Speakers Series 2017-2018, Spring

Organized jointly by the IASR and the New Social Research Programme (NSR)

Lecturers’ power point presentations (pdf) will be added

IASR lectures from Spring 2016 and earlier lectures available in Radio Moreeni as podcasts here

Time: On Tuesdays, at 16.15-17.45, starting from 16 January 2017
Place: University of Tampere, Pinni B, lecture hall B1097, Kanslerinrinne 1

 

NB! Wed 07.03. Ad hoc lecture: Family, Memory and Identity in Historical Perspective, Pinni B, lecture hall B1097, at 14:15-15:45

Programme (subject to change)

Updated on 3 May 2018

 

16.01. Do Women Need More Human Rights?: Anti-Gender Movement, Austerity and Conservative Jurisprudence in Russia

Dr Marianna Muravyeva, IASR

Russia has been experiencing the results of an acute economic crisis since 2012. However, the government has not been explicit in its declarations regarding austerity policies. On the contrary, it tends to represent its measures as ‘normal’ and generally normalises public cuts and reduced spending as part of a new understanding of the welfare state and socio-economic relations. However, there is a clear connection between the crisis and the introduction of conservative discourses and the ‘traditional values’ concept that aims at gender equality both in public and private domains. The Russian case study is exemplary and didactic. As Russia is new to market economics and has never developed a consistent neoliberal agenda, the shift to conservative ideologies came unexpectedly easily. Gender has become a battleground for the government to deal with social problems and austerity measures. Unlike the EU countries, the Russian government does not hesitate in challenging human rights and gender equality, easily shifting the blame onto leftist ideologies – primarily feminism – that are held responsible for family instability and poor demography and health. Using the concept of ‘traditional values’ as a cover for increasing austerity measures, the government relies on short-term strategies. However, this shift to conservative public discourse has not been readily accepted by the Russian population, least of all by women. There is clear resistance from various social groups, including women. This resistance is not just taking the familiar form of public protests (although they have been taking place as well), but rather in the form of withdrawal from public space to minimise dealings with the state, a strategy familiar from the Soviet experience of resistance. Therefore, on the surface, Russian public discourse seems to be dominated by officially promoted ideologies, but this does not mean that society just accepts or even implements those ideologies eagerly. At the same time, there is a clear tendency to follow supranational austerity measures by cutting public spending, amending social security policies, privatising care, and forcing women to return to the double-burden situation of the Soviet type of social contract by openly attacking feminist ideologies, gender equality, and human rights. In this situation, Russian NGOs, especially those with a human rights and gender-sensitive agenda, need more subtle strategies to deal with public policies, starting at the local governmental level.

23.01. From Orientalism to Islamophobia (pdf)

Dr Mahmut Mutman, IASR

This lecture begins with an introduction to Edward Said’s work, Orientalism, and then moves into a discussion of Islamophobia by emphasizing the emergence of a new image of Islam in the post-oil crisis world. Its underlying premise and promise is that Islamism cannot be understood without taking this historical context into account, even though it is not on Islamism itself.

A close critical reading shows that Said’s argument tended to reduce orientalism to an error of representation. I suggest that orientalism (and neo-orientalism) might be better read as a series of political, cultural and scientific and disciplinary practices, i.e. performative acts which “world” the Oriental world, if we employ Heidegger’s concept of worlding. My discussion of the concept of worlding emphasizes that, in the case of Islamicate world, the Western worlding initiated by colonialism and maintained by its nationalist reversal, has led to a further consolidation of Islam, which appeared as an overdetermination of social and economic antagonisms. The situation was exacerbated by the “oil crisis” in the West and the exhaustion of nationalist project of modernization.

The emergence of a new, “unrestrained and immediate” image of Islam in Western media in the late 1970s and early 1980s should be seen a precursor of today’s Islamophobia. Emphasizing that what is at stake here is not an ideology in the sense of a doctrine, I demonstrate that Islamophobia must be understood as a new unfolding of racist discursive and affective formation (hence in comparison with what was once called “negrophobia” and anti-Semitism). I then go through the constitutive features of Islamophobic racism and underscore its strong affective dimension, which is irreducible from the concept of terrorism and the new assemblage of security. Last but not least, I argue that “jihadism” should be seen as an internal component of this assemblage in a discussion of the concept of leaderless jihad and network or complexity theories.

30.01. On the History of the Musicians’ Union in the UK (link removed 19 Aug 2019)

Professor Martin Cloonan, Director, TIAS

This talk reports and critiques some of the findings of a recent project on the history of the British Musicians’ Union (www.muhistory.com). It examines the notion of musicians as workers and places this in the context of current debates about the so-called “gig economy”.

