Forthcoming events
A launch seminar for Kone Foundation-funded “Bad Project” (Wednesday 7 September, 2022 3-5 pm).
We will have Debbie Lisle talking about research for her current book project on failure in global politics. She’ll walk us through stuff like how failure requires a deep normative infrastructure, why systems thinking is dumb, and what kind of stuff falls out of that circuit. Also how managerial technologies to predict and govern failure were spread around the world by organizations like the US Army, and are now literally everywhere. We’ll get Debbie to discuss with an appropriately unruly development/humanitarian practitioner/former practitioner – we are working on that, and have some great people in mind.
Details: Elisa Pascucci
Recent events
Challenges of humanitarian bordering at the present moment (18 May 2022)
In this seminar we bring together researchers, practitioners and activists, to learn from concrete
examples, perspectives and experiences how humanitarian bordering is currently being enacted,
politicized and transformed in particular empirical contexts, from the Mediterranean region to Latin America and various locations across and outside of Europe. We are particularly interested in developing an analysis that focuses on the connecting points between the various empirical examples at the level of discourse and practice. Some of the questions we are interested in engaging with are:
– What new policies and technologies for humanitarian relief are emerging at the border zones
where you have worked/are working?
– What are the new humanitarian borders and the political struggles that they entail?
– What figures of migration are being reproduced through these humanitarian borders and how
do they draw upon notions of deservingness and un-deservingness?
– How do we position ourselves as researchers, activists and in other roles, in relation to the
right for asylum and international protection without reproducing hierarchies of
deservingness?
Details: Kirsi Pauliina Kallio
(Geo)Politics of the Visual Seminar (Tuesday November 6 2018)
What makes everyday items such as action movies, city promotion videos, postage stamps, and maps political and how do they relate to geopolitics? How to interpret visual materials? The seminar builds on these questions and promotes critical visual literacy in an entertaining fashion. The four research presentations illustrate the value of visual data and method(ologie)s in social-scientific research. Program.
Details: Pauliina Raento
Reimagining the cartographies of the war play dilemma: play as relational ethic (Friday, May 4 2018)
Workshop with Tara Woodyer (University of Portsmouth) and Sean Carter (University of Exeter), where they introduce their ongoing ESRC-funded reearch project ‘Ludic Geopolitics’ and present a paper in progress emerging from this study. The seminar is an open event, and after the workshop the participants are invited to join in the Art/Research Festival, where there will be an ‘Acoustic lecture: Sounds of War’ by Susanna Hast and Timo Kalevi Forss at the restaurant Telakka). Program.
Details: Kirsi Pauliina Kallio
Intergenerationality and young people (Friday, March 9 2018)
The concept of intergenerationality attempts to capture dynamics that build between people and groups occupying different generational positions, in various empirical and discursive settings, including notable contextual difference, yet also translocal and transnational links. In the seminar the theme is discussed from the point of view of those who are deemed young people in the contemporary societies, be it by categorical definitions of age, social position giving, contextually negotiated identities, or other ‘placement’ in mundane communities or more broadly in the society. Organized in collaboration with the Tampere Centre for Childhood, Youth and Family Research PERLA. Program.
Details: Kirsi Pauliina Kallio
City, Diversity, and Geopolitics (Monday, 2 October 2017)
The two prestigious keynote speakers of this afternoon seminar address urban spaces as sites of multiple diversities, contestations, and conflicts and explain how this relates to banal geopolitics. Professor David Kaplan (Kent State University, USA) discusses the attempts to categorize and understand the ways in which cultural diversity manifests itself in urban space and how we can consider the differential nature of multicultural neighborhoods. His empirical work relates especially to Paris. Dr. Adam Ramadan (University of Birmingham, UK) talks about one of the most basic and ubiquitous spaces of urban hospitality, the hotel, connecting it to urban architectures of (in)security, war, displacement, and peacemaking. Hotels in the Middle East and the Balkans exemplify how these spaces act as projections of soft power and targets of political violence, but also provide ‘emergency’ hospitality and care. Program.
