Category Archives: Institutes for Advanced Study

Theoretical Foundations for Interdisciplinarity

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By Lilian O’Brien, Walter Rech, and Svetlana Vetchinnikova

The authors of this post reflect on the outcome of the symposium Theoretical Foundations for Interdisciplinarity, which they conceived together while working as core fellows at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. The symposium took place at HCAS on 30.11.–1.12.2023.

Interdisciplinary research has yielded many new insights and methodologies. It allows us to tackle multi-faceted problems that draw from different domains of expertise.

But many who engage in interdisciplinary research will tell you that it can be difficult to do. Our symposium aimed to shed light on key sources of difficulty. Philosophers, linguists, and intellectual historians from Finland, Germany, Sweden, the UK, and the USA, came together for two days of rich discussion in November and December.

Image by Pavel Kaltygin

 

As the name of our symposium suggested, our interests were “foundational”. We were not, that is, primarily concerned with difficulties encountered in specific instances of interdisciplinary research, but with broader themes that are relevant to most interdisciplinary research.

For example, are there different kinds of explanation being sought in, say, the humanities and social sciences? We were also concerned with how variations in how language is used in different disciplines may prevent mutual understanding. Does our shared human cognitive architecture help or hinder interdisciplinary work? Given that concepts evolve over time, and shape our disciplines in deep ways, how does this affect our interdisciplinary work?

The papers at the symposium provided a rich and rewarding conversation. Here we would like to share brief observations of each of the co-organizers of the workshop.

Walter Rech:

The symposium illustrated that the dynamics of scientific evolution are both disciplinary and interdisciplinary, micro and macro. Historically, moves towards specialization as well as cross-fertilization have generated a productive tension.

Martti Koskenniemi noted that specific disciplines tend to produce and perpetuate their own worldview as characterized by particular interests and mindsets, thereby preventing a meta-description of the world. At the same time, some disciplines or sub-disciplines may move towards convergence or retain certain traits that they share with neighboring fields. Within the humanities, for instance, intellectual history remains a typical blend of history and philosophy: it discusses historical sources by simultaneously providing relevant historical contexts and delving into the philosophical analyses of texts, as Adrian Blau argued.

New technologies may also encourage interdisciplinary work. There is increasing convergence, for instance, between classical intellectual history and the digital humanities. Alison McQueen and Mikko Tolonen stressed the centrality of digital methods for expanding historical knowledge and analyzing large bodies of sources in a systematic manner. Within critical history, digital humanities may broaden existing canons and help make visible certain aspects of the past that have remained invisible so far.

Certain disciplines today appear as inherently interdisciplinary and can hardly be imagined otherwise. This is the case of human rights, as Miia Halme-Tuomisaari showed. While early human rights scholarship focused on human rights norms from a largely legal perspective, the broader phenomenon of human rights politics, diplomacy and culture is now studied by social and political scientists, historians, philosophers and economists. Importantly, these perspectives do not produce a meta-description of human rights but rather contribute to a more comprehensive picture of the overarching field, thereby also increasing awareness of the challenges facing human rights today.

Svetlana Vetchinnikova:

In the efforts to understand another discipline, it is useful to keep in mind that, in a way, any discipline is a product of cultural evolution. Disciplines evolve in social interaction between community members and are therefore subject to the influence of social, cognitive, and linguistic factors. As a result, disciplinary state-of-the-art may reflect the origin and historical development of the field no less than its actual subject matter. Any discipline as we know it could have been different. We do what we do because of how we got here.

This is not a fundamental flaw. In fact, complex systems, that is, open systems where multiple agents interact over time, such as all biological systems, produce optimal results through self-organization, adaptation, and evolution. However, our understanding of a field is incomplete without an appreciation of its history.

For example, statistics is often seen as the epitome of objectivity in science. This does not hold, as Bodo Winter vividly demonstrated. Rather, it emerged in the interplay between the processes characteristic of human social interaction like any other discipline. The spread of significance testing, which is arguably the most widely used statistical framework today, can be traced back to the specific sociopolitical context within which it developed including the idea of eugenics, the level of technological development of the time, the incentive system of academia with its focus on publishing as well as the bandwagon effect.

In appreciation of such developments, we may hear, especially perhaps from academic administrators, that we need to shake up the fossilized structures of academia. Indeed, some of the fossilized structures may be artifacts of the historical processes and can create perverse incentives and unintended consequences. At the same time, a so-called “fossilized structure” is an ultimate form of efficiency.

Fossilization, routinization, and conventionalization all refer to the same process of learning through practice. A convention, whether it is a linguistic form-meaning pairing, a social practice, or a methodological procedure, is a low entropy zone with reduced information load which lets us function efficiently. It is not just a highly automatized process like brushing your teeth but also a socially accepted process like agreeing with each other on a specific way of brushing your teeth to achieve predictability – which of course would be entirely useless in the case of teeth brushing but essential, say, in language.

There is a catch though. A convention reduces information load and facilitates communication for the members of the community who agreed on it, but not for the outsiders. So something which makes our work efficient within a field at the same time creates barriers between fields. The principle applies to all social practices including language. As Elke Teich showed, increasing conventionalization of a disciplinary sublanguage reduces cognitive load and makes communication efficient within a discipline but at the same time hinders interdisciplinarity.

In sum, historical baggage is both a blessing and a curse. It may help to unpack it now and then.

Lilian O’Brien:

Consider a cell biologist and a historian. They would seem to have little in common. The cell biologist is curious about what cells are, what their parts do, and what causal role they play in an organ. The historian is, say, interested in the rise of an empire, what sustained it, and what led to its demise.

And yet, in spite of the differences, central to the curiosity of both is the desire to understand how one thing causes or sustains the operations of another. How do mitochondria allow the cell to sustain its operations? How did a trade route sustain the operations of an empire?

Stephen Grimm’s talk emphasized such commonalities – he argued that a close study of research in fields as diverse as history and musicology reveals deep commonalities in the kind of understanding that is sought. In Lauren Ross’s talk, we learned about different kinds of causal concept, such as pathways and cascades. These show up in disciplines as diverse as sociology, chemistry, and environmental science and reveal common explanatory strategies. They also highlight ways in which diverse disciplines could be fruitfully brought together.

This is not to flatten out the many differences among disciplines, to pretend they are not there. As was amply illustrated in Caterina Marchionni’s talk, to insist upon harmony among disciplines even when they share the same object of curiosity – mental health in humans – is a mistake. It is not possible to integrate all of the important insights from diverse fields into a single overarching framework.