Professor Martin Cloonan is Director of the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS). His research interests focus on the politics of popular music and the political economy of the music industries, especially live music. Recently funded work includes the UK Live Music Census (www.uklivemusiccensus.org) and the history of the British Musicians’ Union (www.muhistory.com).

Key publications include: Williamson, J. and Cloonan, M. (2016). Players’ Work Time: A history of the British Musicians’ Union, 1893-2013. (Manchester: Manchester University Press) Homan, S., Cloonan, M. and Cattermole, J. (2015) Popular Music Industries and the State: Policy Notes. (London: Routledge). Frith, S. Brennan, M., Cloonan, M., and Webster, E. (2013). The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume 1: 1950-1967: From The Dance Hall to the 100 Club. (Farnham: Ashgate). Johnson, B. and Cloonan, M. (2008) Dark Side of The Tune: Popular Music and Violence (Aldershot: Ashgate) Cloonan, M. (2007) Popular Music and The State in the UK (Aldershot: Ashgate). Cloonan, M. and Garofalo, R. (ed) (2003) Policing Pop (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). Cloonan, M. (1996) Banned! Censorship of Popular Music in Britain; 1967-1992, (Aldershot: Arena).

13.02. On Becoming Political: The Political in Subjectivity (pdf)

Professor Jouni Häkli, NSR

This presentation explores mundane political agency. It will introduce the notion of the ‘political ordinary’ as agency based on the capacity of human beings to carry out acts that are undetermined and unexpected, and thus capable of challenging, opposing, negotiating, maintaining, and readjusting prevailing conditions. Subjectivity is approached from a pragmatist and phenomenological point of view, arguing that it is the condition of possibility of political agency. In empirical terms, political subjectivity is located in the ways in which people take up issues that stand out as important to them. Some everyday experiences of struggles related to proposed subject positions are discussed to provide examples of mundane political agency. The main argument is that mundane political agency is the subject’s action when in a state of becoming prompted by future-oriented demands and contingencies of social life.

Keywords: subjectivity, political, agency, temporality, attentiveness, everyday life

20.02. “The Long Dreaded Islamic Bomb”: America, Britain, and Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East, 1974-1991

Dr Malcolm Graig, Liverpool John Moores University

From its first media appearance in the late 1970s, the ‘Islamic bomb’ has been a persistent presence in popular and official thinking about the proliferation of nuclear capabilities to the Middle East. The words are loaded with meaning. They imply that a nuclear weapon developed by an ‘Islamic’ nation would become the Islamic world’s shared property, a nuclear sword to wage jihad against the non-Muslim world. The Islamic bomb’s journey from the lips of Pakistani leaders Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Muhammad Zia ul-Haq to the silver screen, newsprint, and the pages of lurid works of fiction illuminates Western attitudes towards the spread of nuclear weapons and the Muslim world. The idea grew from Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions, but was popularised by western media institutions: the Guardian, New York Times, and Washington Post newspapers, and broadcasters such as CBS and the BBC. This talk will consider the nature of American and British policy towards the so-called Islamic bomb and Middle Eastern nuclear proliferation more generally. It intertwines the ‘official’ narratives emanating from national governments and policymakers with the ‘unofficial’ narratives created by media institutions, pundits, and fiction writers. This thus allows an exploration of the ways in which the Cold War, Islamic radicalism, Middle Eastern politics, South Asian rivalries, and fear of nuclear confrontation intersected and mingled.

27.02. Sharing Secrets: Memories, Silences and Inscribing Genocide on Women’s Bodies

Professor Meyda Yeğenoğlu, IASR

This lecture examines how the experience of the Armenians during mass deportations before the WWI is a good example of how their life was turned into homo sacer (as suggested by Agamben). Having been put at the limits of ethical and political life, being dispossessed from the protection of rights by the law meant that they can either be killed with impunity. On their way to Syria, thousands have died, many were killed, some have committed suicide and many women and young girls have been kidnapped either by Ottoman gendarmes, wealthy military officials, Kurdish and Arab tribes. Those who have survived were mostly integrated into Muslims families, their names have been changed to Turkish names, their Armenianness were erased as they were Muslimized and have forgotten their native language. Some of the surviving women were forced into prostitution and others have eventually married to Muslim men and have continued their past lives in complete secrecy. After highlighting the dimension of silence about this past and how this silence has been a systematic dimension structuring the lives of Armenian people who survived, my lecture suggests that the inability to talk about the tragedy and the silence surrounding it has been transmitted as an Armenian heritage. However, this history that cannot be forgotten as loss is imprinted in the collective memory of Armenians and cannot be erased or diminished by remaining silent about it. The persistence of the memory of the tragedy is refusing to fade away and continue to surface itself in numerous affective encounters. To address this affective dimension, I would like to bring to your attention two survivor stories and examine the contexts, moments and environments in which these mutely residing memories erupt and come to surface.

