Month: April 2019

Research on health and illness conducted within medical humanities and social sciences inherently engages both people(such as healthy volunteers, patients, their families, health professionals, geneticists, lab specialists, data managers and policy makers) and their non-human counterparts, in particular, data and technology. Humans, data and technology travel, intermingle and converge. Yet technological applications and analysis of big health data are increasingly defining health and illness, as well as influencing the direction of healthcare policies and services in ways that downplay their fundamental entanglement with mundane, embodied and institutional human activities. Contextualizing and exploring human-data-technology relations allows for a better understanding of healthcare practices.

This symposium aims at facilitating an interdisciplinary discussion and cooperation between scholars in the humanities and social sciences (anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, philosophy, law, psychology, gender studies among others) who examine assemblages of tangible and intangible materialities and health-related issues. We particularly welcome empirically-grounded papers that firstly address issues that pertain to the meaning of, access to, gathering and translation of health-related data in contemporary societies. Secondly, as a growing number of health practices depend on different technologies (such as health apps, feeding tubes, monitoring devices, telecare), we want to examine what happens when the human-technology-data assemblage becomes part of daily life.

We invite contributions that address issues such as:

·       Everyday practices of patients and/or professionals in using and modifying technology and data;

·       Materialities and their interactions – how technology, food, pharmaceuticals and data co-construct health and illness;

·       Care and caring with data and technology;

·       Politics of healthcare data and technology;

·       The impact of and appropriation of data and technology in local and global health.

Keynote speakers:

·       Prof. Vincanne Adams, Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, University of California SF

·       Dr Christine Aicardi, Senior Research Fellow, Human Brain Project Foresight Laboratory, Kings College London

·       Prof. Barbara Katz Rothman, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, City University of New York

Please submit your abstract tointangible.technology.data@gmail.com by April 30^th 2019. Decisions on acceptance will be made by May 31^st. The abstract should not exceed 250 words. Please add a bio note of max. 100 words including your name, e-mail and affiliation.

Information about the symposium will be updated on our blog: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/intangibletechnologydata/

There will be a workshop directed to PhD students on 16^th October. The call for papers will open in May 2019. The idea for the pre-symposium for doctoral students is to enable them to present and receive feedback from keynote and invited speakers on their research papers, such as work-in-progress manuscripts. 

For further information, please contact the organisers of the symposium:

Karoliina Snell karoliina.snell@helsinki.fi

Małgorzata Rajtar mrajtar@ifispan.waw.plor malgorzata.rajtar@helsinki.fi

Presentation: Simon N. Chapman: Grandmother hypothesis revised

Time: Monday 13th May at 4 pm to 6 pm

Place: University of Helsinki: Unioninkatu 35, ground floor, seminar room sh 114

The presentation is based on the recent article:

Chapman, S.N., Pettay, J.E., Lummaa, V. & Lahdenperä, M. (2019). Limits to Fitness Benefits of Prolonged Post-reproductive Lifespan in Women. Current Biology, 29, 645–650.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(19)30008-9.pdf

Simon N. Chapman is a PhD student in the Human Life History Group at the Department of Biology at the University of Turku, supervised by Professor Virpi Lummaa. He completed his Master’s in the Myanmar Timber Elephant Project at the University of Sheffield in the UK in 2015, also under the supervision of Lummaa, and was working on growth in the Asian elephant.

Welcome to listen and discuss, no preregistration required!

Open Moodle platform for seminar can be found here: https://moodle.helsinki.fi/course/view.php?id=31386

Edward Westermarck (1862-1939) is a founding father of Finnish sociology and one of the world’s first evolutionary sociologist whose scientific thinking was a century ahead of its time. Westermarck seminar gathers together researchers and students interested in evolutionary research from different disciplines. Cross-disciplinary seminar is open to all.

Contact:

Antti Tanskanen

antti.tanskanen@helsinki.fi

Mirkka Danielsbacka

mirkka.danielsbacka@vaestoliitto.fi

We are extending the deadline for application to our first Helsinki Conference on Emotions, Populism and Polarisation!

All information (CfA, keynotes etc.) can be found on our new conference website: www.helsinki.fi/en/HEPP

Please send your abstracts to marina.vulovic@helsinki.fi by April 26, 2019.

We hope to see you there.

