Author: Jessica I Karlsson

There were a lot of dimensions to the lecture. When we discussed the lecture we found that the most interesting topic was David Graebers theory of guilt tripping. Before the lecture everyone watched a video about mortgages in Spain. In the video they talked about how people don´t have the knowledge about mortgages and how they work. This problem is worldwide. That gives the bank personnel power over the customers, who don´t have enough knowledge about their financial rights. The personnel then can guilt trip the customers, meaning that they can convince the customer that they were in the wrong, even though they weren´t actually in the wrong. When taking this to a national level, we discovered that the current government in Finland too is constantly guilt tripping the Finnish citizens of the national debt. This is an never ending spiral.

Alongside with the bank other institutions that uses the method of guilt tripping are e.g the church and health care. Some churches can guilt trip you in to giving them money in return for holy redemption. Health care specialist can guilt trip you about your lifestyle, which can be seen by constant body shaming you about your weight. This is can be also be seen all throughout society. Parents can also guilt trip their children and vice versa. These are examples of how knowledge can be used as power over someone. Like Nietzsche said about guilt: you don’t need money nor other goods to blame someone or to make the social gap bigger, it is about status and gaining power over the ones who already have less power.

We end our blog by presenting an everyday example: a young female driver who just got her driving lisence vs. a middle-aged man in an expensive car. Young female driver gets guilt tripped by the man about their crash even though the one making the mistake was clearly the middle-aged man.

Read the link here:

http://gamla.hbl.fi/nyheter/2014-10-09/666346/de-satter-gubbars-makt-under-lupp

Televangelist in America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y1xJAVZxXg

Graeber’s video:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2015/oct/28/david-graeber-what-government-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about-debt-video

-Sofia, Jessica, Tobina, Katri

The first assignment was to discuss diversity in education and specifically our personal experiences in school.  We started discussing the “us and them”- grouping between the Finnish and the Swedish speakers in the educational field.  This got us thinking about the bilinguality of the University of Helsinki. On paper the masters program for general and adult education is bilingual. When you look at he curriculum there are a lot more courses offered in Finnish; Swedish speaking students are not only expected but also have to take some courses in Finnish in order to graduate on time. The Finnish speaking student on the other hand can graduate in time without taking any courses in Swedish. In addition to this we have also noticed that the information is lacking or not available in Swedish. As an experiment we checked all the signs on our way from the classroom to the cafeteria. About half of the signs didn´t have any information in Swedish. It occurred to us that the newer signs were only in Finnish and in English. Vad har hänt?

As there were only three of us present at the first lecture the Finnish speaker was the minority of the group. This is very unusual. This led us to discuss how we automatically continued the discussion in Finnish , even though the majority speaks Swedish as their mother tongue. Maybe we all should notice that the norm to speak Finnish is so strong, that even in a case like this where all of us are used to speak both languages we chose to speak Finnish.  Vad har hänt?

Group J

Jessica, Katri & Tobina