06.03. Parricide and Violence Against Parents throughout History: (De)Constructing Family and Authority? (Palgrave 2018) Book Launch

Dr Marianna Muravyeva, IASR, & Dr Raisa Maria Toivo, SOC, TRIVIUM, HEX (eds)

Opening by editors Marianna Muravyeva & Raisa Maria Toivo, What could we learn from the history of parricide?

Presentations by authors

Satu Lidman: Ambivalent Fatherhood: On Disobedience and Assaults Against Parental Authority in Munich in the Early Seventeenth Century (Independent researcher https://www.utu.fi/fi/yksikot/law/tiedekunta/henkilosto/Sivut/Satu-Lidman.aspx )

Katie Barclay: From Confession to Declaration: Changing Narratives of Parricide in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (University of Adelaide / University of Aarhus https://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/katie.barclay )

Comments by Philip Shon (University of Ontario, http://socialscienceandhumanities.uoit.ca/research/researcher-profiles/dr.-phillip-shon.php )

More info on the book: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781349949960

Wed 07.03. Ad hoc lecture: Family, Memory and Identity in Historical Perspective, Pinni B, lecture hall B1097, at 14:15-15:45

Dr Katie Barclay, University of Adelaide

The family is a key social unit implicated in the shaping of self and identity. This is true at a personal level – as the place where most people learn gender, race, class and other facets of identity – and at a national level as family stories become national histories, producing boundaries on who is included (or not) in the nation. This paper explores the significant role that family plays in shaping memory, identity and heritage. In doing so, it wishes to rethink the family as a category of analysis, exploring the family not just as a unit of social structure but as an agent in processes of historical change.

Katie Barclay is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide, and in 2017-18, EURIAS Marie-Cure Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus Universitet. She is the author of the award-winning, Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650-1850 (2011), and numerous articles on emotion, gender and family life. Her most recent book, Men on Trial: Performing Emotion, Embodiment and Identity in Ireland, 1800-1845 will be out with Manchester this year. She is also editor with Andrew Lynch of the journal, Emotions: History, Culture, Society.

13.03. On the Role of Manipulation in (Digital) Photographic Representations (pdf)

Associate Professor Asko Lehmuskallio, NSR

With digitization of news work, including increasing reliance on near-real time connections to the Internet, questions of authenticity of journalistic images have resurfaced. Common questions are: Can we trust images shown to us in networked publics? Or the images that we ourselves forward on social media for others to see?

In order to counter ’pictorial fraud,’ especially press photographers need to adhere to strict guidelines in how photographs are shot, edited and published, while photorealistic computer-generated images are increasingly used in other areas of visual communication. In recent years, photographers have been publicly fired due to removing or adding content to images, while ‘non-manipulated’ pictures published may again have been changed at a later stage of their circulation. ‘Manipulation’ has become something to guard against, and ‘non-manipulation’ almost a guarantee for “an accurate and fair representation of the scene […] witnessed so the audience is not misled” (World Press Photo Contest Code of Ethics).

This talk discusses tensions that arise from a continued focus on ‘non-manipulation’ of camera-based photography and computational possibilities for photorealistic rendering. First, I present empirical research conducted together with Jukka Häkkinen and Janne Seppänen (accepted, 2017). We were interested in finding out if professional photographers and editors can distinguish photographs from photorealistic computer-generated images by looking at them on a screen. Second, I discuss implications that arise from the results by focusing on the usefulness of thinking about the camera as a sensor, as suggested by some software developers studied earlier (published, 2016). Taken together, these studies call for a need to develop a visual literacy that explicitly takes material mediations of visual presentations into account and grounds the use of digital photography among particular communities of practice. While some communities of practice seek for guards against manipulation, on closer scrutiny it shows that the careful and correct handling of photo technology is an accomplishment in its own right, assured by codes of conduct, education and peer review.

