The sciences have made dramatic progress in the last couple of hundred years, and especially in the last half-century. So much so, that we now have a vast body of incontrovertible scientific knowledge. Philosophy, by contrast, has a 2,500-year history and we know almost nothing. While the nature of the debates changes, they rarely get settled in favour of one view rather than another: many of the issues that divided, say, Plato and Aristotle still divide philosophers today. So how, if at all, can philosophy be said to be making any progress? I’m investigating how we might answer this question once we give up on the impossible idea that what we’re looking for is knowledge. And the answer I’m developing is that we can gain valuable understanding of the world and our place in it not just by settling on the One True Theory, but by figuring out what the viable options are.
I gained my PhD from King’s College London in 1996 and since then have had a variety of jobs at UK universities – Edinburgh, St. Andrew’s, UCL, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds – and also had a postdoc at the Australian National University. Since 2022 I’ve been Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds, where I’m Director of the Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science. I’m a Fellow of the British Academy and next year will be President of the Mind Association.
This project is a book-length study of the place of material culture in utopian writing and thought since Thomas More's influential imagining of the island of Utopia in 1516. The central focus is on the significance and function of objects in utopian writing, thought, and design, with particular reference to five major themes, each to be represented in chapters of their own: technology, the body, the built environment, and the utopian library. A final conclusion will consider the place of utopia in the virtual world of immaterial things.
I am Professor of Bibliography at Cardiff University and also a Corresponding Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Munich. I was the founder of the Centre for the History of the Book at The University of Edinburgh in 1995, and Director until 2012. I have held visiting posts at the Humanities Research Centre of The Australian National University, The University of Ottawa, and St John's College, Oxford, Jadavpur University, and The University of Goettingen. I have also served on several professional bodies and am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
A core use of human language is to describe facts about the world, using simple sentences such as “Abby is in the library.” However, we can also use complex expressions to convey sets of possible alternatives, as in “Abby is in the library or at the store.” My project will investigate the grammatical strategies employed by different human languages for describing and asking about different alternatives. In other words, I will study cross-linguistic variation in the use of question words, disjunctions, and related grammatical particles and the interpretational mechanisms that underly these uses and their variation.
Concretely, two subprojects are planned. First, I will investigate languages that have multiple disjunctors with contrasting range of use, such as Finnish “vai” versus “tai”. My preliminary work shows that such pairs of disjunctors in various languages of the world do not encode the same distinction. Second, I will investigate the use of question words (‘who’, ‘what’, etc.) to express non-interrogative, quantificational meanings, especially in combination with other grammatical particles. I aim to develop a compositional semantic theory that helps to explain the prevalence of such patterns and their cross-linguistic regularities.
I am a linguist broadly interested in how human languages express meaning. I investigate how we form sentences and map these structures to meaning, and the extent and shape of variation in these strategies across languages of the world. I combine formal linguistic theory, which allows us to make fine-grained predictions about grammatical behavior, with detailed empirical work on individual languages, including through original fieldwork. In particular, much of my work is based on the study of underdescribed languages of Southeast Asia.
The MOrTexts project will develop a framework for modelling understandings of oral and oral-derived texts as ‘things’ in the world with sometimes complex relations to agents, forces, objects, and places. ‘Materiality’ is liberated from the tyranny of science-based epistemologies to encompass vernacular materialities that may defy empirical testing, such as the idea that a verbal text is a supernaturally empowered artefact that only one person may possess at a time; that performance gives unseen reality to past or present events of which the actors may punish a performer’s errors; or that the communication of a text as knowledge requires physical contact. Scholarship has historically taken the ‘thingness’ of oral and oral-derived texts for granted, without connecting research on the variability of oral texts to beliefs about those texts and ways people talk about them as concrete 'things'. The MOrTexts project explores the dynamics of ways people think about and understand oral texts and things in the world, from living oral traditions to academic editing and publication.