Details: Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto
Publishing in an international peer-reviewed journal (September 3 2017)
An afternoon seminar for all who aim at publishing their scholarly work in quality journals, wish to improve their performance, and think about best publishing strategies. The seminar is designed for junior scholars but open to everyone in the university community. Lectures by David H. Kaplan (Kent State University in Ohio) and Kirsi Pauliina Kallio (University of Tampere). Program.
Details: Pauliina Raento
Negating Attunements and the Moods of Political Violence
12-13 September, 2017, University of Tampere
Guest Lecturers: Jeremy Crampton (University of Kentucky), Mark Griffiths (University of Northumbria)
As a part of the broader trend in social and political sciences, the last two decades have shown an increasing trend in geographical research focusing on the manifold ways affects, emotions and attunements play in producing/production of cultural landscapes, social spaces, and sites of political struggles. What happens when we are captured by the moods nullifying, negating, distracting and distancing us from the world? Moods taking away the world, making things uncanny, monstrous, alien, unhomely? This workshop deals with such negative/negating attunements, moods, affects and emotions. The idea is to explore how these moods, such as anxiety, fear, loss, anger, frustration, boredom, sense of powerlessness etc., are related to the production/resistance of political violence, control, and governance, and the ways of studying them. Program
Details: Mikko Joronen
Spaces of Refuge: Infrastructures, Sovereignties, Economies
4-5 October 2017, University of Tampere
Guest Lecturer: Adam Ramadan (University of Birmingham, UK).
From displacement in the Middle East to the new restrictive asylum policies in the United States and northern Europe, forced migration ‘crises’ continue to characterize the contemporary world. In this global context marked by humanitarian emergencies and growing political hostility towards migrants, the spatial technologies deployed to govern refugees and displaced people are proliferating and becoming more sophisticated. In this workshop, we are interested in theoretical and empirical analyses of the spaces and materialities through which refuge is sought, experienced, and governed, as well as of the ways in which refugees’ social and economic lives are sustained and challenged within those spaces. In proposing the concept of ‘infrastructures’, we intend to signal our interest in the relation between people, materialities and the built environment. Program (tba)
Details: Elisa Pascucci
Planning redifined – The 8th Nordic planning research symposium (August 15th–18th, 2017)
The conference, held in Helsinki, Aalto University, continues the 2015 symposium theme ‘Planning in Crisis/Crisis in Planning’, discussing the challenges posed to planners and their institutions. The identified challenges related to, among others, legitimacy, knowledge, and effectiveness of planning in the face of new modes of governance, market-driven urbanization and climate change. New responses include efforts to reform planning institutions, emerging forms of agency in planning, new instruments of knowledge management, and new experiments in, and evidence from adding agility and harnessing creativity in planning. Is planning being redefined, shifting agency and capability to new forums, roles and resources that the planners themselves need to identify in order to make a lasting difference? How are these challenges and opportunities to be understood especially in the Nordic context? Planning is driven by demand, but are the planners and planning institutions still on board? More info and program.
Details: Pia Bäcklund
Taking practices seriously – Methodological challenges in studying social practices, RELATE CoE workshop (September 2016)
29.-30.09. 2016, University of Tampere. The theories of practice are not singular but rather a family of conceptions which have emerged from a bundle of writings authored during the last century. However, what merges the various approaches is the priority given for practices as central aspects of social life. Practices are considered as the smallest and the principal unit of analyses through which other social phenomena and entities can be understood and scrutinized. The idea of this workshop is to discuss the methodological and conceptual challenges and possibilities of studying practices. Special attention is given both to the practices of doing practice theory driven research and to the potential implications of practice thinking to the current geographical discussions on territorial/relational and topographical/topological spaces. Keynote lecturer is professor Theodore R. Schatzki, College of Arts & Sciences, Philosophy, University of Kentucky (USA).
