Marjo Kolehmainen osallistuu Århusin yliopistossa Tanskassa järjestettävään konferenssiin Illness Narrative Retold – Diversity, Temporality, and Digitization, joka järjestetään 1.-2.6.2026.
Kolehmainen pitää konferenssissa alustuksen otsikolla: "Digital Traumascapes: Victim-survivors’ stories of the aftermath of a psychotherapy-related data breach".
Alustuksen abstrakti alla:
The Finnish private psychotherapy center Vastaamo was the target of massive data breach in 2018 and 2019. Both personal identification information and psychotherapists’ private notes from sessions, stored in a digital data register, were leaked. This information was used to blackmail both psychotherapists and their clients, and was largely made available on the darknet in 2020. Many victims of the data breach experienced the breach and its aftermath as deeply painful and traumatic, finding themselves repeatedly reminded of it through a wide range of activities embedded in digitalised societies. To shed light on these experiences, this presentation maps how networked societies make the memory of trauma caused by data hacks inescapable and how they function as sites of re traumatisation: a day to day sense of risk and danger continues to haunt victim survivors’ lives despite their various attempts to minimise the harms. The data encompasses anonymous digital stories written by the victims of the data hack (N=100). Autobiographical writing has been identified as a valuable way to elicit trauma survivor knowledges. Although stories about deeply painful experiences often remain untold because they are difficult to tell and hear, anonymous storytelling enables victim survivors to articulate their experiences without disclosing their identities. To increase understanding on the particularities of traumatic temporalities present in these stories, I bring together scholarship on ‘traumascape’ and ‘suspended time’ to argue that the concept of ‘digital traumascapes’ offers a powerful lens for understanding both the enduring psychological harm initially produced by data hacking and the affective pervasiveness of unavoidable remembering in a digital society. The notion of ‘digital traumascape’ sheds light to the ways in which the aftermath of psychotherapy data breach is lived and re-lived across time in digitalised societies. Digital traumascapes highlight the inescapable and omnipresent qualities of networked technologies, which compel victim survivors to remain with experiences of failed care.
More info about the conference: https://conferences.au.dk/illness-narrative-retold