I am a folklorist specializing in mythic discourse and verbal art, with interests in empirically grounded theory, methods, and interdisciplinarity. I have worked with traditions of non-modern Finno-Karelian cultures and of Viking and Medieval Scandinavia since the beginning of my career, developing long-term perspectives on cultural developments in the Circum-Baltic context. My interests have gradually extended to the reception of these traditions, cultural heritage construction, fieldwork-based research with Rotenese and Tetun ritual poets in Indonesia, and digital ethnography on mythic discourse in current political and conspiracy discourse. When writing this, I was thinking about different forms of performance through writing.
Projects, as a social form, constitute a versatile, portable organizational structure predicated on managed progress toward a pre-determined goal. Despite their ubiquity, the project form—the very model of a project as a distinct type of goal-oriented and managed action—remains underexamined in current scholarship. Project Lessons thus convenes a critical exploration into the past, present and future of the project form, investigating how the norms, practices and expectations of project making have shaped historical formations, contemporary social environments, and our understanding of them.
Andrew Graan is a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. A cultural and linguistic anthropologist, he earned his PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2010. His research examines project making, the politics of publics spheres, international intervention, and the political history of North Macedonia. He has taught anthropology at the University of Helsinki, the University of Virginia, Wake Forest University, the University of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago. He has published his research in Cultural Anthropology, Signs & Society, The Journal of Cultural Economy, The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Slavic Review, and HAU, among other places.
My project focuses on environmental crisis and human reproduction that are both pressing issues in public, political and academic debates. I examine the interrelationships between the embodied and ecological environments that condition reproduction and how liveable futures are imagined. The project studies procreation from the perspective of ‘being scarred’. I focus on bodies and ecosystems as reproductive environments that are wounded in ways that hinder fertility and reproductive desires. In other words, I focus on embodied and ecological conditions that may not enable the continuity of life in the form of new births. The project juxtaposes two cases of activism. First, I explore patient activism that emerges from the experience of living with endometriosis, a chronic disease in which cells similar to the uterine lining grow outside the uterus causing persistent pain (subproject 1). Second, I draw on an analysis of younger people’s climate anxiety and activism and explore the effects of damaged ecological surroundings on the decision not to have children (subproject 2). Through its juxtaposition of patient and climate activism, my study’s objective is to analyse struggles to improve the conditions of life in scarred environments – with or without babies.
Elina Helosvuori is a sociologist and science and technology studies scholar. Her earlier work includes multi-sited ethnography about assisted reproduction in Finland, in which she explored the entanglement of clinical practices, laboratory labour and patient experience in fertility treatment practices. Elina received her PhD in sociology from the University of Helsinki in 2021. As a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University, Elina has used ethnographic methods to explore intersections of medical practices and experiences of chronic pain, focusing on surgical interventions to endometriosis. Her current research is situated at the intersections of feminist science and technology studies, medical sociology and environmental humanities.
Very often, a person’s speech varies according to the social situation. One of the underlying mechanisms of these changes is probably the human ability to mimic, or copy, other humans’ behaviour. Although such accommodation often occurs automatically, it is an important way to establish social relations. This project is part of an on-going research started in 2019 and is aimed at searching for patterns of communication accommodation in human speech depending on the relationship between the interlocutors in a dialogue (compare, e.g., a conversation between siblings and a dialogue between two strangers). In the previous years we managed to show how this relationship influences speech tempo and pausing, vowel quality and the occurrence of some paralinguistic events (e.g. laughter and fillers, e.g. “uhm…”). This project is focused on intonation, i.e. the melodic aspect of speech. Using a large annotated corpus of dialogue speech and modern tools for prosodic analysis, I am looking for systematic variation in the “tunes” that each speaker uses in conversations with different interlocutors.
I am a linguist specializing in phonetics and speech prosody with strong background in the analysis of speech signal. I defended my PhD in 2015 at the Department of Phonetics, St. Petersburg State University, with my research focused on segmental duration in connected speech. In the following years, I worked at the same department as a researcher and, later, an associate professor. Since 2023 I have been teaching part-time at the University of Helsinki. In recent years, my research interests have focused on exploring inter-speaker variation and cross-linguistic influence in intonation.