Details: Juho Luukkonen, Pia Bäcklund, Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen
Methodology seminar: Use of policy documents as research data (October 2016)
RELATE CoE and The School of Management will organize a methodology-oriented two-day seminar 4.-5.10. 2016. The seminar will concentrate on interpretive policy analyses and use of policy documents as research data in the fields of, for instance, urban planning, participation, public management and governance.
Keynote lecturers are professor Hendrick Wagenaar (Univ. Sheffield), Professor Eija Vinnari (Univ. Tampere) and Dr. Vivi Niemenmaa, Pricipal Performance Auditor at the National Audit Office of Finland, currently Seconded National Expert at the European Court of Auditors. Program.
Details: Pia Bäcklund, Markus Vinnari, Eija Vinnari
Subject formation and agency in intergenerational encounters, RELATE CoE workshop (October 2016)
The workshop brings together scholars from different disciplines and research areas, to engage with distinct perspectives related to intergenerationality, subject formation and active agency. Conceptual, methodological as well as empirically grounded presentations are welcome. It is also possible to participate in the workshop without a presentation, as a discussant or as part of the audience (registration still needed). Program.
Details: Kirsi Pauliina Kallio
Visiting scholar Dr. Ann E. Bartos (September 2016)
Guest lectures:
“Exploring possibilities for a food sovereign New Zealand”, POLEIS research seminar, September 13, 9.30–11.30, Pinni A, seminar room 3020.
“Inequality, power, anxiety: exploring the political geographies of care”, PERLA research seminar, September 16, 10.00–12.00, Linna, seminar room 5101
Details: Kirsi Pauliina Kallio
Possibilities of ‘data’ in social research – Summer School for Doctoral students (August 2016)
In this summer school, we make ‘data’ unfamiliar. Through interdisciplinary engagements we interrogate what we do / can consider as [good] data in the context of social research: definitions, enactments and treatments of data. We think this is an important issue in research at a time when data has gained the status of ‘hard data’ supplying ‘hard evidence’ and when the concept of data in many research projects is still treated as taken-for-granted. Organisers Zsuzsa Millei and Antii Saari (School of Education, University of Tampere). Program. Blog.
Details: Zsuzsa Millei
New perspectives on the government of the everyday in/through crises, conflicts and (contemporary) colonialism, RELATE CoE workshop (May 2016)
Guest Lecturers: Mitch Rose (University of Aberystwyth), Stephen Legg (University of Nottingham)
Moments of crisis, conflict and war are often seen as a platforms for transitional moments in government. Exceptional situations understandably do occasionally lay the grounds for new forms of government, as it is often the prevailing ones that are in crisis. However, exceptions, conflicts and crises also function as techniques of government that are used to support different kinds of politics, from the politics of austerity and discrimination to the politics of exclusion, racism and radicalization. Whether we look at the contemporary politics and policies of refugee/asylum seekers in EU countries, recent ‘Arab uprisings’, or politics of austerity in Greece (and other parts of the Europe), the talk on ‘exceptions’ and ‘crises’ are at the core of justifying violent interventions, even inhuman practices of government. In some instances, particularly in the case of quite regular war-cycle in Gaza, war itself has been used to promote radicalization that most unlikely will pave the way for a two-state solution supported by the international community. In other cases, ethno-national categorizations are used to produce discriminatory politics and regulations, as exemplified by the colonial history and contemporary forms of colonialism, and to some extent the recent racist/right-wing populist reactions to the increased number of refugees and asylum seekers around the Europe. This seminar focuses on the government that operates in and/or through the transitional moments and exceptional situations of crisis, conflict, war and colonial rule.
Organiser: Mikko Joronen. 16.-17.5.2016, Preliminary program.