20.03. Towards Decolonizing Childhood and Knowledge Production in and about Post / Socialist Societies

Dr Zsuzsa Millei, IASR

It is almost 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and people of different generations still wrestle with the legacy of (post)socialism. At the same time, researchers invest renewed efforts and apply novel frames for the exploration of historical and contemporary experiences and processes within the region. Our project contributes to these efforts by delving into the lived experiences of children in socialist and post-socialist societies. The socialist modernization project had a preoccupation with childhood in which metaphorical children appeared as the icons of the socialist revolution’s present and future, and in which children were educated and trained to embody a new social order. Nevertheless, living in socialist societies often meant something quite different compared to its official and academic interpretations on both sides of the Iron Curtain. To research past lived experiences of children requires an epistemological, ontological, and methodological rethinking. I discuss these considerations that enables the decolonization of childhood and knowledge production about children’s lives in this era and region. I finish with selected evocative memories that paint a different picture of experiences of children in navigating state expectations to embody ‘model socialist citizens’ and their mixed feelings of attachment, optimism, dullness, and alienation associated with participation in ‘building’ socialist futures. I conclude with the utility of alternative histories that contribute to better understand the present and future of post-socialist societies. To learn more about the project look here.

27.03. What Works in Music, Arts and Wellbeing? Evidence, Policy and Practice (pdf)

Professor Norma Daykin, NSR

Music and arts are widely perceived as having the power to enhance personal and collective wellbeing. Over the last 15 years, the evidence base for has grown, with the adoption of increasingly rigorous research designs to identify biopsychosocial effects of participating in music and arts. Recent work has shifted the focus from health to wellbeing, including notions of eudemonic, hedonistic, experiential, and evaluative wellbeing that inform current policy and practice.

While quantitative research can demonstrate health and wellbeing outcomes from music and arts, qualitative research is needed to explore the underlying processes through which these outcomes are achieved. Drawing on ethnographic research on music in youth justice, military, and acute dementia care settings, I will explore theoretical frameworks that can inform understanding of what works for wellbeing, and what doesn’t work, in specific situations. In this context I will discuss the role of artistic quality as a potential mediator of wellbeing outcomes.

Policy makers have shown increasing interest in this field, through programmes such as cultural commissioning and social prescribing, which seek to harness the benefits of arts and music as part of integrated health and social care. While these developments have created opportunities for innovation, they have also increased anxieties among practitioners and service delivery organisations about the role of evaluation. I will briefly discuss findings from an ESRC funded knowledge exchange project that brought together artists, health professionals and commissioners to explore evaluation challenges and strategies; this led to the commissioning by Public Health England of a standard evaluation framework for arts, health and wellbeing.

As well as examining what works it is important to acknowledge what doesn’t work, examining both benefits and risks of creative practice in health and wellbeing contexts. I will draw both on my research and my community music practice to examine some of the cultural and discursive risks associated with arts engagement, illustrating my examples using extracts of music.

I will conclude by identifying three key challenges: reducing inequalities, adopting suitable evaluation strategies, and assessing artistic quality, that need to be addressed in order to advance the interdisciplinary field of arts, health and wellbeing.

03.04. Businessmen’s Vigilante Organizations in the Early 20th Century United States (pdf)

Dr Aaron Goings, IASR

This presentation will focus on the history of so-called Citizens’ Committees and Citizens’ Alliances in the United States during the early 20^th century. In several parts of the U.S., employers, frequently united within their chambers of commerce and elite fraternal organizations, organized these groups to combat unionism and radicalism. In many cases, these committees violently assaulted leftists, using beatings, deportation, and even murder to defeat strikes.

10.04. Sociology of Scientific Craftwork (pdf)

Associate Professor Mianna Meskus, NSR

What do we fear in life? We fear disease and death, the disintegration of the mind and the degeneration of the body. Where do we look for alleviation? Most of us turn to medicine, expecting biomedical knowledge, products and treatments will provide the cures for ourselves and our family members. We consent to give blood, urine, tissue, and personal data for biomedical research with the hope of helping medicine out. This talk addresses the circulation of human biological material from the perspective of “scientific craftwork” and its practical conditions. Using stem cell research as an example, I discuss how sociologists can make sense of knowledge production that involves “the hands and brains” of researches

17.04. Marx on the Dialectical Role of Capitalism (pdf) updated on 22 March 2018

Associate Professor Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto

In Capital, and through his whole oeuvre, Marx indicated six conditions generated by capitalist mode of production, which are fundamental prerequisites for the birth of communist society: 1) cooperative labour; 2) the application of science and technology to production; 3) the appropriation of the forces of nature by production; 4) the creation of large machinery that workers can only operate in common; 5) the economizing of the means of production; and 6) the tendency to create the world market.

Although Marx held that capitalism created the historical conditions for the workers’ movement to struggle for a communist transformation of society, he did not think that this idea could be applied in a rigid, dogmatic manner. On the contrary, he denied more than once that he had developed a unidirectional interpretation of history, in which human beings were everywhere destined to follow the same path.

