Welcome to the conference!

You are most warmly welcome to the 5th Annual Conference for the Doctoral Programme in Political, Societal and Regional Change and the Doctoral Programme in Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. This year’s conference is titled: ‘The Social and Political Life of Methods’

The 5th annual conference for PhD students explores the role of methods and methodologies in research and how they represent and perform aspects of the explored phenomena. Special attention is given to what could be called “the social and political life of methods”, referring to the historical, cultural, social and political contexts of methods and methodological developments. The expansion of digital data has made these questions particularly timely, but they are not limited to any particular data type, and the goal of the conference is to cross-fertilize questions about methods across the digital and analogue, including various disciplines and thereby strengthen the debate about methodological choices.

We are interested in questions like: how do research tools and methods promote certain forms of knowledge at the expense of others? How do they convert empirical data? What are methods good at “seeing” and what do they conceal? When and how are method choices political? What happens to research when methods become fashionable or are abandoned?

We welcome analytical debates on the value of methods, concerning digital methods and beyond. We are interested in ways to bypass the quantitative and qualitative divide in research and encourage papers to combine and compare different kinds of methods to highlight and discuss aspects of research.

More information on the conference and its program coming soon!

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