And, of course, the cell biologist seeks causal regularities, repeating patterns in nature. They wish to understand why things always happen in the cell in a particular way. By contrast, the historian’s interests are not usually quite so general, but seek understanding of a particular moment or sequence of events.

These and other differences speak against the assumption that we can do away entirely with disciplinary boundaries and diverse methods. But acknowledging this allows us to highlight the value of diverse disciplines, diverse methods, and to steer us clear of discounting one discipline in favour of another.

The symposium gave us an extremely valuable opportunity to stand back from the disciplines, to reflect upon and articulate important commonalities and differences among them. In doing so, we become better prepared to note both opportunities for, and obstacles to, interdisciplinary work.

Providing a shelter for exiled scholars – Additional Kone Foundation Fellowships to help researchers displaced by the war

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By Kaisa Kaakinen 

In March 2022, Kone Foundation granted extra resources to the Helsinki Collegium, to enable support for scholars who cannot continue to work in their home country due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Anton Kotenko, Sergei Medvedev and Anna Sokolova, all scholars recruited to HCAS in 2022, talked to us about the significance of the Kone Foundation fellowship for them and about the impact the war has had on the Russian research context. 

The March 2022 Kone Foundation Fellowship call was open both to Ukrainian scholars, who could not stay and work in their home country due to the war, and to Russian academics who had to resign from their positions in Russia because of their opposition to Putin’s regime and the war. According to the current policy of the University of Helsinki, the Collegium cannot fund researchers, who are officially affiliated with a Russian institution.  

The additional funding, enough for a total of 48 months of research time, was distributed through the Collegium’s ongoing Kone Foundation Fellowship program. This program has brought researchers from the Baltic countries, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine to the Collegium already since the year 2004. Due to this existing structure, it was possible to recruit researchers quickly, and the first fellows began their terms at the Collegium in May 2022. 

Among the first scholars arriving in the spring 2022 was Sergei Medvedev, who is known both as a political scientist and as an active columnist and broadcaster. 

“I left Russia at the start of the war, which was a spontaneous but a long-awaited decision. It was a situation in which there were no other options left. I could not stay in Russia any single day longer, for moral reasons but also for safety reasons. But probably the moral reasons were prevalent.”   

Sergei Medvedev giving a talk in the HCAS common room.

Sergei Medvedev giving a talk at the Collegium in January 2023.

It was a happy coincidence for Medvedev that the funding opportunity brought him to Helsinki, which is a research context that he knows from before and has come to appreciate. The Kone Foundation fellowship made it possible for him to both continue his career after resigning from Higher School of Economics in Moscow and to organize all the practicalities in a difficult life situation.  

Anna Sokolova, scholar of Soviet history, notes that the Kone Foundation Fellowship call was a rare opportunity, because it was open also for Russian scholars, who had decided to resign from their positions and leave Russia. Sokolova and her family had left Moscow and moved to Yerevan, Armenia, soon after the beginning of the war.  

“During those first months nobody really understood how many academics fled Russia. That was absolutely unexpected even for us. When my family arrived in Yerevan, we suddenly understood that there are lots of colleagues and friends around, and Armenians were extremely helpful and supportive. They were trying to do their best in this situation, but they were also not ready for such a huge number of colleagues arriving,” Sokolova explains. 

Anna Sokolova in the HCAS Common Room

Anna Sokolova in the common room of HCAS

Sokolova is grateful for Kone Foundation and the Collegium for providing an academic safe haven in which it was possible to recover from the shock of the war and figure out what to do next. The fellowship at the Collegium gave her a sense of stability and security, which was the most important thing in the immediate aftermath of emigration. 

“Since the war started, I was not sleeping, nor eating, and we understood that, although we do not know where we are going, we must leave. […] It might be hard to imagine that a single year of funding can feel like providing stability, but in our case it meant a really high level of stability in comparison to the situation of many other colleagues who have, like, two-month fellowships, forcing them to change countries and organize documents all the time,” Sokolova says. 

Prospects for the future 

One of the benefits of the Collegium as a host institution was that the incoming researchers could be immediately integrated into an active research community of scholars from various countries and disciplines. Anna Sokolova stresses that it was important for her to be surrounded by the supportive atmosphere at the Collegium, by the friendly communication and events, which forced her to connect with others and helped her not to concentrate on the dark side of the situation only. 

Sokolova is working at the Collegium on her project “On the Edge of Socialism: State Institutes and Everyday Life on the Late Soviet Periphery”. She says that since the start of the war, she has seen her research topic in a new light, as she has come to perceive connections between the late Soviet period and contemporary Russia. She will continue her work in the fall 2023 with a one-year funding from the Finnish Cultural Foundation.  

“I got great support with my application to the Finnish Cultural Foundation, which I had to submit in October, quite soon after my arrival. Hanne [Appelqvist] and Tuomas [Forsberg] explained to me that this is exactly what I should do right now, and I did. I am very grateful for them for pushing me to do that.” 

Historian Anton Kotenko mentions that he has genuinely enjoyed the interdisciplinary setting of the Collegium.  

“Being surrounded not only by historians of the nineteenth century Romanov empire, but by scholars studying such diverse topics as individual variations in perceptual chunking of spontaneous speech or general trust in society around you, makes one see the world in a whole new light.” 

When the war broke out, Kotenko resigned from his previous position at the Higher School of Economics in St Petersburg. At the Collegium, he is finishing the project with which he applied to HCAS, a manuscript of a book on the history of Ukrainian national territorialization in the nineteenth century. Since the beginning of his HCAS term in October 2022, he has been able to secure further funding in the form of a three-year fellowship from the German Research Society. Kotenko is hoping that these two projects at HCAS and in Germany will become the first steps for relaunching his academic career in the next few years.  

“In 2024 I will start working on the history of zoological gardens in the Romanov empire as a researcher at the Department of History of Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. And as far as Korkeasaari Zoo was opened in 1889, I hope to be back in Helsinki quite soon to look for the primary sources in the local archives related to its establishment and the first decades of its existence.” 

Anton Kotenko giving a talk at the HCAS orientation week in September 2022

Anton Kotenko giving a talk at the HCAS orientation seminar in September 2022.

