Public Lecture by Erkko Professor Kevin Durrheim – Polarization: In mind, social media and public life

Time: December 3, 4:15 pm
Venue: Metsätalo, Hall 1 (Unioninkatu 40, Helsinki)
Reception: After the lecture at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (Fabianinkatu 24 A, 3rd floor)
Live stream: A link to the live stream will be published here closer to the event.

The event is free and open to the public.

This lecture examines polarization as a psychological, technological, and historical phenomenon linking mind, media, and public life. It traces how group processes—conformity, persuasion, and identity—drive opinion shifts toward extremes, and how digital media amplify these tendencies through selective exposure, algorithmic curation, and expressive partisanship.

Using large-scale “speaker landscape” analyses of millions of news quotations, the talk demonstrates how machine learning reveals the formation of opinion-based groups that have replaced traditional sociological categories in shaping the public sphere. Revisiting Habermas, Noelle-Neumann, Anderson, and Moscovici, it explores how the digital sphere decentralizes power yet risks detaching opinion from shared truths.

The presentation concludes with a reflection on Yeats and Achebe: as “the centre cannot hold,” can new forms of dialogue, solidarity, and collective imagination still emerge in an era of unbounded communication and fractured common consciousness?

is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Johannesburg and director of its UJ Methods Laboratory, promoting open science in Africa. During the 2025–2026 academic year, he is Jane and Aatos Erkko Visiting Professor in Contemporary Society at HCAS.

Durrheim is an NRF A-rated social psychologist who explores intergroup relations, racism, segregation, polarization, and social change. With nearly two hundred publications, his interdisciplinary work spans experimental, qualitative, and computational methods. He has co-edited influential books such as Racial Encounter (2005), Race Trouble (2011), and Qualitative Studies of Silence (2019), and authored key texts on research methods. His research tackles how everyday discourse and identities shape and respond to social transformation.

donated 2.92 million euros to the University of Helsinki Funds in 2008 to establish a visiting professorship in studies on contemporary society at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. The research focus of the professorship is on issues related to social justice.