Kind regards,

Marina, Emilia and Virpi

Call for Papers (PhD Workshop & Conference)

University of Helsinki, 26 and 27-28 August, 2019

Conference keynotes by

Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Rutgers University)

Suvi Keskinen (University of Helsinki)

Anne-Marie Fortier (Lancaster University

PhD Workshop keynote by

Kristín Loftsdóttir (University of Iceland) 

Race is a thorny issue in the global north. It cannot be addressed comfortably in environments that understand themselves to be ‘colourblind’ but are, in fact, overwhelmingly white. This seems to apply particularly to the Nordics, where notions of equality and fairness are so central to a collective sense of identity, and where the prohibition of racial discrimination dominates discourses about race. However, recent publications have tackled the issue of ‘Nordic whiteness’, taking up the perspectives and methodologies of post-colonial studies to critically engage with the seemingly non-colonial, colourblind (or even colourless?) societies of the North (e.g. Lundström & Teitelbaum, 2017; Loftsdottir & Jensen, 2012; Garner, 2014; Hübinette, 2017). This conference invites researchers to build on that work, and particularly welcomes contributions from a cultural and humanities driven perspective.

The conference-organizers are committed to examining post- and de-colonial perspectives on Whiteness that do not take ‘modern’ nations and regions as their point of departure, and can therefore accommodate different practices of migration, different understandings of indigeneity, and different ‘Nordic’ ethnicities. As Sarah Ahmed has noted, whiteness is an inherited history (and thus culturally specific and malleable) that shapes bodies, affecting how they take up space and what they can do. This opens up perspectives for research on the languages and practices of ‘belonging’ that we aim to explore during the course of the conference. The conference aims to tackle two main sets of questions:

1)      Questions of linguistic/cultural difference in the expression and representation of Whiteness. How are issues of race, colonization, whiteness and belonging expressed in the different languages (either ‘national’ or different indigenous languages) used in the region, and how do linguistic and cultural differences inflect the experience of racialized bodies? What kind of ‘language ideologies’ are at work in the construction and expression of Nordic Whiteness?

2)      Questions of belonging and their change over time. Where can a chronologically as well as geographically ‘blurred’ perspective take us, how can we look for (imagined) continuities and changes in the meaning of Whiteness and Otherness (rather than contrasting ‘historical’ and ‘contemporary’ views). This could include, e.g., questions about the current ‘use’ of history by white supremacist groups, but also the transitory meaning of ‘Whiteness’ as a category.

The conference aims toward a diverse, multi-disciplinary field and welcomes contributions mobilizing methods in fields such as anthropology, linguistics, history, cultural studies, sociology etc. We are keen to open up a conversation regarding ‘the Nordics’ in a broad sense, showing its diversity in modes of belonging as well as its different (indigenous) languages across Scandinavia, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, Lapland and (Western) Russia.

Submission of proposals

Proposals for twenty-minute papers should include: a title, an abstract of up to 300 words, contact details and institutional affiliation, and a note of any particular requirements.

The deadline for submission of proposals is 30 April 2019

Proposals should be uploaded to our website: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/the-great-white-north

The conference will be preceded by a workshop for graduate students. To find out more, or to send in an abstract for the workshop by 30 April, 2019, check out our website: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/the-great-white-north/call-for-papers-doctoral-student-workshop

Contact Email: jana.lainto@helsinki.fi

Please find attached an invitation to guest lecture on Friday 26th April by James Liu, Massey University, New Zealand:

Title: “Generational and Intergenerational Collective Remembering: Evidence for Global Narratives, Region-Culture Influences, and National Political Cultures across 42 Societies”

– abstract Liu Generational and Intergenerational Collective Remembering,

Venue: U35, room 114
Time: 2 – 4 pm
Contact: anna-maija.pirttila-backman@helsinki.fi

Please note these courses, UH students can make it for a significantly reduced price. (Also for students who have been on my Ideology and Discourse Analysis methods course, this is not the same one.) There will also be a conference on “Emotions, Populism and Polarised Politics, Media, and Culture”, 19-20 August, CfP open until 15 April. Useful for those who cannot take the courses. Best, Emilia

**Welcome to pass around, apologies for cross postings**

Call for Applications

Helsinki Summer School, University of Helsinki, 6–22 August 2019

“Rhetoric-Performative and Post-Foundational Analysis” and “Populism on the Loose in Europe and Beyond”

The two courses draw on the political philosophy of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, taking forward the discourse theoretical, hegemony-focused Essex school approach. The courses include also a two-day conference “Emotions, Populism and Polarised Politics, Media, and Culture” (https://blogs.helsinki.fi/populismi/emotions-populism-and-polarised-politics-media-and-culture-conference-august-2019/ ) organized by two Academy of Finland funded projects, “Mainstreaming Populism in the 21st Century” (MaPo)(https://blogs.helsinki.fi/populismi/), and “Whirl of Knowledge: Cultural Populism in European Polarised Politics and Societies” (WhiKnow) (https://blogs.helsinki.fi/whi-know/). The conference looks at cases of politics, media, and culture, and explores the link between emotions and populism, polarizing politics that spills over to media and culture.

