25.4. Funding Workshop for Doctoral and Early Career Researchers
The funding workshop offers practical tips and insights on how to successfully apply for funding especially from the Finnish foundations (e.g., Kone Foundation, The Finnish Cultural Foundation) as well as support from both experts and peers.
In the first part of the workshop, Research Specialist Maija Ojala-Fulwood (SOC) gives an introduction to writing a successful funding application and to the services offered by the university. After this, Doctoral Researcher Anna Kuutsa (Literary Studies) and Postdoctoral Researchers Usva Friman (Game Culture Research) and Iuliia Gataulina (Politics and Political Economy) share their personal experiences of successful funding applications for doctoral and early career postdoctoral research.
The second part of the workshop focuses on more practical work. The participants have the unique opportunity to read and discuss funding applications that have been submitted to the Finnish foundations and get feedback for their own research ideas. For this part of the workshop, participants are expected to bring an abstract-length description (max. 2000 characters) of their own research idea or project either in English or in Finnish.
Please register through this link (click here) on 19 April 2024 at the latest. There will be coffee/tea and vegan snacks served.
For more information on the workshop, please contact Narrare’s coordinator Markus Laukkanen (markus.laukkanen(at)tuni.fi).
10.4. Jussi Backman: “After the Ends of History: A Look at Historical Metanarratives vs. Micronarratives in Contemporary Political Thought”
This talk is a part of the Narrative Studies Seminar
At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama presented his provocative thesis of liberal democracy as an “end of history,” as the culmination of political history in a system of maximal freedom and mutual recognition. Fukuyama invokes the teleological philosophy of history of Hegel, Marx, and Alexandre Kojève that sees the historical process as fueled by intellectual, social, and economic contradictions whose ultimate resolution will remove the driving force behind substantial historical transformations. Fukuyama’s thesis contrasted conspicuously with Jean-François Lyotard’s equally provocative 1979 diagnosis of the ongoing loss of credibility of grand “metanarratives” – post-Hegelian teleological and totalizing narratives of universal history – as a result of the increasing fragmentation of knowledge. Instead of an end of history, Lyotard predicts the end of History as a universal narrative and its replacement by “small narratives” or micronarratives – local histories whose limited scopes accommodate the existence of other, incommensurate narratives. In the light of Heideggerian and Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics and Foucauldian discursive genealogy, micronarratives can here be understood as a heuristic, temporary, and situated narrative interpretations that are never total or definitive, but are constantly being renarrated for the changing purposes of changing presents.
I suggest that the dispute between grand and small narratives of history is an ongoing one and an aspect of the wider complex conflict between the legacies of the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment. The primarily theoretical and intellectual conflict has a central and volatile political dimension. While the critique of totalizing metanarratives has typically been seen as an emancipatory critique and can be connected to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the structure of totalitarian ideology, it has in recent decades been associated with “post-truth” phenomena and has also been increasingly appropriated by radical-conservative and “ethnopluralistic” ideologists such as Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin. An example of an opposite but no less controversial historical narrative strategy is Steven Pinker’s recent rehabilitation and vindication of Enlightenment universal progress narratives.
The Narrative Studies Seminar is open to all interested persons. The aim of the seminar is to allow for a multi- and interdisciplinary discussion on data, methods, theories, and the state of narrative research. Sessions consist of introductory presentations by researchers from different fields studying narratives at Tampere University (up to 20 min), and general discussion.
26.3. Master class: Academic writing with Professor Eric Hayot (Penn State University)
Tampere University, 26 March 2024, 10-12, Päätalo D13
Eric Hayot’s The Elements of Academic Style (2014), a handbook for writing academic research in humanities fields, is widely taught in graduate programs around the world. In this master class Hayot will focus on the book’s central structural and stylistic figure: the Uneven U. The Uneven U is a model for the construction of paragraphs, articles, chapters, and entire books. We will go through the U’s basic structure and work on several practical examples. The goal is to have everyone leave the room a stronger and more confident writer.
The master class welcomes doctoral researchers, faculty and anyone interested in a reflection on the way we write as well as in practical tips on how to develop one’s academic style. The event is sponsored by the Tampere Institute for Advanced Study and carried out in collaboration with Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies.
Eric Hayot is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Penn State University and Director of Penn State’s Center for Humanities and Information. He specializes in a wide range of topics, including world literature, information theory and modernism. Hayot’s publications include a monograph on Literary Worlds (2012), which unites classical narrative theory and the latest debates in comparative literature in a groundbreaking investigation of worldedness, and A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (co-edited with Rebecca L. Walkowitz, 2016). His most recent monograph on Humanist Reason (2021) examines the current resistance to the idea of knowledge as it emerges from within the humanities.
Registration link HERE.
Master class reading: Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities (Columbia UP, 2014). Excerpts will be emailed to those registered for the master class.
Contact: Natalya Bekhta (natalya.bekhta@tuni.fi), Tampere Institute for Advanced Study
25.3. Research Workshop “Contemporary Theory in the End Times”
Tampere University, Monday 25 March, 14:30-16:30 Pinni B4113
Following the keynote lecture, Eric Hayot will lead a research workshop on the role of literary theory today. This broad frame unites four presentations of the work-in-progress by the researchers from the Tampere Institute for Advanced Study, Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies and the University of Helsinki. At a time when the familiar aesthetic categories no longer work and the narrative form itself is strained by the temporality of a perpetual present without a livable future, immediacy seems to have become the cultural dominant of our age (Kornbluh 2024). Its consequences include valorizations of instantaneity and authenticity, narrative privileging of the first-person point of view, dissolution of medium and mediation up to a weakening of theory’s ability to interpret and understand cultural and social reality. Zooming in on these concerns, we shall consider several of their specific aesthetic, narrative and formal dimensions. Immersion, form and new formalism, utopia and apocalypse: which concepts, categories and tropes can productively guide contemporary theory in its grasp of the present and possibilities inherent in it?
