Dr. Spencer Hazel from Newcastle University gave a talk with the title Reading one another – intersubjectivity and the constrains of orthodoxy at the beginning of November. He wanted to present some of the reasons behind how we represent and theorize face to face interaction: there is a long history how interaction is represented in the form of dialogue and from the linguistic point of view, and for example movements and gestures have been put aside. With examples from interactional data from range of settings, Hazel argued that if we are really interested in interaction, we may continue to do ourselves a disservice if we do not wrest ourselves from one heuristic technique developed initially to deal with a more limited set of social interactional phenomena. Hazel’s lecture awakened lively discussion about the methodology of conversation analysis.
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Professor of philosophy of religion Sami Pihlström (University of Helsinki) talked in October about Solipsism and the Possibility of Intersubjectivity. According to Pihlström solipsism is a fundamental issue in intersubjectivity. He introduced different types of solipsism, however concentrating on transcendental solipsism and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein related to this. Drawing from Wittgensteins work, Pihlström connected the concept of solipsism with issues in intersubjectivity.

Professor Anja Stukenbrock from University of Lausanne gave the first lecture of the autumn 2017 in the series Helsinki Lectures on Intersubjectivity with the title From noticings to extended sequences: exploring joint attention with mobile eye tracking. In her study she used eye tracking glasses, which show exactly what a person is looking at. Stukenbrock demonstrated with multiple recorded examples from a market, how gaze practices are used by participants in concert with verbal and other embodied resources to share visual attention on visible phenomena in their surroundings.
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Docent Mia Halonen from Jyväskylä University lectured about intersubjectivity in May with the title Performance as analysis and reproduction of epistemic common ground. Halonen presented interaction research through the concept performance. She demonstrated this point of view with the help of empiric data from three different studies that included material from television programs, social media spaces and elementary schools.
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Professor of Ecumenics Risto Saarinen is the director of the Centre of Excellence in Reason and Religious Recognition. On April, he gave a lecture on the recent activities of the CoE and focused on issues of intersubjectivity. Saarinen dealt with religious recognition connected, for example, to immigration and same-sex marriages. According to him, multicultural societies need not only toleration but also recognition to flourish.
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Professor of translation studies Kaisa Koskinen (University of Tampere) gave a talk on Translation and affect in the lecture series Helsinki Lectures on Intersubjectivity at the beginning of March. Koskinen presented an overview of how affect has been perceived in translation studies in the long run. She also focused on today’s translation studies and gave examples of how affect and emotion manifest in practical translation and how they are studied in translation studies.

Professor Alex Fleisch (African studies, University of Helsinki) gave the first lecture of the spring 2016 in the series Helsinki Lectures on Intersubjectivity. Fleisch is interested in how meaning gets into language. The title of his talk was Making sense and documenting meaning: semantic fieldwork on seNdebele and isiNdebele. The talk illustrated Fleisch’s research group’s methodological and technical approach with examples from their field work in South Africa. The languages that Fleisch spoke about (seNdebele and isiNdebele) are similar to one another. Fleisch introduced linguistic features that are shared and not shared in these languages.

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Professor Minna Palander-Collin gave a talk on Tracing Societal Change Through Linguistic Shifts on December. This was the year’s last lecture in the lecture series Helsinki Lectures on Intersubjectivity. Palander-Collin talked about her new and previous research projects. She and her research group have used for example corpus methods in their research on the fields of sociolinguistics and social history. She is interested in how changes in language practices and social factors are interrelated and how this relationship can be operationalized in research.

Professor Simona Pekarek-Doehler (University of Neuchâtel) gave a talk on Epistemics and the body: Turn-initial and turn-final uses of je sais pas ’I don’t know’ in French talk-in-interaction as a part of the lecture series Helsinki Lectures on Intersubjectivity. Pekarek-Doehler dealt with the functions of je sais pas positioned at the beginning and at the end of a turn.

Pekarek-Doehler studies turn-initial je sais pas expressions in responses to questions and in turn-extension or turn-final expressions in sequence-initiating actions. The function of the expression depends on how it is positioned.

Professor Raimo Tuomela (University of Helsinki) was the first guest lecturer of the fall 2016. The topic of his talk was Non-reductive views of shared intentionality. Tuomela is a philosopher who has studied especially philosophy of social sciencies. One of his latest books, Social ontology (2013), elaborates a notion of collective intentionality. Tuomela’s lecture was mainly based on this book, and it dealt with a distinction between ‘we-mode’ and ‘i-mode’ intentions.

Professor Kristin Davidse gave a talk on (Inter)subjectivity in the English Noun Phrase: Synchrony and Diachrony. Davidse was the last speaker of the spring in the lecture series Helsinki Lectures on Intersubjectivity. In her presentation, Davidse introduced intersubjectivity and subjecitivity in the English noun phrase and dealt with language change. Davidse works as a professor in the University of Leuven in Belgium.

Professor John W. Du Bois gave a talk on Intersubjectivity as sociocognitive coupling – Dynamics of Dialogic Engagement. The talk was a part of the lecture series Helsinki Lectures on Intersubjectivity. Du Bois presented how interlocutors can be united in conversation and how they even can constitute themselves, jointly, as a sociocognitively and socioaffectively coupled system. For example, he dealt with the role of empathy when constructing this kind of intersubjectivity.

