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.
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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.
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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.
The summer school is a joint venture of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC1342) “Global Dynamics of Social Policy”, Bremen International Graduate School for Social Sciences (BIGSSS), Danish Centre of Welfare Studies (University of Southern Denmark) and the Faculty of Social Sciences (University of Helsinki)
Welfare states can be studied with a number of theoretical and methodological approaches, from various chronological perspectives and with a focus on different empirical phenomena and localities. The Nordwel summer school aims to stimulate discussions across disciplines and foster innovative cross-disciplinary research on the development of welfare states over time and in a global context. The summer school brings together PhD students and well-established international scholars in scientific exchange.
We invite PhD students from different disciplinary backgrounds to participate in the discussion on the development of welfare states, their preconditions, present status, and how we ought to study them. PhD Students present their papers in parallel sessions and get feedback from senior scholars and junior colleagues.
Teachers include Daniel Béland (McGill University), Stephen Devereux (Institute of Development Studies), Patrick Emmenegger (University of St. Gallen), Lorraine Frisina Doetter (University of Bremen), Pauli Kettunen (University of Helsinki), Åsa Lundqvist (Lund University), Julia Moses (Sheffield University), Frank Nullmeier (University of Bremen), Herbert Obinger (University of Bremen), Klaus Petersen (University of Southern Denmark), Carina Schmitt (University of Bremen), and Reimut Zohlnhöfer (Heidelberg University). More teachers to be announced soon.
We welcome applications by PhD students by 15 April 2019. The approved proposals will be selected on the basis of their quality. Papers can be written from a broad historical or contemporary perspective and come from different disciplines such as history, social policy, sociology, political science, and political philosophy. Guidelines for papers will be sent in connection with the letters of approval by 30 April 2019. Participants who complete the summer school successfully are credited with 5 ECTS credits.
The course fee is 300 euros. Participants are expected to cover their own travel costs (a limited number of travel grants will be available – please state in the application), accommodation (4 nights, single room in a hostel) as well as most meals are covered.
Applicants are to submit an abstract (max 400 words) for a paper and a short biography (including a list of publications) by e-mail to Dörthe Hauschild, socialpolicydynamics@uni-bremen.de, no later than 15 April 2019.
Further information about the teachers, the conference venue and accomodation as well as travel information will be available soon, see https://www.socialpolicydynamics.de/nordwel-crc-summer-school.
Herbert Obinger (University of Bremen), Pauli Kettunen (University of Helsinki), Christian Peters (BIGSSS), Klaus Petersen (University of Southern Denmark)
Target group:
The course is targeted at doctoral candidates in humanities and social sciences.
Sign up for the event on Thursday, April 4, 2019 at the latest!
https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/97082/lomake.html
The workshop is held by Pertti Simula, Anja Nygren and Markus Kröger.
Pertti Simula, MS, psychoanalyst, author of five books on human relations and cooperation, stress and psychosomatics
Experience in Finland, Sweden, Brazil and USA
Consultant and educator at the Landless Landworkers´ Movement in Brazil
Anja Nygren is Professor of Development Studies and Director of ”Political, Societal and Regional Changes” – Doctoral Programme at the University of Helsinki. She has carried out long-term ethnographic field research under politically volatile and socially delicate conditions in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Mexico.
Markus Kröger is Associate professor in Development Studies. He has done field research in challenging circumstances in South America and India.
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
We welcome paper proposals for the Gender Studies 2019 Conference: On Violence. We warmly invite scholars from a variety of locations in the Global North and South to participate in the discussions on violence.
We welcome paper proposals for the wide range of workshops featured on the program. We have 39 workshops that approach multiple aspects of violence and widely represent the multidisciplinary field of gender, sexuality, queer, trans, disability, postcolonial, and critical race studies. You’ll find the full list of workshops here: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/gender-studies-2019-conference/call-for-papers
We open submissions for paper proposals from the 21st of March until the 30th of April. We invite you to submit paper abstracts in English or Finnish.
After selecting the appropriate workshop, proceed to submit your an abstract of your paper (max 2000 characters with spaces) using this e-form: https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/97041/lomake.html
For further information, see conference web page: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/gender-studies-2019-conference
To contact the conference team, please email us at genderstudies2019[at]helsinki.fi.
The conference is organized and hosted by the Gender Studies Discipline of The University of Helsinki together with the Association for Gender Studies in Finland (SUNS).
Please circulate widely to your networks and all persons interested!
On behalf of the organizing committee,
Anna Heinonen
Doctoral student (M.Soc.Sc.)