Workshop speakers:
Lieven Ameel, Natalya Bekhta, Merja Polvinen, Candela Potente
Please register HERE.
Contact: Natalya Bekhta (natalya.bekhta@tuni.fi), Tampere Institute for Advanced Study
25.3. Guest Lecture: “The End of Aesthetic History; or, Provincializing Modernism” by Eric Hayot (Penn State University)
Tampere University (Pinni B1097).
Monday 25 March, 12-14.
What would it mean if modernism were over? At this distance from the aesthetic events of the previous century, in a time when the rhythm of periodization seems to have halted – so that we are stuck in an endless “contemporary” moment – is it possible to understand modernism (and indeed much of the aesthetic history of capitalism) in a new way? This talk begins by discussing how the formal drives of modernism were always destined for a certain kind of “end” of the aesthetic. It considers the impact of the historical expectations created by the last few centuries on academic criticism’s own formation. It wonders, finally, how a historically provincialized (but geographically expansive) modernism ought to shape our understanding of the history of capitalist aesthetics.
Eric Hayot is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Penn State University and Director of Penn State’s Center for Humanities and Information. He specializes in a wide range of topics, including world literature, information theory and modernism. Hayot’s publications include work on Chinese literature and culture in a global comparative perspective, a monograph on Literary Worlds (2012), which unites classical narrative theory and the latest debates in comparative literature in a groundbreaking investigation of worldedness and world-literary theory, and A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (co-edited with Rebecca L. Walkowitz, 2016). Hayot has co-edited Information: A Reader (with Anatoly Detwyler and Lea Pao, 2022), which together with its companion volume, Information: Keywords (2021), offers a systematic introduction to this concept not simply as a challenge for the humanities today but as an integral part of any humanist investigation of social and cultural phenomena. His most recent monograph on Humanist Reason (2021) lays out the historical context of the current resistance to the idea of knowledge as it emerges from within the humanities and illuminates the knowledge-creating practices that characterize humanist reason, arguing for their present and future use.
The event is sponsored by the Tampere Institute for Advanced Study and organized in cooperation with Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies
Contact: Natalya Bekhta (natalya.bekhta@tuni.fi), Tampere Institute for Advanced Study
20.3. Caesy Stuck: “A Narratological Perspective on Human-Nonhuman Hybridity in Literary Fiction”
This talk is a part of the Narrative Studies Seminar
Time: 2:15 pm (EET); Place: Pinni B4113 or Zoom (Link). (Meeting ID: 668 4700 7494 Passcode: 045076)
A Narratological Perspective on Human-Nonhuman Hybridity in Literary Fiction
Narratives about human-nonhuman transformations fulfil a variety of functions. They often address problematic relationships of humans to their environment and other living things or provide the reader with a putative experience of “what is it like.“ Through the mode of representation, these narratives do not simply present a binary transformation from human to nonhuman and vice versa but rather processes of hybridization that negotiate epistemic and ontological boundaries between human and nonhuman.
In her presentation, Caesy Stuck introduces a theoretical framework for discussing three types of human-nonhuman hybrid narratives and a tool for focalization to describe them. This framework is concerned with the deictic field of the focalizer, to describe changes in perspective in human-nonhuman hybrid transformations when the focalizer and/or mode of focalization do not change.
13.3. “Making Narratives Appear and Matter: Algorithms as Organizational Logic”
This talk is a part of the Narrative Studies Seminar
Time: 2:15 pm (EET); Place: Pinni B4113 or Zoom (Link). (Meeting ID: 668 4700 7494 Passcode: 045076)
Making Narratives Appear and Matter: Algorithms as Organizational Logic
As central cultural practices of reading and writing are fast becoming processes that rely on digital platforms, it is increasingly evident that the principles behind algorithmic operations are never neutral. They affect human capacity for sense-making, guiding us, for instance, to approach the world as data that can be modeled in many alternative ways. Although digital platforms have been identified as elementary in conveying our experiences to others in narrative form, narratologists have not sufficiently engaged such algorithmic effects. In her presentation, Roine discusses algorithms as organizational logic, producing the conditions through which data on digital platforms are put into forms of meaningfulness. For narrative theory, this means asking what kind of logics make narratives, as patterns of meaning, appear and matter on these platforms.
31.1. Aura Lounasmaa: “Can Stories Affect Social Change? Participatory and Collective Narratives of (Forced) Migration”
This talk is a part of the Narrative Studies Seminar
Time: 2:15 pm (EET); Place: Pinni B3109 or Zoom (Link). (Meeting ID: 668 4700 7494 Passcode: 045076)
Between 2015 and 2022 I worked in various projects in the UK and Northern France that engaged forced migrants in participatory arts-based and educational activities. Story-telling and multimodal narrative practices were used across the projects, as we understood their potential for opening creative, relational spaces in which refugees were able to negotiate their positioning within racialised power imbalances (Esin and Lounasmaa, 2020).
In this presentation I reflect on the potential of creative writing, collective story-telling practices, co-authoring with refugees and multimodal narratives in both social justice settings and as part of critical pedagogy. I draw on examples of cocreation with refugee participants in these projects, reflecting on what they can tell us about the right to narrate (Bhabha, 2000), narrative as sense-making and self-making (Bruner, 2002) and dialogical education models (Freire, 1979).