Kotenko is also actively involved with organizing an HCAS symposium for the fall 2023 on the validity of historical analogies and comparisons. The topic will be discussed in general theoretical terms but illuminated by reference to concrete cases such as the war in Ukraine, which has prompted different historical analogies by diplomats, politicians, scholars and journalists who have tried to explain the war and predict future developments. 

During his year at the Collegium, Sergei Medvedev has been able to finish his book “A War Made in Russia”, forthcoming in the summer 2023 with Polity Press. Furthermore, he has been able to contribute actively as a columnist for several Russian-language exile media outlets. 

In the fall 2023, Medvedev will begin work at Charles University in Prague as the academic supervisor of a new master’s program in Russian studies. For the past 15 years, he has been making a Russian-language television program called “Archaeology”, named after Michel Foucault’s archaeological method, which offers in-depth conversations with academics on current issues. In Prague, Medvedev will continue his work of hosting intellectual talk shows for Radio Liberty, which has its headquarters in Prague.  

Emigration and the Russian research context 

Sergei Medvedev points out that the Kone Foundation Fellowship at the Collegium has significantly contributed to the possibility of Russian academics to continue to work abroad after the recent political developments in Russia. He adds that the crisis situation has touched different fields differently.  

“It is of course difficult to ruin entire schools and institutions that have been there for decades, but especially in my field, political science, the Russian research context has been ruined. Let’s face it, these days Russia is a fully grown classical fascist country. How can you do political science and think freely in a fascist state? You have to comply with the ideological dictate.” 

While researchers in the natural sciences may still have good funding opportunities and a better chance to stay in Russia, also their lives have become precarious because all contacts abroad have been effectively banned and news about professors being reported to the police are abound. 

Medvedev has followed the changes at his former university, Higher School of Economics in Moscow, which used to be the most international academic institution and one of the best schools in social and economic sciences in Russia. 

“It is amazing to see how it is ruined from within. Since it is an important state institution, it is under the direct auspices of the presidential administration. The entire leadership has changed, and it is totally loyal to the war. There are war commanders coming there and talking to students, it has opened campuses in Luhansk in the occupied territory, there are recruitment points for students, and some of my ex-fellow professors are encouraging students to volunteer to go fight on the front. The university newspaper published reports about students who are fighting in Donbas on the Russian side operating drones and killing Ukrainians. It was just announced that there will be free education for anyone who participated in the war and for the children of those who are on the front. They are collecting money and goods for Russian soldiers at war, there are signs of propaganda at the university, without any reservation or shame. They have just joined the fascist operation. And this has been a global university where English speech could be heard just as often as Russian speech and with some Nobel laureates teaching. It is really striking to see such degradation in the educational scene in the matter of just one year, in an institution to which you belonged and where you worked for twenty years.” 

Anna Sokolova points out that while the total percentage of researchers who have left Russia may not be very big, the ones who left are those scholars who were the most active and the most connected to international academia. “In some departments, they lost only one or two scholars, but in other departments everyone left.”  

At the same time, there are many reasons why researchers opposing the current regime have been forced to stay, for instance, because they must take care of dependent persons such as their elderly parents.  Sokolova finds it important to stay in contact on a personal basis with her former colleagues who are still in Russia – not with institutions but with individuals.  

“Somehow I feel that my community is not complete without them, because we as a community of scholars in Russia were split in so many parts by this war, and I think if I can save any kind of connections in such a state of total disruption, it is very important both for us here and for them there,” she says. 

Anton Kotenko hopes that the crisis of the war will galvanize studies of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe.  

“Many problems that have been discussed since February 2022 have their roots in the age of empires, but unfortunately, these have not been properly studied. Hopefully, historians will realize that they must take more responsibility for the world around them and provide it with decent studies of the past, which will develop from a larger number of visionary research projects.” 

 

 

HCAS 20 years – The June 2022 Anniversary Celebration in pictures

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(Photos by Veikko Somerpuro)

HCAS interns standing at the main doors of the University of Helsinki Festive Hall

The Festive Hall of the University of Helsinki is ready for the HCAS Anniversary Celebration (June 15, 2022, 2 pm)

 

Audience members walk down the steps to take their seats in the hall.

Audience arriving to the Festive Hall

 

From the left: HCAS Deputy Director Hanne Appelqvist, Prof. Sari Kivistö (Former Director of HCAS), Prof. Sami Pihlström (Former Director of HCAS), Prof. Martha C. Nussbaum, HCAS Director Tuomas Forsberg

 

Prof. Morten Kyndrup (HCAS Advisory Board Member, former president of UBIAS, former Executive Director of the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies)

 

A string quartet play in the festive hall.

Meta4 performing Jaakko Kuusisto’s “Play III for String Quartet, Op. 21” (Antti Tikkanen, violin; Tomas Djupsjöbacka, cello; Atte Kilpeläinen, viola; Minna Pensola, violin)

 

A host addresses the room and another stands next to them.

The hosts of the celebration, HCAS Fellows Sean Griffin and Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius

 

Director of HCAS, Tuomas Forsberg, giving a speech at the celebration.

Director Tuomas Forsberg welcoming the audience

 

Prof. Morten Kyndrup addresses the audience.

Prof. Morten Kyndrup’s anniversary greeting

(Prof. Kyndrup’s speech has been published on this blog at https://blogs.helsinki.fi/hcasblog/2022/09/12/hcas-20-years-anniversary-greeting/)

Vice Dean Minna Palander-Collin addresses the audience from the podium.

Vice Rector Hanna Snellman’s address was delivered by Vice Dean Minna Palander-Collin (Former Director of HCAS)

 

Professor Sami Pihlström introducing the keynote speaker Martha C. Nussbaum

Prof. Sami Pihlström (Former Director of HCAS) introducing the keynote speaker Martha C. Nussbaum

 

Professor Martha Nussbaum giving a speech from the podium.

Professor Martha Nussbaum giving the keynote address “Music and the Costs of War: Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, Bodies, and Reconciliation”

 

A front view of Professor Martha Nussbaum.

Prof. Martha C. Nussbaum at the podium

 

A twelve person choir sing during an interval.

The Academic Choral Society performing after the keynote address

 

Former Jane and Aatos Erkko Visiting Professors Jane Cowan and Molly Andrews

 

Members of the audience begin to leave the hall.

Prof. Martha C. Nussbaum, Deputy Director Hanne Appelqvist and Director Tuomas Forsberg on their way to the reception

 

The choir sign to the guests during a reception.