Academy Research Fellow Jutta Jokiranta (University of Helsinki, Team Leader in Centre of Excellence in Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions) was this spring’s third speaker in the lecture series ‘Helsinki Lectures on Intersubjectivity’. She gave a lecture on Social sciences meet biblical studies: Conversations with social identity and magical agency.
Jokiranta introduced how she as a biblical scholar employs concepts and theories from social sciences. In her work with the ancient texts, she deals with rituals and social identities of the ancient authors and their audiences.

The second speaker of this spring’s Helsinki Lectures on Intersubjectivity was emeritus professor Mikael Leiman (Univesity of Eastern Finland), who gave a lecture on Primary intersubjectivity – a Myth? Leiman talked on intersubjectivity in development of the individual.
According to Leiman there are two fundamental sign systems; primitive and lingual. In his lecture Leiman talked on how signs are mediated in interaction.

The first speaker of this spring’s Helsinki Lectures on Intersubjectivity was professor Dan Zahavi (University of Copenhagen). His talk was titled Anonymity, intersubjectivity and the self-other differentiation. Professor Zahavi is currently located in Copenhagen in the Center for Subjectivity Research, the research subject of which is close to the Center of Excellence’s. In his talk Zahavi discussed the relation of subjectivity and intersubjectivity and presented different views on how to conceive of the self-other relation.

Professor Leelo Keevallik gave a lecture on Non-lexical sounds and the embodied action. Keevallik illustrated with data examples how non-lexical vocalizations (like whee) and embodied actions are combined e.g. in dance classes. By using non-lexical sounds one can provide rhythm, underline the contrast between different embodied actions and organize the whole dance teaching activity.

The second speaker of this autumn’s Helsinki Lectures on Intersubjectivity was professor Jyrki Kalliokoski (University of Helsinki). The title of Kalliokoski’s talk was Intersubjectivity across norms, genres and linguistic resources. Kalliokoski showed how language users with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds make use of their linguistic resources in performing different activities. He also brought up the idealization of “proper” “correct” and “native-like” language and asked, if it was time for us to update “our” norms to achieve intersubjectivity.

Professor Riikka Stewen (University of the Arts, Helsinki) was the first lecturer of the autumn 2015 in the series ‘Helsinki Lectures on Intersubjectivity’. The topic of the talk was Intersubjectivity in Art History: Addressing the Viewer. Stewen approached the notion of intersubjectivity from a perspective of art history. She showed pictures of both paintings of the Reneissance and installations of contemporary art, and illustrated how an interaction between the artwork, the artist and the viewer is constructed.
Stewen brought up that especially contemporary artists are interested in everyday encounters. The coverage and the effect of art is not limited to galleries but viewers can find themselves in the middle of an artwork e.g. in a street. Stewen reflected also how social and cultural background has an effect to the viewer’s observations about the artwork. She gave as an example Yoko Ono’s work Cut Piece (1965). The interpretations of the artwork vary according to the contexts. In Japan the artwork is associated with the victims of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and in the USA it’s been connected to the feminism.

Professor Rose McCabe (University of Exeter) continued the series Helsinki Lectures on Intersubjectivity with a talk titled Empirical Correlates of Intersubjectivity in Interaction: What are the Symptoms? McCabe is professor of Clinical Communication and she is one of the few scholars who combine a C.A. approach with a variety of highly technically advanced methods such as 3d motion capture and computational linguistics. In her lecture she presented some verbal and non-verbal mechanisms that can help improve the relationship between doctor and patient in psychiatric treatment. In particular she focused on the role of questioning and on how different attitudes can be displayed through different question types. Moreover, she introduced some practices that can be used to help doctors improve their interpersonal skills.

Docent Sanna Vehviläinen (Finnish Institute of Occupational Health) gave the second intersubjectivity lecture of the spring 2015 titled Understanding and critical feedback in academic supervision.Vehviläinen started the lecture by going through some of the literature on understanding in different fields. She introduced for example the idea of the separation of two aspects of understanding: claiming and demonstrating.
In Vehviläinen’s own data this separation of claiming and demonstrating came up in an interesting way. She showed a case example of a discussion in academic supervision where the supervisor gave some critical feedback to the student concerning central issues in the student’s dissertation. The student’s response to the feedback revealed some underlining problems in understanding. Vehviläinen asked whether there is something in the interaction that intensifies and escalates the problems and causes the supervisor to repeate his/her negative feedback.

Professor Peter Auer (University of Freiburg) gave the first lecture of the spring 2015 in the series Helsinki Lectures on Intersubjectivity. The lecture was titled Establishing intersubjectivity when it seems unlikely: Interaction with people suffering of severe cerebral palsy who use a computer to ‘speak’. At the beginning of his lecture Auer compared some traditional theories of intersubjectivity with a new approach, in which intersubjectivity is treated as constructed moment-to-moment instead of something cognitive and static.
Auer talked about how interaction between people is affected when one of the participants uses a computer as a communication aid. He has done research on people who suffer from cerebral palsy and who use a computer to communicate. Auer presented his data and made observations on how the other participant of the conversation can orientate either to the device or to the participant using the device. According to Auer especially embodiment and bodily movements become relevant in these kinds of situations because participants use them to create intersubjectivity via mutual incorporation.

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