Ethnography in times of global awareness and mobility (May 2016)
Creative efforts have already extended the range of existing ethnographic methods to accommodate the complexities of different kinds of movements, flows and circulations across the planet. These creative approaches are enhanced by the combination of ethnographic observation with other ways of generating social knowledge — for example with those of political economy, social theories and art. To study phenomena related to education in this context means to think anew about space, place, scale and time, and the ways in which we conceptualize movement. Organizers Zsuzsa Millei togehter with Nelli Piattoeva (School of Education, University of Tampere). Preliminary program.
Details: Zsuzsa Millei
Visiting Scholar Anne Harju (June 2016)
Research seminar in Tampere, 3.6.2016. Invitation.
Details: Zsuzsa Millei
Government, topologies, practices (May 2016)
Research seminar and workshop in Tampere, 3.-4.5.2016, with Prof. Anna Secor (University of Kentucky). Invitation.
Details: Sami Moisio, Jouni Häkli
Mobile Geographies of Learning (March 2016)
Panel at the112th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, San Francisco, California. Organizers
Jennie Germann Molz (College of the Holy Cross, USA) and Zsuzsa Millei. Session description.
Details: Zsuzsa Millei
Migrant protests and political mobilization in North Africa and the Mediterranean: spaces, infrastructures, and embodied experiences of migrant political agency (March 2016)
Panel organized at the 8th Conference of the Italian Society for Middle Eastern Studies (SeSaMO), University of Catania, Italy, 17-19 March 2016. Organizers: Elisa Pascuci, Cristina Brovia (University of Turin) and Marta Scaglioni (University of Milan – Bicocca). Workshop description.
Details: Elisa Pascucci
Nation and Childhood(s): The Cultural Politics of the Borders of Childhood (December 2015)
Workshop at the BORDERS – VIII Conference on Cultural Studies – December 3−4, 2015, University of Oulu, Finland. Organized by Zsuzsa Millei, Robert Imre and Kirsi Pauliina Kallio. Session description.
Details: Zsuzsa Millei
Soft and hard planning in the city-regions: spatialities, territorialities and governmentalities (October 2015)
Session at the Annual Meeting of Finnish Geographers, October 29 2015, University of Tampere, Finland. The session explores the novel theoretical and practical developments in planning at the city-region level, both formal and informal, from multiple viewpoints. The scope of the papers ranges from politics of knowing, geopolitics and region formation to plan rhetorics and local adaptations. Organised by Pia Bäcklund, Vesa Kanninen (Aalto University) and Simin Davoudi (Newcastle University).
Details: Pia Bäcklund
Methodologies for the Liminal, the Excluded, and the Mobile, RELATE CoE workshop (October 2015)
Research workshop in Tampere, 7.-8.10.2015. Organisers Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen and Lauren Martin. Preliminary program.
Details: Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen
The Annual Meeting of Finnish Geographers 2015: Ecologies of Change (October 2015)
The Annual Meeting of Finnish Geographers 2015 takes place under the general theme “Ecologies of Change”, addressing the multiple ways in which contemporary geographies, environmental change and political impacting intertwine. The meeting is held on 29.–30.10.2015 at the University of Tampere, Pinni B building, and it is accompanied by an intensive course for PhD students in geography and neighboring disciplines. Invited keynote speakers are Simin Davoudi, Professor of Environmental Policy and Planning in Newcastle University, Global Urban Research Unit (GURU), and Clive Barnett, Professor of Geography and Social Theory at the University of Exeter.
Details: Webpage and Coordinator
Research with children and young people: Thinking through empathy, being, enchantment and ethics (June 2015)
In contemporary geographical and youth research, children and young people are often seen as active agents with whom researchers hope to conduct their studies, not of them. The idea of children and young people as co-researchers has also been developed methodologically. This means that the knowledge and capacities of young people are valued as such. In this workshop we wish to discuss the multiple roles and positions of researchers working with children and young people. We elaborate how thinking, doing and being with children and young people constitute geographical knowledge of (inter)subjective daily encounters. The workshop will take place at the University of Helsinki, 15.6.2015. Organisers: Sirpa Tani and Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen. Programme.
