Month: May 2019

International Conference to celebrate 2019 Year of Indigenous Languages declared by Unesco and the United Nations

 When? 19.–20.9.2019

Where? University of Helsinki, Main Building, Fabianinkatu 33

‘Árran’ means hearth/fireplace, and we take it as an analogy to how languages allow people to come together and share their different experiences. On the Year of Indigenous Languages declared by the Unesco and United Nations, the main objective of our conference is to bring together both indigenous and non-indigenous scholars, activists, and artists in order to discuss indigenous languages in light of the current socio-political, economic, and environmental changes, which at present affect the world. Our aim is to exchange knowledge on best practices for the promotion of Indigenous languages, which are often listed as endangered, and to advance knowledge on the relations between Indigenous languages, ontologies, and epistemologies. The conference allows us to match the goals risen by the Unesco by celebrating the Year of Indigenous Languages, and to effectively contribute to scholarship in developing the concept of language ecology further. Metaphorically, sharing stories and narratives, verbal art, ways of speaking, and their symbolism fuels the warmth and guarantees the continuation of the Árran.

Keynote speeches: Gunvor Guttorm (Sámi University of Applied Sciences) and Anthony Webster (University of Texas at Austin).

Opening words: Alexey Tsykarev (EMRIP)

Speakers include:

Mere Kepa  (University of Auckland, Aoteorea-New Zealand)

Linita Manu’atu (Api Fakakoloa Educational Services, Auckland, New Zealand & Tonga Institute of Education, Kingdom of Tonga)

Daniel Mundurucu (Mundurucu author, Brazil)  

Ekaterina Grudzeva (University of Helsinki) 

Harald Gaski (University of Tromsø)

Inga Ravna Eira (Sámi author)

Jelena Porsanger (University of Helsinki)

Katarina Pirak Sikku (Sámi artist)

Maria Khachaturyan (University of Helsinki)

Robert Brave Heart Sr. (Executive Vice President at Red Cloud Indian School, Pine Ridge, South Dakota)

Stef Spronck (University of Helsinki)

Organizers: Laura Siragusa, Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen, Hanna Guttorm, Irja Seurujärvi-Kari (Indigenous Studies), Rani-Henrik Andersson and Olesya Khanina (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies)

Program and Conference website: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/arran-ecology-of-indigenous-languages

Registration before Sept 12^th: https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/97903/lomake.html (places limited)

The event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/811183392592139/

For further information, please contact conference secretary, Indigenous Studies: 

Mariia Rauramo: mariia.rauramo@helsinki.fi 

On Friday 17.5.2019, Laura Sumari (University of Helsinki) will give a talk “Refugee Narratives of Europe – an Area of Security?” in the EuroStorie research seminar series. The EuroStorie research seminar is organized by the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives and will host a guest speaker or several shorter presentations centered around a common theme. The seminar is open to all without registration, welcome!

When: 17.5.2019, 13:00-14:00
Where: Meeting room 229, Psychologicum (Siltavuorenpenger 1 A, 00170 Helsinki)
Event page: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/society-economy/eurostorie-research-seminar-laura-sumari-17.5.2019

Abstract: Laura’s PhD project examines how refugees and other ‘protection’ or ‘life seekers’ imagine and experience Europe, especially in terms of security and safety in different stages of the displacement. She seeks to find out how Europe is envisioned and experienced from the outside by those trying to enter, and how refugees and asylum seekers socially and culturally construct Europe as an area of security/insecurity throughout the migratory journey and asylum process. The research material is gathered by interviewing refugees and asylum seekers in various places and environments: camps and reception centres as well as urban and rural locations before and after reaching Europe. So far, Laura has collected research material in Kenya as well as Cyprus and Southern Italy and the plan is to continue in other locations next autumn and during spring 2020. Laura will also interview refugees and asylum seekers in Finland. The research is ethnographic by orientation and the analysis critically reflects the concepts of Europe and security. The purpose of the study is to offer a ‘refugee’ perspective to European security discussion. Laura wants to bring alternative narratives as a part of the ‘story of Europe’, traditionally told from the inside by people close to power, and challenge the traditional Eurocentric narratives that dominate the public discussion.

For more information about EuroStorie, the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives, please see www.eurostorie.org.

Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland

#intangible2019

The workshop is arranged in connection to the symposium with the same name
on October 17^th-18^th 2019  https://blogs.helsinki.fi/intangibletechnologydata/

Scope: 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 in detail the relations between humans, data and technology allows for a better understanding of healthcare practices.

The workshop offers possibilities for PhD students from a range of fields (anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, philosophy, law, psychology, gender studies among others) to take part in interdisciplinary discussions on what happens when the human-technology-data assemblage becomes part of daily life. In the workshop, the students will receive feedback on their papers (article manuscripts, work-in-progress) from the keynote speakers and symposium organisers. The students are also invited to the symposium following the PhD workshop.