The talk will highlight how Marx repudiated the thesis, wrongly attributed to him, that capitalism was everywhere historically inevitable and that the socialist mode of production could be constructed only through certain fixed stages.

 

24.04. Resilience and the New Governmentalities of the Anthropocene: Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (pdf)

Professor David Chandler, University of Westminster

In this presentation I explore three ways of rethinking governance in the Anthropocene. The first is autopoietic and recursive; here, the use of ubiquitous data is seen to enable new methods of mapping/tracing relations in time and space. In this paradigm, problems are seen more clearly through an ontology of depth, ‘drilling down’ to context where processes/path dependencies come to light which can be intervened in. The second is responsive, the paradigm of sensing and datafication: seeing relations in real-time, to enable increasingly automated processes of governing emergence. Here, the Internet of Things and cyborg more-than-human assemblages are imagined to govern with rather than over or against potential problems or threats of climate change, disease or socio-economic crises. The goal is that of resilience: the maintenance of the status-quo or homeostatic governance. The third form of adaptation is sympoietic, less goal-directed and therefore more future-orientated, for example, hacking as a project of exploration of the possibilities of relations and processes, detaching and repurposing assemblages creating new possibilities. In all three, the ‘what-is-ness’ of the world is given its due; there are no assumptions of linear, abstract or universal frames of knowledge or governmental capacity. They could also be seen as stages through which understandings of the human relation to the world is transformed, enabling adaptive possibilities and facilitating the building of a home in the post human age of the Anthropocene.

08.05. Giving Food is No Problem – Why is Giving Money? Social Protection and Tuberculosis (pdf)
updated 3 May 2018

Associate Professor Salla Atkins, NSR

Social protection, in the form of insurances or cash transfers is an important protection from economic risks encountered during ill health. It is high on the global agenda, given the sustainable development goals and their slogan “Leaving no-one behind”. Poverty and disease are closely interlinked, and while poverty can predispose to disease, disease can also deepen poverty. Not only does social protection protect from poverty, but it has been shown also to have important effects on health, particularly for poverty-related diseases. This presentation will introduce the concept of social protection in relation to a key poverty-related infectious disease, tuberculosis. In addition, policymakers’ and practitioners attitude to cash interventions for tuberculosis patients, and the reasons for these, will be discussed in relation to past and ongoing work in South Africa and Mozambique.

15.05. German Nuclear Restraint in the Cold War and Today (pdf)

Dr Benedikt Schoenborn, IASR

Since Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, due also to the Brexit referendum of 2016 and the extravagant foreign policy claims of U.S. President Donald Trump, the EU’s security policy has become subject to serious reconsideration. Whether the pendulum might swing towards a reinforcement of nuclear deterrence or towards nuclear disarmament in Europe will also depend on Berlin’s position. Ever since the late 1960s, (West) Germany has occupied an awkward position between cultivating its identity as a non-nuclear-weapons state and its loyal endorsement of nuclear deterrence within NATO. Against this background, Schoenborn’s lecture explores the different lines of reasoning in the domestic German debate on nuclear policy. The recent discussions on the Nuclear Ban Treaty in the German parliament, the Bundestag, constitute the source corpus for the analysis. In order to include the historical dimension by way of comparison, the lecture also examines the lines of argumentation expressed in the Bundestag debates on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1967-69.

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What is the IASR? – The Institute for Advanced Social Research, IASR) is the research collegium of the University of Tampere. It grants annually one- or two-year research positions for Professorial Fellows, Senior Research Fellows and Postdoctoral Research Fellows studying society to promote high-level multidisciplinary research and international interaction in the university.

What is the Speakers Series of the University of Tampere? – The Speakers Series is a series of Studia Generalia Lectures in the Study of Society organized weekly by the University of Tampere Institute for Advanced Social Research (IASR) in cooperation with the New Social Research Programme (NSR). The lectures are given by the Research Fellows as well as the distinguished guests of the IASR and the NSR. For the programme, please check the IASR website www.uta.fi/iasr/lectures/.

Most doctoral students can also get 2 ECTS for attending a minimum of six IASR Lectures, altogether 6 ECTS at the maximum. These 2 ECTS for attending 6 lectures can be earned during two successive terms.

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Speakers Series 2017-2018, Autumn

Organized jointly by the IASR and the New Social Research Programme (NSR)

Lecturers’ power point presentations (pdf) will be added

IASR lectures from Spring 2016 and earlier lectures available in Radio Moreeni as podcasts here.