Teaching will be composed of lectures, workshops and excursions. It also offers great possibilities for academic networking during and outside teaching hours. We designed the courses as a special opportunity to learn the underpinnings of post-foundationalism and populism in a friendly environment and in a collaborative way. The course organizers are Senior Lecturer Emilia Palonen from Political Science and Postdoctoral Researcher Virpi Salojärvi from Media and Communication Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki.

Descriptions of the courses:

Rhetoric-performative post-foundational analysis (https://www.helsinki.fi/en/admissions/helsinki-summer-school/courses/rhetoric-performative-and-post-foundational-analysis) 

This course focuses on post-foundational political thought and the related perspectives of conceptual analysis, post-structuralist discourse theory, interpretive political analysis, and discourse theory. The broader aim is to learn how to make use of theory in research in social sciences and humanities. With emphasis on rhetoric and performativity, the course investigates how meaning-making takes place through contingent concepts, discourses and structures we inhabit. These theoretical approaches will be discussed in relation to themes such as democracy, economy, populism, gender, climate change, identity politics, and the notion of ‘post-truth’. The students will learn about different forms of post-foundational thinking and get to explore the ways in which it can be combined with various research methods. As central to the post-foundational framework, the course will introduce the works of authors such as Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau.

Confirmed teachers: Tomas Marttila (Vienna University of Economics and Business), Emmy Eklundh (King’s College London), Mark Devenney (University of Brighton), Tuija Saresma (University of Jyväskylä) and Niko Hatakka (University of Turku)

Target Students: Master’s/PhD level students. Bachelor’s degree or previous knowledge of research methods and research practice required.

***

Populism on the Loose in Europe and Beyond (https://www.helsinki.fi/en/admissions/helsinki-summer-school/courses/populism-on-the-loose-in-europe-and-beyond)

While much of the study of present-day populism has focused on identifying features shared by populist movements or on populism as a social logic, this course looks at the variability and intersectionality of populism in a perspective inspired by the political philosopher Ernesto Laclau. During the course are examined such topics as distinct aspects of social media and mainstream media in relation to populist politics; role of affect, gender and ethnicity in populist movements; anti-populism and the relation between democracy and populism. The geographical areas studied during the course include the emergence of Donald Trump in the US, the rising tide of radical parties in Europe (including e.g. France, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Nordic countries), Islamic populism in Turkey, and the rise and fall of Chavismo in Venezuela. Thus, covering both left- and right-wing populism in different continents.

Confirmed teachers: Emmy Eklundh (King’s College London), Mark Devenney (University of Brighton), Tuija Saresma (University of Jyväskylä), Tuula Vaarakallio (University of Jyväskylä), Rūta Kazlauskaitė (University of Helsinki), Laura Sibinescu (University of Helsinki), Niko Hatakka (University of Turku), Halil Gürhanli (University of Helsinki)

Target Students: Advanced Bachelor’s level, Master’s or PHD students of social sciences are warmly invited to take this course.

***

Important information:

Organiser: Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki

Credits: 5 ECTS

Price: HSS course fees are 900–1490 EUR (UH students with local rates)

Preliminary course schedules may be found in the course pages.

The application deadline is June 17th, 2019. However, the students of the University of Helsinki may apply until July 19th, 2019. If you need a visa, please apply 31st of May the latest.

Apply for the course:

Rhetoric-performative post-foundational analysis https://apply.helsinkisummerschool.fi/courses/course/221-rhetoricperformative-and-postfoundational-analysis

Populism on the Loose in Europe and Beyond https://apply.helsinkisummerschool.fi/courses/course/220-populism-loose-europe-and-beyond

More info on the Helsinki Summer School:

http://www.helsinkisummerschool.fi

The students participating the courses are invited to present their work in the conference “Emotions, Populism and Polarised Politics, Media, and Culture” organised 19-20 August. However, it is also possible to participate only the conference. To apply, please, send your abstract (200-300 words) with heading to: marina.vulovic@helsinki.fi by April 15, 2019. Selected participants will be notified by April 30, 2019. Participants are encouraged to submit written papers by August 5, 2019.

The modest conference fee 50/80 euros includes tea, coffee, and lunches, as well as the conference dinner on Monday. The summer school course students do not pay extra for participating at the conference.