The Academic Choral Society singing the new drinking song of the Collegium celebrating freedom to think

 

At the reception

 

Three people discuss at a table with coffee.

Professor Emeritus, Academician, Chancellor Emeritus Ilkka Niiniluoto, Docent Elina Kahla and Chancellor Emeritus Kari Raivio at the reception

 

A photo of Professor Martha C. Nussbaum and Professor Sami Pihlström

Prof. Martha C. Nussbaum and Prof. Sami Pihlström

 

Guests at the reception reading posters presenting current research of HCAS Fellows

 

HCAS 20 Years – Anniversary Greeting

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By Morten Kyndrup, professor, Aarhus University, HCAS Advisory Board Member, former president of UBIAS (University-based Institutes of Advanced Study), former Executive Director of the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies

Prof. Morten Kyndrup giving a talk at the HCAS Anniversary Celebration on June 15, 2022

Professor Kyndrup’s speech was delivered at the 20th Anniversary Celebration of the Helsinki Collegium in the Festive Hall of the University of Helsinki on June 15, 2022. (Photo: Veikko Somerpuro)

It is an honor and a pleasure for me to convey my greetings today on the occasion of this 20 years birthday of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. So first of all: Congratulations on the anniversary!

One might ask: Why celebrate such an occasion? There is nothing really honorable about age in itself. Everybody acquires age over time! What counts, of course, is what you have achieved, what you do, and how you do it. This indeed applies to Institutes for advanced study.

I am not going to repeat today the beautiful story about the rise and development of the phenomenon of institutes for advanced study since the first one was created in Princeton in the 1930’s – in fact based on an amalgamation of two different European University traditions, the British Oxbridge system based on colleges, and the continental Humboldt-tradition of free, individual research. As such, a nice example of import-export, since this American invention inspired by Europe was subsequently re-exported back to Europe and to the whole world. Moreover, the idea of institutions like institutes for advanced study has spread increasingly fast over the last 50 years.

Why, one might ask? This is another long story. But at this occasion two points should be emphasized (to avoid widespread misunderstandings): First of all, institutes for advanced study were never thought of as alternatives to the ordinary university systems, but exactly as tiny supplements, exceptions, lacunas, with space to work and to meet with, temporarily, top notch colleagues from other disciplines under alternative circumstances. And secondly: Meeting not in order to turn disciplines into interdisciplinarity, but to let disciplines fertilize each other in their proper disciplinarities respectively. The two are by no means the same thing.

Anyway, the idea of institutes for advanced study is not an easy one to realize. It certainly produces “structural difficulties” to be a permanent, marginal exception to an overall system – especially if that overall system owns you. Unfortunately, such difficulties have led many universities worldwide to opportunistic shortcuts. Over the last decades, many institutes have been launched under the name of “advanced study” without actually fulfilling the criteria for or following the tradition of such institutes. There are quite some examples of initiatives, which have aimed at profiting from the IAS-connected prestige without actually engaging in the necessary endeavors to create such an institution, being, literally spoken, just a sign on the wall, a name without any real substance. I have seen – and visited – institutes with just a couple of fellows, institutes with local fellows exclusively, and institutes which were in fact nothing but a university’s visiting program or a traditional disciplinary institute just under another label.

Now this is why two international network organizations, the UBIAS (University-based institutes of advanced study worldwide) and the NetIAS (A European network of institutes) were created, both with stringent membership criteria (grosso modo identical) concerning institutional status, admission criteria, kinds of fellowship programs, scientific independence etc.

This brings me back to the good reasons for celebrating the Helsinki Collegium on its 20 years anniversary today: Here in Helsinki no shortcuts have been taken. The Helsinki Collegium is a real “classical” institute for advanced study, and as such, it is a core and distinguished member of both international networks. Like any other institute for advanced study, the Helsinki Collegium has led a life full of dangers and obstacles, because that is how it is to be a small institutional, permanent exception in the margins of a much bigger system. But the Helsinki Collegium has stuck to the principles, has built up and preserved its status as a genuine institute for advanced study. As such, the Helsinki Collegium has been an ideal to many of its sister-institutes worldwide. When I myself was about to create the foundation for AIAS, a new institute in Aarhus, some 12 years ago, I traveled around to learn from existing institutes. The first three I visited was the WiKo in Berlin, the SCAS in Uppsala, both much older, well-established institutes, and the Helsinki Collegium, by then less than 10 yrs old.

Over the years, I’d like to add, a close and fruitful cooperation has been flourishing between the AIAS and Helsinki Collegium – at staff level, between fellows and of course between directors, bilaterally and in the international networks. At this occasion, I will take the opportunity to thank the Helsinki Collegium warmly for this cooperation on behalf of AIAS and Aarhus University.

All in all, there are indeed good reasons for celebrating this anniversary of the Helsinki Collegium. Not because of age, but because of the institute’s achievements as a genuine, classical institute for advanced studies. The Helsinki Collegium has developed itself and thrived in spite of occasional hard times and difficult conditions. On top of that, the Helsinki Collegium has also contributed substantially to making the very concept of these institutes thrive and evolve internationally.

Achievements like that are of course not signed by the walls of the building. They are the result of ongoing endeavors of the staff, of the board members, and not least of the fellows of the Helsinki collegium. Nothing comes out of nothing, and real world achievements certainly do not.

So, congratulations to the Helsinki Collegium, to all of you behind these achievements, no one named, no one forgotten. But I can think of at least a handful of living persons, having over the years done the most honorable, determined efforts to make this come true.

However, I would also like to congratulate University of Helsinki on this occasion. You can be proud of the Institute for advanced study you have created. It contributes immensely, not least symbolically to your reputation as one of the world’s leading classical universities.

The Helsinki Collegium is a distinguished member of the leading international networks of institutes for advanced study. I am confident that I can extend my greetings today to be on behalf of also NetIAS and UBIAS.

Finally, as we do on anniversaries, I wish you a long and healthy life in the times to come. I can promise you that it is not going be easy. However, I am confident that you will survive, develop yourself and thus remain among the best, classical institutes for advanced studies worldwide.

