An open office hour invites guests to learn about Collegium fellows’ research in the humanities and social sciences. Afterwards, a roundtable discussion addresses the question of happiness. What does it mean to live in the ‘happiest nation’? What does it have to do with how people feel? The theme is further pursued through a musical performance Camino Dreaming: Songs from the Way.
Program:
17:15–18:15: Open offices at the Collegium!
(Address: Fabianinkatu 24 A, 2nd and 3rd floor)
Roam through the corridors of the Collegium and get to know our fellows and their projects.
Participating fellows:
18:30–19:30: Roundtable discussion: Happiness? Politics, Promises, and Practices
(Venue: Common Room, Fabianinkatu 24 A, 3rd floor)
Collegium Fellows Acer Chang, Amanda Lagerkvist, Olesya Khanina, Satu Venäläinen, and Rob Boddice explore the conceptual and practical complexities of happiness, drawing on diverse perspectives in the humanities, social sciences, and neuroscience.
19:45–20:45: Camino Dreaming: Songs from the Way
(Venue: Common Room, Fabianinkatu 24 A, 3rd floor)
Singer-songwriter and cultural anthropologist Kristina Jacobsen (Core Fellow) shares songs inspired by mindful walking and ethnographic fieldwork along Spain’s Camino de Santiago. Joined by Carolina Stenbäck on Cello and Emma Polyakov (Core Fellow) on fiddle, Jacobsen invites listeners into the soundscape of the Camino. An interactive discussion moderated by Amanda Lagerkvist will follow the performance.
Acer Chang
Acer (Yu‑Chan) Chang is a cognitive scientist and computational neuroscientist studying consciousness and intelligence. His work integrates philosophy of mind, information theory, and cognitive neuroscience to link phenomenology with mechanism. He develops information‑theoretic models of conscious experience and test them with behavioural experiments, brain imaging, and large‑scale simulations. He also compares informational principles across brains, AI systems, and collective agents. At the Collegium, he will build shared concepts and open tools that connect theory with data and foster interdisciplinary collaboration.
Amanda Lagerkvist
Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of Media and Communication Studies, PI of the Uppsala Hub for Digital Existence and researcher at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society at Uppsala University. She is a founder of the field of existential media studies. Her current work spans intersections of biometric data, disability and selfhood; and the ambivalent AI imaginary and its relationship to both futures and endings. In her monograph, Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (OUP, 2022) she introduces Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy of limit situations for media theory. She is currently under contract for her new book Dismedia: Technologies of the Extraordinary Self with The University of Michigan Press.
Olesya Khanina
Olesya Khanina holds a degree in theoretical and applied linguistics with a specialization in typology and fieldwork from Lomonosov Moscow State University; the PhD she defended in 2005 at the same University was in the field of semantic and morphosyntactic typology. In her postdoctoral projects at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and at the University of Edinburgh, Khanina extended research questions of her thesis to historical domains and worked on documentation and description of two Samoyedic languages in Northern Siberia. In 2017, she was appointed a permanent researcher at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, leading a research group “Dynamics of language contact in the circumpolar region”. Around the same time, she became affiliated with the University of Helsinki, where her interests went fully interdisciplinary and where she became immersed into Uralic historical linguistics. Currently, Khanina leads an international working group on language diversification and spread in the Siberian North at the University of Helsinki. Her expertise in integrating linguistic evidence into interdisciplinary reconstructions of the past has been reflected in her recent contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language, International Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics (Elsevier, 3rd edition), and recent papers in the Diachronica journal.
Satu Venäläinen
Satu Venäläinen is a university lecturer in social psychology, University of Helsinki. Her previous research has focused on violence and gender, which she has examined from the perspectives of online and offline discourses, affects and the construction of intersectional identities. Her research tends to blend a social-psychological orientation to subjectivities formed through social dynamics and critical insights from disciplines such as gender studies and media and cultural studies. Her recent postdoctoral project focused on young people’s perspectives and affective experiences of sexual harassment, in which she continued developing an affective-discursive approach to analysing the entwinement of meanings and embodied experiences.
Rob Boddice
Rob Boddice, PhD (British/Canadian) is the author/editor of 15 books, including The History of Emotions (2nd edn, Manchester UP, 2024) and Knowing Pain: A History of Sensation, Emotion and Experience (Polity, 2023). His books have been translated into twelve languages. Boddice has published dozens of academic articles and written popular essays for Aeon Magazine, History Today and Psychology Today. He is general editor of Elements in the Histories of Emotions and the Senses for Cambridge University Press and serves the editorial board of Emotion Review. Boddice is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Finnish Historical Society.
Kristina Jacobsen
Kristina Jacobsen is an ethnomusicologist, cultural anthropologist, and singer-songwriter whose work bridges academia and the arts. Her recent books include Sing Me Back Home (University of Toronto Press/NeoClassica, 2024) and The Creative Ethnographer’s Notebook (Routledge, 2024). Jacobsen’s interdisciplinary projects span ethnographic songwriting, language politics, and musical activism, with fieldwork in Sardinia, the U.S. Southwest, and beyond. A Fulbright Scholar and touring musician, she leads international songwriting retreats and community collaborations from Spain to South Africa. At HCAS, she explores voice, vulnerability, and belonging through place-based songwriting, with a focus on sound and listening in transnational contexts.
Emma Polyakov
Emma Polyakov is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Merrimack College, and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lund University. She received a Ph.D. from Boston College, as well as degrees from Boston University and Bard College. Her publications include the monographs The Nun in the Synagogue: Judeocentric Catholicism in Israel and Remembering the Future: The Experience of Time in Jewish and Christian Liturgy, and the edited volumes Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Interreligious Hermeneutics: Ways of Seeing the Religious Other and the forthcoming Jerusalem in Memory and Eschatology: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Visions of the Past and Future of Jerusalem.
The venue is partially inaccessible. Wheelchair access is available via the inner‑yard elevator at Fabianinkatu 24. However, wheelchair users may require assistance when moving through the facilities. Some areas include thresholds up to 2 cm high. An accessible toilet is located on the 5th floor.
The doors leading from the accessible elevator to the HCAS facilities are locked. Upon arrival, please call the HCAS Service Coordinator Oskar Ahlberg at +358 294 122 149, and we will open the door for you.
For more information, see the
HCAS Research Coordinator Juhana Toivanen at: