Impact or Insight: What is the driving force of academic research?

Time: November 7, 5:00–6:30 pm
Venue: Think Corner Stage (Yliopistonkatu 4)
Speakers: Sarah Green, Martti Koskenniemi, Jaakko Lehtinen
Moderator: Kaisa Kaakinen (HCAS)
Recording:

Academic research, just as any other form of human activity, is goal-directed. The goals in question need not be external to the activity itself but often define and shape the very endeavor. Perhaps especially in the humanities and social sciences, the accumulation of understanding and knowledge has traditionally been seen as an intrinsic value in no need of instrumental justification. For many academics, then, the ultimate goal as well as the motivating force or research is mere curiosity and quest for understanding and knowledge. Insofar as the practical applicability and impact of research come into the picture, they do so as secondary if welcome byproducts. This traditional ideal of understanding for its own sake has been challenged by increasingly vocal appeals to justify the investment in research by reference to the applicability of the research results and their societal and economic impact. This logic of productivity has become more dominant also in the self-understanding of academic institutions. But can research be managed with societal impact and applicability as the guiding principle? Can researchers find motivation for their work in such objectives? Is the logic of productivity incompatible with the logic of curiosity?

The event is free and open to the public.

Speaker Bios

Sarah Green is a professor of anthropology at the University of Helsinki. She is a specialist on the anthropology of space, place, borders and location. In an ERC project called Crosslocations, she developed a dynamic and relational understanding of location along with a research team (see ). Her own part of this project involved studying both the geometries that might be involved, and the way that non-human living things encounter human borders: livestock, wild animals and microbes. She is developing further research on human and nonhuman relations across space.

Martti Koskenniemi is Academician of Science and Professor Emeritus of International Law at the University of Helsinki. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has worked as diplomat with the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and was a member of the International Law Commission (UN) in 2002–2006. He has held several visiting professorships across the world. He has received honorary doctorates from the universities of Uppsala, McGill, Frankfurt, Tartu, Brussels (VUB) and the European University Institute (EUI, Florence). His main publications include From Apology to Utopia; The Structure of International Legal Argument (1989/2005), The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (2001) and To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power 1300–1870 (2021). His most recent publication is a joint work with Professor David Kennedy (Harvard), Of Law and the World. Critical Conversations on Power, History and Political Economy (2023). 

Jaakko Lehtinen is a tenured associate professor at Aalto University, and a distinguished research scientist at . He works on computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning, with particular interests in data-driven generative modelling, realistic image synthesis, and appearance acquisition and reproduction. Jaakko is fascinated by the combination of machine learning techniques with physical simulators in the search for robust, interpretable AI.

Prior to his current positions, Jaakko spent 2007-2010 as a postdoctoral associate with  at MIT. Before his research career, he worked for the game developer  in 1996–2005 as a graphics programmer, and contributed significantly to the graphics technology behind the worldwide blockbuster hit games Max Payne (2001), Max Payne 2 (2003), and Alan Wake (2009).