University of Helsinki
Department of Cultures
SKY Doctoral Programme
Researchers in the humanities and social sciences are often asked, whether their research is scientific and objective or just descriptive and speculative. This panel, featuring researchers from the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, sheds light on the actual research practices in these fields. How do the Collegium Fellows combine rigorous methodology and creativity in their work? What is curiosity-driven research in practice? What is the role of experimentality – including failed experiments? Which comes first: methodology, curiosity, or science policy?
Speakers:
Patricia Garcia’s field is comparative literary studies. Her research focuses on narrative spaces and their intersection with other fields such as the fantastic, feminisms, and urban history. In contrast to most literary scholars who study the unprecedented growth of Europe’s urban centres in the 19th century in relation to the realist novel, she examines how the same realist writers explored an alternative form of expression through their fantastic fictions.
Kollegium Talks is a discussion series hosted by the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and Think Corner. In the spring 2019 Kollegium Talks events, scholars of the Helsinki Collegium share their experience on negotiating between curiosity and discipline in research. It is often emphasized that curiosity in natural sciences leads to great discoveries and, ultimately, useful applications, but what is the role of curiosity in human and social sciences? How do researchers in these fields manage the need to stay open to the unexpected while grounding their work in systematic methods? Are today’s academics still allowed to be led by mere curiosity, or must they conform to the demands of applicability and strategic career calculation?
This conference seeks to bring analytic clarity to the concepts of liberalism by investigating into its historical and contemporary variations. We pay special attention to the various reconfigurations of the liberal doctrine that emerged in the context of interwar and post-WWII Europe (e.g. different forms of neo-liberalism, German ordoliberalism, social liberalism). We invite presentations that discuss particularly the theoretical underpinnings and intellectual transformations of the liberal doctrine in the past 100 years with a focus on the following questions:
Please send your abstracts (max. 400 words) with relevant contact info to the address: liberalism2019@helsinki.fi by May 15, 2019. For practical information, please consult our coordinator Dr. Heta Björklund (heta.bjorklund@helsinki.fi).
Read more about the conference here: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/society-economy/cfp-liberalism-historical-and-contemporary-variations
A Doctoral Program in the Social Sciences International Workshop
Organized in collaboration with Social and Cultural Anthropology
Organizers: Anni Kajanus, Suvi Rautio and Sarah Green Contact: anni.kajanus@helsinki.fi or sarah.green@helsinki.fi
April 1st, 2019 13:30-17:00,
Unioninkatu 37, Room 1055 (Faculty Meeting Room)
Secrecy can create distinctions and ambivalences; it can build trust and break down relationships, protect and endanger groups and individuals; give control and create vulnerabilities; provide a means to mediate between untrusting persons or groups. In this workshop we will discuss the kind of work secrets are made to do in various political and inter-personal contexts in contemporary China. In a nation marked by constraints in the transparency of government affairs and media; the lack of trust an individual confronts everyday gets projected from social relations to protective mechanisms, such as the rule of law and state welfare. To cope, people’s circles of trust are small and extend through networks of shared trust and often secrecy. To maintain secrecy, what is said and what is meant often carry two different meanings. The universality of these norms is exemplified in Chinese expressions that recognise the relevance of secrecy and things left unsaid. Phrases that exemplify distinctions between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (内外有别); differences between intention and expression (表里不一); and contrasts in what the mouth says from what the heart means (口是心非). These sayings reveal gaps between official representation and private belief (Steinmuller and Brandstatder 2016). Our workshop expands on these discussions alongside earlier anthropological debates on the political and social implications of secrecy (within the Mediterranean region in particular). Rather than delving into the more ritual-related aspects of secrecy, our objective is to unpack the relationship between secrecy and power to reflect on the darker side of what binds social relations together, such as lies, deceit and bickering; and to look at secrecy as a proactive investment in relationships, and in individual and collective trajectories. Looking at how things left unsaid maintain secrecy and trust, as two connected attributes, we ask the following: what does secrecy mean in China today?
Presenters and timetable:
13:45–14:15 Harriet Evans University of Westminster “Invisible to ‘them up there‘(shangmian)’? Privation, precarity and the search for privacy in a marginalised neighbourhood of “old Beijing.”
14:15–14:45 Stephan Feuchtwang London School of Economics “Ostentation of invisible authority and evasion of responsibility in urban planning”
14:45–15:15 Sam Geall University of Sussex “A sheet of paper can become a knife”
15:15–15:45 Coffee break
15:45–16:15 Anni Kajanus University of Helsinki “Public blame and secret punishments in children’s groups”
16:15–16:45 Hans Steinmüller London School of Economics “Don’t pay attention! The pragmatics of secrecy in China today.”
16:45–17:00 Final discussion
University of Helsinki