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

For applying to the workshop, please send an abstract of your paper (max 300 words) by June 15^th to: intangible.technology.data@gmail.com . Decisions on acceptance will be made by July 2^nd.  Please add a bio note of max. 100 words including your name, e-mail and affiliation. Participants of the workshop are required to send a paper (max 2500 words) by September 30^th. In addition, participants are encouraged to prepare 1-2 questions for the commentators to address. The papers will be circulated among the workshop participants, so all can comment and discuss.

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

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

Karoliina Snell karoliina.snell@helsinki.fi

Małgorzata Rajtar mrajtar@ifispan.waw.pl or malgorzata.rajtar@helsinki.fi

Dear all,

On Tuesday 7.5.2019, Ann Rigney (Utrecht University) will give a presentation on “A new narrative for Europe: what are the alternatives?” in the EuroStorie research seminar series. The EuroStorie research seminar is organized by the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives and will host a guest speaker or several shorter presentations centered around a common theme. The seminar is open to all without registration.

When: 7.5.2019, 13:00-14:00
Where: Meeting room 229, Psychologicum (Siltavuorenpenger 1 A, 00170 Helsinki)
Event page: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/society-economy/eurostorie-research-seminar-ann-rigney-7.5.2019

Abstract: Since Renan (1882), it is generally believed that collective identities are sustained by a shared cultural memory. In line with this, European heritage institutions, including the European House of History, have been concerned to develop a common over-arching narrative for Europe that would provide symbolic and affective support for other processes of integration. In my presentation I will draw on recent insights in the interdisciplinary field of cultural memory studies to provide a more dynamic and generative model of the relationship between identity and memory, presenting the latter as ‘processual and relational’ (Olick 2007) rather than as a monolithic fixed legacy. Drawing on a range of examples from across Europe, I will show how cultural memory, while it is often invoked as a bulwark against change, also operates as a communicative resource for making new connections across traditional borders.

Ann Rigney is professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and founder of the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies. She has published widely in the field of memory studies, both on theoretical issues and with reference to specific developments in memory cultures since the early 19th century. Her many publications include Imperfect Histories (Cornell UP, 2001), The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford UP, 2012), Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (ed. with A. Erll, de Gruyter, 2009), Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales (ed. with C. De Cesari; de Gruyter, 2014). In 2018 she was awarded an ERC advanced grant for her project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (ReAct), which will run until 2024.

For more information about EuroStorie, the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives, please see www.eurostorie.org.

Best wishes,
Heta Björklund

Ilana Gershon, Visiting Professor to Helsinki Social Sciences 2019-21,

will be giving her first seminar at Helsinki on Tuesday, 7^th May, 16 – 18, U35 h.113

“Theorizing Multiple Social Orders and Leaky Boundaries”,

to be held 16:15 – 17:45 on Tuesday 7^th May 2019, in room 113, Unioninkatu 35.

Abstract: In this talk, I want to propose that ontological perspectivism is not the only theoretical movement in anthropology wrestling with the uneasy legacy that the culture concept has left in its theoretical wake.  A growing number of anthropologists are taking on board ontological perspectivists’ complicated engagement with the analytical possibilities promised by culture, but starting from a different intellectual first cut.  While ontological perspectivists presume Others exist within a single different ontology, multiple social orders (MSO) theorists believe that their fieldwork interlocutors are constantly navigating multiple social orders.  They ask: how do people on the ground manage to move between different social orders in their daily lives, social orders that not only ethnographers find contradictory but that the people themselves on the ground sometimes find challenging to live with simultaneously as they move, sometimes rapidly, between these epistemologically and ontologically different ways of carving up the world.  To ask the question ethnographically, how do the same people manage to engage in kula trade and go to the market, how do they manage to go to church and respect the ancestors properly, all in the same week?  At its core, this is a question of imagination — how do ethnographers approach the multiple social imaginations that allow people to create and cross multiple social orders that at different moments complement and contradict each other?  In this talk, I explore how beginning from the premise that everyone lives among leaky multiple social orders encourages anthropologists to explore questions surrounding how the boundaries of social orders are created and maintained, how people, objects, and ideas circulate translated across social orders, and how people navigate the spacetime of different social orders.

Ilana Gershon is the Ruth N. Hall Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. She earned her PhD at the University of Chicago and has taught at Yale and Emerson College (Boston), and held research fellowships at the University of London, the Center for Advanced Studies of the University of Notre Dame and the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Stanford. She has done ethnographic fieldwork in Samoa and the United States, and her published research covers areas such as legal anthropology, the anthropology of work, new media use, science studies, and diasporic societies. She is the author of four monographs, seven edited volumes, and 45 articles, and has given 30 invited guest lectures at academic institutions in Britain, Canada, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and the U.S.A. Her most recent book is published by the University of Chicago Press, and is entitled Down and Out In the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today (https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo25799564.html ).

All welcome.