Latest activities

Joel Hänninen  SYLFF-Grant Fellow 2023

“I am a 2023 SYLFF grantee and a doctoral researcher at University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Social Sciences. My field of study is political science, especially world politics. I am working on a doctoral dissertation titled Dialectic of Responsibility – Big Tech, Corporate Social Responsibility and Ideology concerning the world’s most powerful tech companies and their discourses on corporate social responsibility (CSR). I have chosen the so-called “Big Tech” companies (Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon) due to their involvement in the 2019-2020 US Department of Justice’s hearings (formally known as “Online Platforms and Market Power”). The transcripts of these six-part hearings are the primary research material for my dissertation. I utilise a methodology consisting of a synthesis of discourse theory and ideology critique in analysing the research material.

One of my central critical arguments is that Big Tech’s CSR discourses are fundamentally ideological and have functioned merely to consolidate the companies’ corporate power and their capital accumulation – instead of amounting to, as they claim, positive societal change. However, to engage with this problem dialectically is not to outright dismiss CSR and responsibility altogether – as has often been the case with some extant critical approaches. Instead, CSR needs to undergo a theoretical and conceptual reworking to uncover that the notion contains always-already, in-itself, the potential for challenging the antidemocratic, hierarchical and unequal power and logics of large multinational corporations. Such a reworking, I argue, is a crucial step in realising more democratic, sustainable and equal futures.

The SYLFF grant has been instrumental for my research process. With the grant, I have been able to focus full-time not only on my research activities, but networking and other academic projects as well. Advancing my doctoral research at this pace would have been difficult without the grant.”

Joel Hänninen: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/fi/persons/joel-h%C3%A4nninen

 

PAST EVENTS

  • The SYLFF Association of Helsinki University organizes an annual lunch meeting for SYLFF Fellows on November 6, 2017. The aim of this seminar is to get to know each other, and talk about research and SYLFF plans for the future.
  • The fellows’ seminar at the Department of World Cultures, August 24, 2016.
  • The 5th workshop of the Helsinki SYLFF Association: “People, Spaces, and Identities in Movement” on August 25, 2015. Keynote by Dr. Lauren L. Martin (University of Oulu): The Relational and Territorial Politics of Bordering, Identities, and Transnationalization.
  • The fellows’ seminar at the Department of World Cultures, January 20, 2015
  • The 4th workshop of the Helsinki SYLFF Association: “No Future? Uncertainty and its Control” on December 10, 2013. Keynote by Hirokazu Miyazaki (Cornell University): Hope in the Crack of the Social – A Reflection on the Crisis of Post-Fukushima Japan
  • Book launch of Perspectives on Difference and meeting on January 10, 2013.
  • The third Sylff publication our local alumni: “Perspectives on Difference: Makings and Workings of Power”, edited by Anni Kajanus and Maylin Meincke, was published in December 2012.
  • Hisayo Katsui published a book on the human rights of Ugandan women with disabilities in 2012 (one of the results of her Joint Initiative project).
  • Get together meeting with the new fellows January 11, 2011
  • The 20th anniversary celebration of the Sylff program at the University of Helsinki, October 14, 2011
  • The fellows’ workshop Perspectives on Difference, October 14, 2011
  • the book launch of “Local and Global Encounters: Norms, Identities and Representations in Formation,” 26.2.2009, Renvall Institute
  • Tuija Veintie and Pirjo Virtanen received the JIP funding for a social action “Tradition in the present. Amazonian designs and oral history at schools in Brazilian Amazonia” 2009-2010.
  • Hisayo Katsui and Richard Wamai completed in 2009 their research project “Human Rights-Based Approach to Disability and Health in Development Cooperation” that was funded by JIP award.
  • The Sylff seminar “Global and Local Encounters” at the Confucius Institute, September 26,, 2008.
  • Seminar proceedings, “Civil Society Reconsidered: A Critical Look at NGOs in Development Practice,” was published in the Helsinki University Insitute of Development Studies Publication Series in 2006.