sightseeing time!

Day 1

I arrived in Helsinki in the evening and headed straight for my hotel. At 830pm on a Sunday, dinner options were limited even though I was in the city centre. I settled on the nearby Phở Việt for beef phở, which turned out to be a fantastic idea given the cold. I decided to have an early night in preparation of a long week of conference activities.

Day 2

Helsinki is two hours ahead of Portsmouth, which meant that I got up at 530am UK time for breakfast. Thankfully, breakfast had been included in the hotel rate, so I didn’t have to go far in search of coffee. The hotel breakfast buffet had a wide variety of options—a bread table, a hot food buffet with roasted vegetables and meats, a selection of yogurt and cereal with various toppings, charcuterie, fresh fruit, and pancakes.

After a quick breakfast, I headed off for Day 4 of the pre-conference PhD course. We had had 3 days of online sessions the week prior, so this was the first day we all met in person. The assessment for this course was an essay, for which the other students had each prepared a proposal. As I was only auditing the course (and frankly, kind of busy writing my thesis!), I simply turned up ready to learn. We spent the morning hearing brief presentations from everyone about the key takeaways from their planned essays, and sharing our thoughts and feedback.

We took a break midway through the session for lunch, and headed over to the nearby Cafe Viola. Lunch was vegan corn soup topped with tofu, served with a side of bread.

We returned to campus to finish up the feedback session. At the end, two other students and I discovered we were all staying at the same hotel and so we walked back together.

After resting in my hotel room for a while, I went in search of (more) coffee. I wound up at Andante Coffee, and treated myself to a slice of matcha tiramisu which paired beautifully with the coffee.

I returned to the hotel and then it was soon time for dinner. I met up with the other PhD students at the nearby Vibami, a Vietnamese restaurant located in Kluuvi Shopping Centre. I opted for a rice noodle salad with five-spice pork belly, the Vietnamese name for which is (I believe) Bún Thịt Heo Quay. After filling our bellies and a little more conversation, everyone was tired and ready for bed. Not sure what it says about us that this happened at 8pm 😂

Day 3

I skipped the hotel breakfast and headed instead to Tintin Juurilla, which boasts a 100-year-old sourdough starter. I snagged an almond-chocolate croissant and a flat white, and couldn’t resist also picking up a bag of crunchy korvapuusti (cinnamon bun) slices to take home. Now fueled and properly awake, it was time for the final seminars of the PhD course. This included my favourite seminar of the course—Professor Leslie Swartz’s session on publishing disability research. It was practical, educational, and fun, thanks to Leslie’s jubilant energy and generous inclusion of memes in the slides. Leslie’s insights were also very reassuring, as his suggestions and thoughts on publishing aligned well with my existing approach.

We took a break during Leslie’s seminar to have lunch, again at Cafe Viola. This time, we were served baked potatoes topped with what we think was cream cheese (I sat with non-Finns, so no one was that confident about what we were eating).

After returning for the rest of the discussion on publishing, we wrapped up the course with a general feedback session. I then headed back to the hotel to drop off my laptop before venturing back outside for coffee and some shopping.

I stopped briefly at La Torrefazione for a flat white on the way to Stockmann, the largest department store in Northern Europe. I headed straight for the basement, which is home to a large supermarket that immediately made me envious of the Finns’ vast food selections (or maybe I need to visit the Marks & Spencer type of food halls more often). I picked up some snacks to bring back to the UK, and then checked out the Moomin shop on the way back to the hotel.

For the unfamiliar, the Moomins are a family of trolls in a series of children’s stories by the Swedish-Finn illustrator and writer Tove Jansson. The stories are hugely popular even beyond Finland. I’d heard of the Moomins before, but had never delved into their lore. It was only through this trip that I discovered how much the themes of inclusivity and acceptance run throughout the Moomin stories, which was quite serendipitous given the reason for my being in Helsinki. The Moomin stories feature queer characters and diverse gender roles, and the Moominhouse (in which the Moomins and their friends live) is described as a welcoming space for everyone to come as they are. These themes remain undoubtedly relevant and important 80 years on from the publication of the very first Moomin story.

The merchandise shop had an extensive selection of items, including a special collection for the Moomin stories’ 80th anniversary. The store also boasts a large Moomin Arabia collection, which is the result of a highly successful ongoing collaboration with the historic Finnish ceramics producer.

For dinner, I consulted a list of the hotel’s recommendations, and decided on Seksico Tacos. On the way there, I came across a painted electrical box that felt pretty apt—it does sometimes feel like the research I do goes against the flow, because autism researchers often advocate for the non-autistic majority to make changes rather than continue floating.

Going back to the tacos—they weren’t that big, and I ended up having 5—pork, chicken, fish, potato, and beef. My favourite was definitely the cheesy beef taco, dipped in its accompanying birria consommé.

After dinner, I enjoyed a cool evening stroll back to the hotel, and began preparing for the first day of the conference.