Time: On Tuesdays, at 16.15-17.45, starting from 19 September 2017
Place: University of Tampere, Pinni B, mainly lecture hall B1097, Kanslerinrinne 1

Exceptions: 7 November 2017 and 14 November 2017, Linna, lecture hall K103, Kalevantie 5

 

Programme

Updated on 29 November 2017

 

19.09. Measurement and Field Dynamics: The Example of the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) (pdf)

Research Professor Niilo Kauppi, JYU, CNRS

The first Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) or Shanghai ranking came out in 2003. It was an innovation, intended to measure the performance of the best universities in the world. In this talk, I will explore the criteria that the Shanghai ranking set and the forms global competition have taken in higher education since its inception. Its impact has been twofold. First, the Shanghai ranking gave the starting shot for a global competition between universities. Today, this competition is taken for granted. Second, it defined the rules that this competition would follow: quantification of excellence, focus on universities, on the hard sciences, and on English-language production. Ruled out were qualitative evaluation, research institutions, the soft sciences, and non-English language scientific production. These criteria have had a powerful impact on innovation governance, the strategies of universities to cope in an increasingly interconnected and competitive world, the global ranking industry of academic performance, national strategic goal setting and funding decisions, the criteria of self-evaluation of academics, etc.

26.09. The Moral Authority of Science in the Modern World Polity: Evidence from Parliamentary Discourse (pdf)

Associate Professor Ali Qadir, NSR

Science has acquired a new level of authority in governance of the modern world. Complex realities and problems are often approached through “science-based decision-making.” This presentation offers a bottom-up account of the authority of science in national policymaking. Relying on a bottom-up neoinstitutionalist framework of epistemic governance, we examine parliamentary debates from seven countries over 20 years to describe the role of “science” in lawmaking. Our qualitative discourse analysis of debates confirms that usage of “science” is widespread around the world and across all policy sectors. We find ample references not just to particular sciences, but also to science in the abstract, and find hardly any contests around the use of science beyond technical contests around the credibility of a particular result. We also find that science is often disconnected from scientific organizations, but is readily related to budgetary proposals and to general assumptions of modernization. In all, our analysis confirms world polity theory findings about the institutionalized spread of science worldwide, but extends it qualitatively to identify what work the term does in parliamentary talk. Drawing on and elaborating Durkheim’s framework, we argue that this work can be characterized as a sweeping “moral authority” of science.

03.10. Writing Disaster, Testifying Violence and Abusing Trauma: The Double Tragedy of an Armenian Woman (pdf)

Professor Meyda Yeğenoğlu, IASR

This lecture will address the difficult distinction between testimony and literary representation of genocide by reading Ravished Armenia and Arşaluys Mardigyan’s story, an Armenian woman who witnessed the murder of her family members.

10.10. From Trash to Treasure: Valuation of Waste in Dumpster Diving (pdf)

Associate Professor Olli Pyyhtinen, NSR

The lecture explores the connections between value, ethics, and waste matter by attending to the voluntary dumpster diving for food. The practice implies recovering discarded items from trash bins, often placed in supermarket backyards or in the vicinity of other commercial establishments. Despite its seemingly marginal nature, the lecture suggests that dumpster diving is a highly relevant and fruitful topic for the understanding of valuation, as it involves the transformation of trash into treasure in hands-on practices of valuation. The lecture examines not only what is valued in dumpster diving, but, importantly, also how the valuation takes place in practice. First, for dumpster divers, the judgment of whether something can or cannot be eaten is not a separate activity, but it is intertwined with other activities. In dumpster diving, the practices of moving in townscape, diving into waste containers, as well as sorting, picking up, transporting, washing, peeling, freezing, and cooking, for example, are integral to what it is to valuate. Second, that valuation of waste in dumpster diving is inextricably entangled with practices that are not explicitly about value also means that valuation is not only about knowing what can be eaten, but also about making them good to eat. Dumpster diving thus entails an important lesson about the creativity of valuation. Third, the case of dumpster diving also illustrates how valuation is bound to remain more or less uncertain. It lacks fixed variables and waste remains in excess of classifications.

17.10. Knowledge Integration Processes in Translational Research: The Case of the Premature Birth Center

Postdoctoral Research Fellow Elina Mäkinen, IASR

Translational research in the field of medicine is applauded for its potential to move knowledge gained from the basic sciences to its application in clinical settings. Academic institutions, governments, and funders are interested in investing in such research initiatives. While it is widely agreed that translational research has the potential to create both social and commercial value, it has been shown to be extremely difficult. A key challenge is that the implementation of scientific discoveries requires cooperation and collaboration among different experts: researchers in the life and physical sciences, healthcare practitioners, university’s technology transfer and commercialization office, and social workers immersed in local communities. This lecture sheds light on collaboration challenges among heterogeneous teams by describing the formation of a new translational research center seeking to uncover the causes of premature birth. The lecture highlights the importance of revealing challenges for collaboration at different developmental stages in the translational research process.