Morten Kyndrup and other guests at the HCAS Anniversary Celebration

(Photo: Veikko Somerpuro)

 

Down by the Water, across the Time Zones – HCAS alumni host an innovative global webinar series on maritime archaeology

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By Kaisa Kaakinen

When the global pandemic stopped all conference travel last spring, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies alumna Veronica Walker Vadillo, a maritime archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, realized that the unexpected situation required new forms of academic exchange. She sought help from Emilia Mataix Ferrándiz, HCAS alumna and researcher of Roman law and archaeology at the University of Helsinki, and Kristin Ilves, assistant professor of maritime archaeology at the UH, to launch a webinar series Down by the Water – Global Conversations in Maritime Archaeology. This conversation that now connects scholars across continents began in the Common Room of the Helsinki Collegium a few years back.

Black-and-white photograph of a boat on a shore

This photo, adorning the website of the Down by the Water webinar series, appears in A History of the Philippines (1905) by David P. Barrows. www.gutenberg.org/files/38269/38269- h/38269-h.htm#pb201

Inaugurated in September 2020, the webinar series has biweekly sessions on Mondays (#MaritimeMondays, as the hashtag of the maritime research community puts it). While the focus of the series is on maritime archaeology, it reaches out to other disciplines, too. 

“Similar webinars are often focused on underwater or nautical topics or specific regions. Our series is about the whole concept of ‘maritimity’, what it means in different areas, and we also invite speakers who are not archaeologists to explain how they understand maritime communities,” Veronica Walker Vadillo explains. “Yes, and this approach really helps us broaden the scholarly discussions, as people doing maritime archaeology can tap into different disciplines,” Emilia Mataix Ferrándiz adds. 

Furthermore, the series brings together scholarly communities from different geographic contexts. For instance, the organizers have been able to connect Helsinki to Asian  scholarly networks and to the large Spanish-speaking community of archaeologists in Spain and the Americas. 

“We decided to take advantage of this pandemic and transform Helsinki into a kind of hub of maritime archaeology. People usually want to present at places like Oxford or Cambridge, not only because they are prestigious but because they are so well located close to London,” says Walker Vadillo. 

Walker Vadillo and Mataix Ferrándiz have been happy to observe that the series run from Helsinki has acted as a bridge in the world of maritime archaeology, as, for instance, the event has put scholars from the Philippines and Mexico in touch, in what they hope is a first step in a fruitful collaboration.  

“Also for my own field this exchange is key, as scholars doing classics and researching the Roman Empire are often quite isolated in their own fields of research, “ says Mataix Ferrándiz. “Methods that we use can sometimes be used to understand other empires. Right now I am studying the Indian Ocean and find many parallels to what happened in the Roman Empire.” 

The events tend to draw about 50 online participants, a mix of people from various locations and career stages. Some recordings of the events have already reached over 1,000 views, and the video archive also presents a great resource for teaching. The project also has local impact, as there is always a good number of people attending from Finland. The events allow Helsinki-based researchers and students to get a glimpse of what is happening elsewhere and to find contacts for their future research endeavors.  

How it all began at the Helsinki Collegium 

The interdisciplinary concept of the series was born two years earlier, when Walker Vadillo and Mataix Ferrándiz were fellows at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Both say that the series would most likely not have its current form had it not grown from the interdisciplinary exchanges at the Collegium.  

An important spark for the project came from a presentation by linguist Olesya Khanina, who presented at the Collegium’s weekly seminar about her research on Siberian rivers as language contact areas. Walker Vadillo, who was researching the riverine cultural landscape of Angkor at the Mekong river, and Mataix Ferrándiz, who specializes in Roman law connected to maritime commerce, understood that they could learn a lot from the way linguists approach riverine cultures. The seminar and lunch conversations grew into a symposium project, in which fellows working on archaeology, law, linguistics and anthropology set out to understand better the human–environment interactions in maritime and fluvial spaces. In addition to Walker Vadillo, Khanina and Mataix Ferrándiz, the symposium team included archaeologist Elisabeth Holmqvist-Sipilä, a specialist in material culture and archaeological science. 

The resulting symposium Down by the Water: Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Role of Water Transit Points in Past Societies took place in November 2019 at the Collegium.  

“During the symposium, we were constantly talking about how all this was so rare, so out of our comfort zone. It became something wonderfully strange. That is what we want to continue, although the new series is more focused on archaeology and anthropology. We also aim to bring in people who are not from these areas,” Walker Vadillo and Mataix Ferrándiz explain. 

From seminar to podcast 

The organizers of the 2019 symposium are currently editing a book that will be published in the series Cultural Studies in Maritime and Underwater Archaeology by BAR Publishing. 

As for the webinar series, the organizers want to explore the podcast format, which allows one to listen to the conversations without being tied to the screen. As there are not many maritime archaeology podcasts out there, this is a promising direction. In addition to presentations, the series has already featured some roundtable discussions, such as a discussion on March 8, 2021, on women doing maritime archaeology. 

“As we change the format into a more conversational tone, I really want to emphasize the advances we are making in theoretical frameworks,” Walker Vadillo says. 

As an example of a session highlighting theoretical advances in the field, she mentions the event on April 19, 2021, with Roberto Junco, who works with the concept of temporal landscapes and talked about the archaeology of the Manila Galleons and current excavations in Acapulco. Junco studies how the temporal landscapes in the ports are dependent on a specific rhythm of different activities. In order to explain how the activities come together as the life of a port city, Junco draws on music and musicology. 

“I am very excited about the chance to have such speakers and conversations and to give the audience the opportunity to ask questions, it really enhances what we can contribute to the field in terms of theory,” Walker Vadillo says. 

In addition to welcoming new audiences, the organizers are open to proposals for presentations. If interested in giving a talk in the series, you can contact the organizers by email. 

Veronica Walker Vadillo: 

email: veronica.walker[AT]helsinki.fi 

Twitter: @VWalkerV 

Emilia Mataix Ferrándiz: 

email: emilia.mataixferrandiz[AT]helsinki.fi 

Twitter: @Mataix_emilia 

Website: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/downbythewater/ 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/4DownByTheWater/ 

 

Freedom to Change Gears – An Interview with HCAS Alumna Josephine Hoegaerts

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By Kaisa Kaakinen 

In 2017, Josephine Hoegaerts received good news. Being a Core Fellow at HCAS at the time, she would be able to stay in Helsinki with her ERC project “CALLIOPE: Vocal Articulations of Parliamentary Identity and Empire”, which she conceived at HCAS. We had a conversation about the impact of the HCAS Fellowship on her career and about tensions inherent in her current role as a Principal Investigator, who sets the research agenda not only for herself but also for others.