Day 4

The conference officially opened in the afternoon, which meant I had the morning to explore. I headed first to Layers Bakery and grabbed a tiramisu croissant. The bakery had only two window-ledge seats, which were both occupied, so I had my croissant at a nearby park (Nervanderinpuistikko) instead. Thankfully I managed to find a spot that was simultaneously sunny, not too windy, and free of hungry seagulls.

Then it was time for coffee! I headed to Lykke and enjoyed their new geisha on pourover.

Next, I took the tram to Vanha Kauppahalli, the Old Market Hall. I’d headed there intending to try some Finnish salmon soup, but hadn’t realised just how many stalls would be selling it! I ended up at SOUP+MORE which, unsurprisingly, is a soup stall. They offer 3 soup options, 2 of which rotate daily while the salmon soup is available every day. The soup had generous chunks of salmon and potato, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it tasted like fish but wasn’t fishy.

After lunch, I strolled through the Helsinki Market Square which had several stalls also offering salmon soup. However, the square is open-air, so all the stalls had to offer as shelter from the wind and cold were their tent-like enclosures. As someone used to living near the equator, I was glad I had eaten in the double-door-enclosed market hall!

Then I made a pitstop at the hotel to freshen up and grab my conference lanyard, which I’d collected during the PhD course. The conference sessions were mostly in the Main Building of the University of Helsinki, though certain talks took place in Porthania about a minute away. The opening address and keynotes were given in Porthania but also streamed in the Main Building, and the latter is where I ended up.

The first keynote was by Associate Professor Margaret Price, and titled What Does It Mean to Gather? She uploaded her slides and script to her website beforehand, and referred to the script periodically so we could follow along. She also informed us she’s an avid knitter, and invited fellow knitters to pull out their work and knit while she spoke, saying that if she could knit and deliver a keynote at the same time, she would! As someone who finds that crocheting helps me concentrate in meetings and talks I’m not actively participating in (and who has typically refrained from doing so as most people perceive this as not paying attention and therefore rude), I was delighted that we were starting off with recognition of different types of learners. It was just one example of accessibility at this conference—allowing people to attend and be present in a way that they are comfortable, even if that way is not the existing (often able-bodied) norm. Unfortunately for me, the crochet project I was working on was at a stage that required me to regularly consult the pattern, so I didn’t take it with me to the conference talks. I enjoyed watching other people’s creations, though, and got to witness both knitting and cross-stitching (or perhaps it was embroidery? I was too far away to tell) in action.

Assoc. Prof. Price spoke mainly about the concepts of “gathering” and “inclusion”. She exemplified her analysis with stories of the Trump administration’s effects on higher education in the US. She spoke of armed, uniformed campus security officers who pull students out of class without forewarning; of students’ visas being revoked; of staff worrying about removing DEI-related words from their syllabi pre-emptively lest they face consequences in future. These were not new examples to me; I have friends living and studying in the US and have been keeping up with such events out of concern for their safety. But Dr. Price’s first-hand accounts made these far-away events feel much closer, and not in a good way.

After that heavy, though powerful, keynote, I needed a break. I popped over to a nearby cafe for some matcha, then headed back for the first paper presentations of the conference. The highlight for me was Associate Professor Shanon Phelan’s talk on technoableism and autistic youth culture on TikTok. In particular, she noted how the algorithm favours whiteness, thinness, and other normative societal ideals. I’m not on TikTok, so this was new yet (perhaps sadly) not very surprising information. Kind of like how this New Yorker article describes social media feeds as now being so horror-filled we become almost numb or desensitised to what we see next.

After an insightful (though kind of sad) first day of the conference, I needed some comfort food. I went first to Hill’s Dumplings (also recommended by the hotel) to try their Mi Goreng wontons. If you’ve never heard of Mi Goreng before, please allow me to share this joyous dish with you. In Bahasa Melayu/Indonesia, mi(e) goreng means fried noodles (and multiple languages have mi for noodles), but the dish mi goreng typically refers to boiled yellow noodles tossed in a savoury and often spicy sauce. Because the restaurant menu describes these wontons as having an “Indomie style secret sauce”, I was excited about the specific flavour profile. Indomie is a popular instant noodle brand whose mi goreng comes with fried onions/shallots. Personally, I prefer the Ibumie brand version of instant mi goreng, but given I was in Finland, I wasn’t about to argue. The dumplings were juicy, and the sauce indeed reminiscent of mi goreng. I was impressed, but not quite full.

That’s when I made the mistake of deciding to get dinner pt. 2. I didn’t want anything else from the dumpling menu, so instead I headed a few streets over to Jumbowl for noodles. I really should have known better from the shop name—my bowl of minced pork noodles with sesame sauce was very generously sized. I especially enjoyed the addition of their chilli sauce and the option to choose from 5 different noodle styles. I went the recommended triangular shape which made for a fun texture and reminded me of how different pasta shapes pick up sauce differently. After this very large two-part dinner, I relished the long, slow walk back to the hotel (and vowed not to repeat my mistake).

This post is getting long, so I’ve written about Days 5–7 in a separate post.