Category: Miscellaneous

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.

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