24.10. Can Information Technology Positively Influence Social Encounters? (pdf)

Associate Professor Thomas Olsson, NSR

Modern information technology allows various forms of mediated interaction and broader social networks than ever before. At the sametime, the very same technologies often disrupt face-to-faceinteraction, and many people yearn for more meaningful social encounters. Consequently, there is a growing number of researchinitiatives for building and testing technological systems that aim to enhance, increase or otherwise positively influence interpersonal interaction in face-to-face situations. In this lecture, I outline the landscape of this emergent but still nebulous research topic based on a systematic literature review about relevant studies and systems. Our review of 125 publications resulted in an in-depth analysis of the focus areas, social design objectives, and design and evaluation approaches identified in the reported systems. We identify four roles of technology relevant for enhancement: enabling, facilitating, inviting and encouraging. The review helps understand and analyze relevant prior research as well as direct the digitalization of social interaction towards a more socially sustainable future.

31.10. Rehabilitating the Mind: The Use of Probation Sentences in Cases of Attempted Suicide in Britain, 1900–1960 (pdf)

Postdoctoral Research Fellow Louise Settle, IASR

Suicide was illegal in England and Wales until the 1961 Suicide Act. The maximum sentence for attempting suicide was two years’ imprisonment, but it was more common that the person was admonished or placed on probation. A probation sentence meant that the offender was placed under the supervision of a probation officer for a maximum of two years and could be required to follow certain conditions, such as abstaining from alcohol, receiving medical treatment or residing in a particular location (including in a ’mental asylum’). This lecture examines the ways in which probation sentences were used in cases of attempted suicide to provide psychological treatment to people who had not legally been certified as insane. However, not all of the people placed on probation for attempting suicide necessarily received medical treatment, and some were instead provided with advice, guidance and assistance from probation officers who had varying levels of professional training. The lecture therefore examines probation officers’ role as both the gatekeepers to psychiatric treatment, a task that relied on probation officers judging the probationer’s mental state, and as the providers of rehabilitation services which were based on a mixture of methods inspired by their professional training in psychology and social work, as well as by their background in religious philanthropic work. Overall the lecture seeks to highlight the important role that the probation service played in shaping both the practical implementation of psychological theories and working-class families experiences of psychiatry.

 

07.11. Integrating Evidence for Social Mechanisms: Lessons from Growth Diagnostics (pdf), NB: Linna, K103

Associate Professor Jaakko Kuorikoski, NSR

Recent methodological debates on the concept of social mechanism, often associated with the methodological movement of analytical sociology, have concentrated on the appropriate form of sociological explanation and theorizing. I discuss the value of mechanism-based thinking in the evaluation of the relevance, reliability, and strength of evidence. My specific focus is in conceptualizing the integration of multiple and diverse kinds of evidence. As an inspiration and illustration, I briefly present a recent and popular methodological school in development economics: growth diagnostics. Growth diagnostics is an analytic framework for identifying the most important constraints on economic growth for specific countries, aiming at directing “the diagnostician” to look for the tell-tale signals that the economy would give, if the main obstacle for growth were A, rather than B. The overall aim is to arrive at the most binding constraint on growth, and consequently the most effective development policy, given limited time and data resources. I discuss what lessons could be derived from this methodology for broader social scientific inquiry.

14.11. Examining Participatory Journalism Through Practice Theory (pdf), NB: Linna, K103

Senior Research Fellow Laura Ahva, IASR

In the recent years, journalistic work has become more open in many ways. Journalism is not produced by professionals in big news organizations only, but various non-journalists can take part in the journalistic process, often with the help of digital technologies in the context of networked newsrooms. This is referred to as ”participatory journalism”. In the lecture, I will discuss three European publications that have incorporated participation into their news practices in different ways: Cafébabel (multilingual online magazine based in Paris), Södra Sidan (free weekly print newspaper based in Stockholm) and Voima (alternative monthly magazine based in Helsinki). I will examine these cases through the frame of practice theory, and propose how the concept of ”practice” can help in examining journalistic work that is more open and complex than before. As a result, I will present four ”anchoring practices” that make participatory journalism possible in all of the studied cases: emotional labour, mobility, resource management and quality control.