Portrait of Josephine Hoegaerts

Josephine Hoegaerts (Photo by Veikko Somerpuro)

 “It was a deeply uninformed decision”, says Josephine Hoegaerts and laughs, when asked about her reasons for coming to HCAS in 2015 to work on a postdoctoral project on the history of voice, after her first postdoc in Belgium. Hoegaerts now holds a position as Associate Professor at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki, but back then she did not know much about the University of Helsinki or about Finland. But, in addition to the prospect of learning a completely new language, Finnish, she was attracted to Helsinki by the opportunity to do research in the interdisciplinary and international environment of HCAS.  

Hoegaerts turned down another postdoc in Germany connected to an archive of popular music, which would have directed her work more specifically towards musicology. The Core Fellowship at HCAS gave her the time and freedom to step back and look for a wider interdisciplinary framework.

“I was trying to get out of strictly doing history, and into interacting with musicology, sound studies, literary studies, and HCAS seemed like an environment in which people would let me get on with that.”

 

Intellectual stimulation and collegial support at HCAS 

It turned out that HCAS was an excellent environment for shifting gears as a researcher. Hoegaerts found that she could engage with people from different fields in a particularly meaningful way.  

“My postdoc project was on history of voice but was mainly looking at educational scientific manuals. It had a very specific, history of science approach. I was looking to pull it more in a political and social direction. At HCAS I had the time to attend different reading groups with people from different disciplines, reading up on stuff that I otherwise would not have planned.”  

Many of Hoegaerts’ collaborations at the Collegium began by chance, at lunch discussions with colleagues, whose work resonated in interesting ways with her own. One of these discussions led to the symposium “Embodiment and Emancipation,” co- organized with political philosopher Leszek Koczanowicz and literary scholar Ulrika Maude. Another HCAS Symposium “Writing Voice and Speaking Text” was a collaboration with Mari Wiklund, French philologist specializing on prosody and university lecturer at the University of Helsinki, with whom Hoegaerts is now co-editing a publication. 

Hoegaerts also stresses the impact of the collegial and supportive atmosphere of HCAS. The career phase after the PhD is plagued by insecurities that, in her view, are related less to the content of one’s research than to institutional conditions. She found it rewarding to be constantly challenged in terms of content, as fellows from various disciplines posed questions about the very foundations of her project. The same people, however, were extremely supportive as colleagues.  

“When I arrived at HCAS, there was a large group of youngish female postdocs, six or seven of us, very much in the same situation, going for sushi every week, complaining. But we were not competing for the same jobs, which meant that if you got a grant or if you got something published, everything was celebrated. There was this enormously supportive atmosphere.”  

Hoegaerts also praises the director Sari Kivistö and other HCAS administrators of the time, who were well prepared to assist researchers coming to work in a new country. She remarks that support structures for international researchers are too often lacking in other units of the university, especially after the centralization of the administrative services. There is nobody in her current unit responsible for answering questions about the structure of the MA program or the Finnish tax system, for instance. As a new employee coming from abroad, you do not initially even know which questions you should be asking, she adds. 

But what made Josephine Hoegaerts decide to stay in Helsinki, when she could have taken her coveted ERC funding to another European university?  

“A sense of loyalty,” she says. “I had been supported really well by the funding services as well as by the Collegium.”  

She was also simply tired of moving, a sentiment shared by many early-career academics. And finally, University of Helsinki offered her career opportunities that were not available everywhere: a tenure-track professorship. 

Curiosity-driven research for the lucky few? 

When Hoegaerts thinks back to her career path, she cannot help but notice a contradiction in her current position as a Principal Investigator of an ERC project, who employs PhD students and postdocs. While she herself has always been able to find funding that does not limit scholars’ freedom to set their own research agendas, she is now, in a sense, forced to limit the freedom of others. 

“I get the impression that particularly at the postdoc stage, it is becoming more and more difficult to find a place that is not within a project. At the same time, there is a demand for people to be autonomous, and this is a very odd tension.” 

In her own career, the freedom to set one’s own agenda meant that she could come to her current research on citizenship, political influence, and empire from an unusual angle: through thinking about voice and sound.  

“It takes time to build confidence, particularly as a woman in academia, to want to talk about politics. Five years ago, I definitely would not have felt I could say anything about citizenship. I was doing something quite weird, and I am still doing something weird, but I am now moving in a direction that could be considered a ‘big and important topic’. I feel that this was a better way of coming to such topics than being in a project, in which you are forced to think about big issues.” 

Hoegaerts finds it problematic, particularly in the humanities, that research is now so strongly connected to projects, in which resources are concentrated around a few PIs. The researchers employed by the PIs do not get to define their research focus freely, which makes it difficult for them to build a career.  

“The idea behind this is that they want us to be more collaborative. But I am not sure that is the result, because collaboration should be more horizontal than what we have now. There seems to be a growing gap, at least to a degree, between the haves and the have-nots. A few people are lucky at some point and start to get money and get to define the research agenda to a much larger degree than is perhaps necessary.” 

Hoegaerts wants to make sure she supports the people employed in her project in a way that brings them forward in their own careers. At the same time, she is held accountable to the ERC to stay within the limits she “defined one summer in Helsinki,” as she puts it.  

She is currently planning a new research project that tackles the problem of professionalization and the notion of excellence, taking a critical view on the frequent talk about the latter. She adds, smiling, that this effectively means that she is asking funding agencies to give her money so that her team can tell them why their whole rationale is wrong.  

Those lunches and coffees 

When asked what it means now for her to be a Collegium alumna, Hoegaerts says that there definitely is a “bizarre bond” between people who have been at the Collegium. As for how this has come about, we – as so often when talking to fellows of institutes of advanced study – come back to how shared lunches build a sense of community and spark bottom-up forms of academic collaboration.  

 “This is the one thing I really miss from the Collegium”, Hoegaerts confesses. 

Helsinki Collegium fellows sitting at the lunch table in the Common Room of HCAS during Orientation Week in September 2019.

HCAS Fellows at lunch during Orientation Week in early September 2019.

This article has also been published in the HCAS Newsletter 2019-2020

On Excellence

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By Tuomas Forsberg

The stated mission of the Helsinki Collegium is to carry out high-level research in the humanities and social sciences. Given this key purpose, it is essential that in the international research assessment of the entire University of Helsinki in 2019 that focused on the past decade, the Collegium received the grade of “excellent” for both the quality of research and the research environment. As excellence ought to be recognised by others, it is important that what we say we are aligns with what we do.