Details: Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen
Youthful lived citizenship: imagined politics and political imaginations (June 2015)
Workshop at the nordic Geographers Meeting (NGM), in Tallinn/Tartu, 16.6.2015. Organized by Elina Stenvall, Zsuzsa Millei and Kirsi Pauliina Kallio. Session description.
Details: Kirsi Pauliina Kallio
Are the Social Networking Sites Democratic for the Public?, RELATE CoE workshop (May 26th 2015)
The workshop hosts Dr Norbert Merkovity fromt the University of Szeged, Hungary, beginning with his visiting lecture and continuing with Q&A session and discussion. His talk will introduce findings from a comparativene study, which could prove the emergence of a new logic of MPs on social media. This logic is different from party logic and slightly different from media logic. Its main goal is not to create an alternative ‘public sphere’ but rather to create a ‘lap dog’ media where the politician could have its own media sphere. The workshop will take place at the University of Tampere, Pinni A building, seminar room A5025.
Details: Robert Imre
Liminal spaces, practices of belonging and agency among displaced people (April 2015)
Paper sessions at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), in Chicago. Organizers Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen and Mary Gilmartin.
Details: Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen
Spaces of the geosocial: transnational topologies and topographies (April 2015)
Series of paper sessions at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), in Chicago. Organizers Katharyne Mitchell and Kirsi Pauliina Kallio.
Details: Kirsi Pauliina Kallio
Border enforcement and humanitarianism in North Africa, RELATE CoE workshop (February 18th 2015)
The workshop hosts Dr. Michael Collyer from the University of Sussex, beginning with his visiting lecture and continuing with Q&A session and discussion. Moving from recent debates on the so-called “humanitarian turn” in border management in the Mediterranean region, and based on his current research in Morocco and Sudan, Dr. Collyer’s lecture will focus on the legal, political, and social consequences of humanitarian bordering policies along the externalized Southern European frontier: What are the implications of the new entanglements of border enforcement and humanitarian intervention within North-African states and societies? And what do recent developments entail for the future of humanitarian practice in the region? The workshop will take place at the University of Tampere, Pinni A building, seminar room A5025.
Details: Elisa Pascucci
Workshop with administrative studies, School of Management (October 1st 2014)
The idea is to discuss how to best conceptualize the rationality of public administration in the context of institutional ambiguity.
Details: Pia Bäcklund
Youthful citizenship: institutional settings, mundane processes (September 18th 2014)
Multi-disciplinary workshop organized in collaboration with the Tampere Centre for Childhood, Youth and Family Research (PERLA), with Bronwyn Wood from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand/Norwegian School of Theology in Oslo as an international quest. Full program.
Details: Kirsi Pauliina Kallio
Relating people in place (May 7th 2014)
Research seminar with Tim Edensor (Manchester Metropolitan University), discussing theoretical perspectives and empirical insights that help us to better understand what kinds of political potentials, constrains, ruptures, continuities and subjects follow from different relations between people(s) and place(s). Full program.
Details: Kirsi Pauliina Kallio
Making political geography (January 28th-29th 2014)
Research seminar on publishing political geography and researching body politics. Keynotes by Klaus Dodds (Royal Holloway), Pauliina Raento (University of Helsinki), Taina Kinnunen (University of Tampere) and Eeva Puumala (University of Tampere). Full program.
Details: Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen
Transnational lived citizenship (October 1st–3rd 2013)
Research seminar. Keynotes: Katharyne Mitchell (University of Washington), Lynn Staeheli (Durham University), Ari Aukusti Lehtinen (University of Eastern Finland). Full program.
Place: University of Tampere (Atalpa room 143)
Additional information: Kirsi Pauliina Kallio
Afternoon with Sue Roberts (April 24th 2013)
Visiting lecture by Fulbright Professor Susan Roberts (University of Kentucky) “Geography and the new political economy of US Intelligence”