21.11. Patterns of Engagement: Identities and Social Movement Organizations in Finland and Malawi (pdf)

Associate Professor Eeva Luhtakallio (& Iddo Tavory), NSR

It has become commonplace in the sociology of mobilization and social movements to note that “identity” is an important aspect of the construction of movements. Although this was a crucial move, and collective identity has become one of the key concepts in analyzing social movements, the use of “identity” has been problematized on different fronts. Methodologically, utilizing notions of collective and personal identity, researchers either explicitly or implicitly operationalize identity with the formation of “I” and “We-narratives,” thus effectively merging actors’ categories of practice, and sociologists’ categories of analysis. Building on the theoretical work of Laurent Thévenot and the notion of plurality of the person in a complex world, this paper focuses on patterns of collective engagement. The pragmatist approach directs us to look at different dimensions of creating commonality on a scale from the most intimate affinities to individual interests and to public expressions of collectivity. By paying attention to the patterning of actors and actions in narratives we go beyond the emphasis on “personal” and “collective” narration forms, and argue that emphasizing the plurality of forms people engage in gives us a more detailed account of the interplay of the person and the collective in the complex social world that carries the label “social movement”. The theoretical argument we present is grounded on a study comparing narratives of climate activists in Finland and Malawi. Opting for such a “comparison of edges” allows us to show how participation in movement organizations can be mediated by very different forms commonality.

28.11. Hurdles Marginalized People Must Cross to Raise Their Voices (pdf)

Postdoctoral Research Fellow Leonardo da Costa Custódio, IASR

Different scholars and civil society actors seem to agree on how a plurality of voices is crucial for the development of healthier democratic environments. In some cases, the widespread popularity and increasing access to digital media (e.g. Internet, mobile technology, the app industry) have appeared as aspects of today’s world which can allow a greater number of people to speak up and therefore engage in different forms of politics. In contribution to these debates, this presentation analyzes how marginalized citizens raise their voices as efforts to act socially and politically in contexts of steep inequalities. Engaging with Nick Couldry’s argument for “sociologies of voice” (2010), I aim at analyzing how low-income and criminalized residents of favelas in Rio de Janeiro develop tactics (De Certeau, 1984) to cross hurdles of discursive and material nature (Carpentie, 2017) that constrain voice-raising efforts. First, I demonstrate what discursive and material marginality mean in unequal Rio de Janeiro by articulating urban studies with theories of public and counterpublics. Then, I identify and analyze tactical actions to overcome criminalizing mainstream discourses, generalized distrust and violence. To organize the discussion about the tactical media activist initiatives, I will divide the argument into three parts: (a) how to communicate and mobilize peer favela residents; (b) how to deal with the discriminating, but also legitimizing role of mainstream media; and (c) how to communicate with non-favela residents.

12.12. Policy Design in the European Union (pdf)

Professor Risto Heiskala, IASR

A publication event: Risto Heiskala & Jari Aro (eds) Policy Design in the European Union. An Empire of Shopkeepers in the Making? (Palgrave 2018) with the editors and some of the contributors will be present.

The book is an edited collection which addresses a paradox at the heart of the European Union: if it is a constantly enlarging empire of governance, how can almost thirty member states design policies as an administrative whole, whilst narrowly approaching all political issues from one economic point of view? The contributors to this collection approach this by studying knowledge production, policy formation and policy implementation in the union. The topics covered include the history of the union, its nature as an empire in the making compared to historical successors as well as current USA and China, formation of union level statistical data and policy documents, paradoxes of fiscal governance, social innovation policy, youth and education policy, energy policy and foreign policy with particular regard to Russia. The concluding chapter outlines five alternative future scenarios for the union extending from collapse and marginalization to the emergence of a federal empire. The book is essential reading for anybody interested in the EU, including students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, political science, international relations, economics, management studies, public and social policy, science and technology studies, and environmental policy.

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What is the IASR? – The Institute for Advanced Social Research, IASR) is the research collegium of the University of Tampere. It grants annually one- or two-year research positions for Professorial Fellows, Senior Research Fellows and Postdoctoral Research Fellows studying society to promote high-level multidisciplinary research and international interaction in the university.

What is the Speakers Series of the University of Tampere? – The Speakers Series is a series of Studia Generalia Lectures in the Study of Society organized weekly by the University of Tampere Institute for Advanced Social Research (IASR) in cooperation with the New Social Research Programme (NSR). The lectures are given by the Research Fellows as well as the distinguished guests of the IASR and the NSR. For the programme, please check the IASR website www.uta.fi/iasr/lectures/.

Most doctoral students can also get 2 ECTS for attending a minimum of six IASR Lectures, altogether 6 ECTS at the maximum. These 2 ECTS for attending 6 lectures can be earned during two successive terms.

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