So I would like to take this opportunity to thank my predecessors and all our former fellows who have contributed to this success.

We may, of course, ask how excellent is “excellent”. Something would be terribly wrong with the concept of an institute of advanced study if the Collegium were not recognised as a better research environment than teaching units and if the quality of the research environment did not translate into quality of research. However, following the academic good practice of doubt and self-criticism, there is no justification for resting on one’s laurels. Even excellence can be improved.

Societal impact from the bottom up

The Collegium received the grade “very good” in the assessment of societal impact. “Very good” is not a bad achievement but already literally a very good result. Yet, given the available resources, to what extent can we realistically improve our societal impact without also jeopardising our excellence in research? Many institutes for advanced study worldwide have reckoned that the old idea of the “usefulness of useless research” is not sufficient. Accordingly, they have started to pay more attention to societal impact to meet the expectations or even demands of the authorities, funding bodies and sponsors.

The Collegium’s visibility and outreach have emerged both locally and internationally. For example, it has been active in social media, through blogs and in public events organised at the new Think Corner of the University of Helsinki and streamed worldwide.

Speakers of the spring 2019 Kollegium Talks on Think Corner Stage

Public Kollegium Talks event “Unexpected turns in research paths”, with Erkko Professor Jane Cowan, Core Fellows Michael Langlois and Emilia Mataix Ferrándiz and Research Coordinator Kaisa Kaakinen on the Think Corner Stage, March 11, 2019 (Photo: Minerva Juolahti)

However, probably the best way for the Collegium to foster societal impact is by facilitating the activities of its researchers. Just as the research carried out at the Collegium is bottom-up by nature, so should its societal impact be. Given that Collegium researchers are exempt from major administrative and teaching duties, they can in fact address new topical issues much faster of their own initiative as well as find more time for societal interaction. Many researchers already know how they can reach out to the relevant audiences. In addition, some researchers are better positioned for societal interaction than others. Moreover, research and societal interaction are typically sequential, since impact is based on research that first has to be carried out. Therefore a kind of division of labour should apply to institutions. Given the diversity of fields and issues represented at the Collegium, it is not easy to identify a core audience other than those interested in knowing what is going on and what is new in academic research in the wide sense.

Can impact be measured?

Societal impact, while definitely important, is difficult to measure reliably. In fact, attempts to do so, particularly when it affects funding directly, may lead to unintended consequences. As is well-known, measuring the societal impact of academic research is difficult because that it may take a long time before the impact becomes visible, and it is often impossible to attribute the impact of scientific knowledge to particular research outcomes. A related question is whether we should reward research that could or should have had an impact, but has failed to have one. Politicians and other decision-makers still make choices on the basis of their preferences and they may discard the scientific evidence. What if we reward outcome, in other words research that has had impact, but for reasons that may have nothing to do with the quality of research? Scholars are expected to be active in the society and broaden their expertise beyond their own academic research. We should reward researchers for their societal impact based on their scholarly expertise, but it is very difficult to do so without rewarding them also for their societal impact that is based on mere civic activism. By the same token, there is no objective way of separating good impact from bad. And even if there were a clear definition of societal impact, it can remain a secret:  some of the most significant instances of societal impact – when advice is given to key decision-makers – are not meant to be publicly acknowledged.

Societal impact should definitely be part of the academic ethos that guides our research. This should not imply that research should be evaluated in terms of its short-term goal or that the societal impact of research can be measured accurately. Moreover, there is no contradiction in claiming that we should pay attention to the societal impact of research, and that we still need places where that is not the primary concern. The more universities and research institutes are required to demonstrate their relevance by addressing immediate societal concerns defined in a top-down manner, the more important it becomes that at least some institutes can focus on basic, curiosity-driven research.

Group photo of Helsinki Collegium fellows standing outside on grass

HCAS Fellows and staff in September 2019 (Photo: Veikko Somerpuro)

Tuomas Forsberg has been the Director of HCAS since August 2018.

This article has also been published in the HCAS Newsletter 2019-2020.

Some Thoughts on the Helsinki Collegium

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By Tuomas Forsberg

More than one month has passed since I began as director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. The first month has been extremely busy but also very rewarding: the new fellows arrived just a fortnight after me and the new academic term has started at full speed.

Photo by Veikko Somerpuro

Director Tuomas Forsberg with the Fellows and staff of the Helsinki Collegium in September 2018 (Photo: Veikko Somerpuro)

The HCAS is a wonderful, unique place as an interface of international scholars and interdisciplinary research in the field of humanities and social sciences, including law, theology and education – the five faculties of the City Centre campus in Helsinki. My own background is in political science and international relations, but I realized that I have many close academic friends in all these fields, and I have published at least one article in anthologies edited by a researcher from each of the five faculties of the City Centre campus. In fact, back in the late 1980s when I was a University of Helsinki student, I also completed at least some courses in all these faculties (yes, even in theology). And not only that: I cannot escape thinking that I have grown up alongside all the above broad disciplines: my parents were theologians, my dear aunt and godmother was a philologist, my aunts and uncles teachers, and one uncle – as well as my wife – lawyers.

Time for Research and Collaboration

The mission of the HCAS is in line with the key idea of advanced studies institutes to produce top-class research that crosses disciplinary boundaries and creates something original. This often means applying the metaphor of building: we do not tear down an old house and quickly build something new and different; instead, we solidify the building’s foundations so that the house can be renovated. For that, fellows need time to focus on their research and the freedom to develop their own agendas.

The HCAS also needs to be a community. A strong identity and esprit de corps has been a strength of the institute in the past, and without a sense of community the whole HCAS idea would be lost. The joy of research comes from discoveries and findings that are often very subjective moments, but no researcher would be able to achieve much alone. Although researchers in the humanities and social sciences often have their own projects, sharing ideas with others is crucial. HCAS fellows come to the institute as individuals, but they hopefully leave with many friends and partnerships that might even be more important in the long term than the research carried out during the fellowship.

The HCAS mission also includes collaboration with the university faculties. Although the point of the HCAS is to enable scholars to focus on their research, “splendid isolation” may distract the younger fellows from taking the necessary next steps towards teaching positions. Many researchers based in the faculties would also be very happy to get even a glimpse of a famous scholar who has landed at the HCAS for a year.

The Three Fs, or the Core Elements of Research

This balance between focusing on research and internal activities vs. teaching and outreach is a longstanding issue often to do with perception and visibility rather than substance. Having a strong esprit de corps is not the same as being inward-looking. Even if the HCAS’s mission concerns the area of basic research rather than policy-oriented knowledge, it can still be vitally important in many different ways. A good example of how the HCAS can be “useful” and reach wider audiences was to promote the lectures on “useless knowledge” that in fact became very popular.

When I was the acting director of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs 20 years ago, we used to describe three core elements of research with three Finnish words starting with H: hyvää (good), hauskaa (fun) and hyödyllistä (useful). I wonder what would be the best translation of this slogan. Maybe three Fs: research should be fun, functional and freaking good!

One feature of the HCAS known widely in Finland has been to reflect academic practices and contribute to debates on science policy. Here, I see no reason to change course, and I hope that this blog can find readers and contributors and in this domain as well.

Tuomas Forsberg (Photo: Veikko Somerpuro)

Tuomas Forsberg (Photo: Veikko Somerpuro)

 

On travelling as an ex-IAS director

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By Jo Shaw

The title needs a little explanation. Before taking up my one year EURIAS fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, I was privileged to spend more than three years as Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. Before that, to give my journey even more context, I was Dean of Research of what is now the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. I was therefore familiar with IASH’s work before I became Director. And I am a connoisseur of Institutes of Advanced Studies!

During my IASH directorship, I had the opportunity to involve myself in the work of a number of international networks in which we participate, including CHCI, UBIAS and ECHIC. I even came to a meeting at HCAS a few years ago. One of the huge pleasures of my time as director was organising and hosting in Edinburgh the 2017 ECHIC Conference under the rubric of inside/OUT. For me, this showcased the best of what humanities centres and institutes (and here I include not just humanities in the narrow sense, but all of the human sciences) can do. The plenary lectures were engaging and broadly focused, highlighting the strong links, for example, between fields of cultural studies and the social science disciplines of political science and sociology. Our shorter presentations and lightning talks were just that: short, punchy, informative. We fostered engagement between scholarship and broader society, with two broader panels focused on populist politics and on IASH’s Dangerous Women Project (another achievement of which I am incredibly proud). And we linked colleagues from universities across Europe with senior colleagues in humanities and social sciences management in Scotland and Ireland, in a very supportive encounter at the Scottish Parliament.

At the end of my term of office, I thought it would be good to spend time on the other side of the IAS fence, as a consumer of the values of interdisciplinarity and scholarly community that are the distinctive facets of Institutes of Advanced Studies wherever they are found. I can confirm, HCAS truly is a great place to rediscover your scholarly habits and to (re-)lay the foundations for a research programme. I’m sure it’s an equally apt destination if what you are looking for as a scholar is somewhere to finish a project and to write up some research for publication.

It is interesting to muse for a moment on the similarities and differences between my Edinburgh and Helsinki experiences, quite apart from the huge contrast between being director and being a fellow. Obviously the two universities are quite different in terms of history, heritage and organisation, although they are partnered together within the League of European Research Universities. There is, as a result, quite a bit of traffic between them, at the level of senior management and deans, as well as a number of research collaborations that I am aware of. An event was organised by colleagues in Edinburgh’s School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures to mark #Suomi100, highlighting research on Finland or by Finnish scholars in Scotland. During my time as Director of IASH we have regularly hosted scholars from Finland, especially those benefiting from Academy of Finland funding comprising a mobility element. There seems to be quite a lot less traffic in the opposite direction, as far as I can see, although I would be happy to be corrected by others with better data. This is despite the more general interest in Finland as a relatively young, rather small and fiercely independent state that exists in Scotland. I think there are regular visits here from the Scottish government and Scottish public bodies, interested in the many things that Finland gets right and which Scotland could do better at (education and innovation being two such things). Scotland has recently adopted the baby box initiative. The UK as a whole, which has a terrible homelessness problem, has shown an interest in how Finland is tackling the scourge of homelessness.

But returning closer to home, it’s worthwhile reflecting on how the two institutes/bodies fostering ‘advanced studies’ continue to flourish in university environments where so-called key performance indicators are becoming the dominant features of everyday life. It is very hard to count the value of giving scholars space and community to flourish. The collaborations that flourish in the environment of an institute of advanced study often take years to come to fruition. In a world obsessed by causality, can we really claim that the residency in the IAS ‘caused them’? New research grants or research collaborations which enrich the university may have been fostered by cross disciplinary discussion and debate within the IAS, or between IAS fellows and scholars in the Schools and Faculties of the host university, but again it is hard to pinpoint causality, or to highlight just what benefit or reward should flow back to the IAS as a result of its contribution to the university’s mission. And notwithstanding the ‘pure’ scholarly nature of the space and time to think offered by each of the two IASs, it is also the case that both Helsinki and Edinburgh are committed to public engagement and to taking the insights of the work of scholars to broader communities. Both IASs see the intense benefits that come from the juxtaposition of different types of ‘creative’ impulse, bringing creative arts fellows into dialogue with those on working within more ‘academic’ schemes.

I am convinced that for a university to maintain and develop an IAS it needs an a priori commitment to fostering the benefits of autonomy and scholarly enquiry that are intrinsic to their flourishing. A reductionist and calculating approach to benefits (‘does it wash its face financially?’) is liable to result in the downgrading of one of the most valuable aspects of international academic community, without appropriate staffing and funding. Management structures that integrate the IAS into the host institution, whilst preserving academic independence are vital. That said, IASs, their staff and their fellows also have responsibilities to intensify their collaborations within and beyond the host university and to tell the world all about it. They can no longer be, if they ever were, quiet inward-looking places. Websites, social media, blogs and more traditional scholarly communication mechanisms all have a role to play. In addition, former fellows and other stakeholders need to be kept in touch with and activated for their support, through newsletters and annual reports (pdf), particularly at key times, such as in the run up to anniversaries (hint: IASH goes 50 in 2019!).

In my still limited experience, I’m happy to say that both Helsinki CAS and IASH Edinburgh fit neatly into that model which brings together the inside and the outside; I sincerely hope that both will have many years of fruitful work ahead of them, based on their respective mottos of being the place where ‘ideas grow’ and offering ‘freedom to think’.

Jo Shaw holds the Salvesen Chair of European Institutions in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh and is a EURIAS Fellow at HCAS for the academic year 2017-2018. Her research interests lie in the field of citizenship, and you can find out more about her current work by following her blog.