Throughout the history of European integration, democratic representation and practices have been an ongoing source of contention and, for some, of condemnation. The project will analyse and explore the historic nature of public-political interactions between citizens, who critics allege have been isolated and uninvolved, and their representatives in the European Parliament. In exploring this topic, the project will address shortcomings in existing literature. It will challenge studies that unduly emphasise a post-Maastricht turning point, and it will seek to show that democratic representation was not a fixed or a set process but one which changed over time, and that any focus on elections as the exclusive indicator of democratic participation is but only one part of the picture. The project will seek to reveal that a plurality of views and forms of contact, among citizens and their representatives, were a core feature of the history of European integration.
William King is a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (HCAS), University of Helsinki. His current research examines the history of European integration. Prior to joining the HCAS, William was a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute London, and before that a Teaching Fellow in History at Sciences Po (Reims). William holds an MPhil in Historical Studies from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in International History from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
In International Relations (IR) scholarship, there is a body of literature that advances our understanding of how certain events that are deeply anchored in a society’s collective memory can be invoked by policymakers as an analogy to current events in their justification of foreign and security policy. By taking the example of Ukraine’s current resistance to Russia’s aggression, my project investigates how the Ukrainian political leadership in Kyiv makes sense of the war by using specific language expressed through historical analogies. It is argued that the use of historical analogies should not be regarded as ‘decorative’ rhetorical devices, but rather as an embodiment of the political actors’ conceptual system. The exploration of political language of the Ukrainian policy makers helps to comprehend the Ukrainian standpoint in the war.
My research on international politics is situated at the intersection of International Relations, History, Sociology, Literary Studies, and Linguistics. I am interested in studying the international politics of memory, political language and foreign policy, interpretive research methodology and methods in political science, as well as teaching and learning politics. I obtained my PhD in Political Science at the University of Vienna, Austria, and I hold the Title of Docent (Adjunct Professor) in Public and Social Policy from the University of Eastern Finland. Prior to coming to the University of Helsinki, I worked as a Researcher at Tampere University and the University of Eastern Finland.
My project at the Collegium examines the use of authoritative texts in early Christian processes of identity construction. The objectives are 1) to produce new knowledge of the ways in which early Christian writers used authoritative texts when shaping the group identity of their audience, 2) to develop concepts and models for analysing the authority of texts, and 3) to demonstrate the connections between power, identity and scriptural argumentation. The results will provide significant new perspectives by combining the use of authoritative texts with identity construction and develop models for analysing textual authority. At the same time, they may also help to understand the identity building processes of our own time. To examine the interplay between using authoritative tradition, shaping the identity of one’s audience, and wielding power through texts, the project combines close textual study, study of rhetoric, and social psychological theories. The source texts are early Christian writings from the 1st and 2nd centuries CE and include Pauline letters, Hebrews, James and 1 Peter, 1 and 2 Clement, the Epistle of Barnabas, and Justin Martyr’s works.
Dr Katja Kujanpää is a Finnish biblical scholar focusing on Early Christian authors of the first and second centuries. She is interested in applying interdisciplinary approaches (e.g. social psychological theories, quotation studies) to the study of ancient texts. Her doctoral dissertation The Rhetorical Functions of Scriptural Quotations in Romans was published in Brill’s Supplements to Novum Testamentum (2019), and her recent articles examine the relationship between using authoritative texts and forming a robust group identity. After her doctorate at the University of Helsinki (2018), she has made research visits to Oxford University and Australian Catholic University.
My project investigates the complex history of work-related fatigue in occupational medicine. In the project, the concept of fatigue refers broadly to disabling tiredness that can be physical, mental or both. By analysing medical texts and archival findings, the research uncovers how the idea of the working body was transformed in post-1945 occupational medicine into a complex entity that could be modulated to tackle fatigue, the nemesis of modern society. The aim of the research is to contribute to academic and public discussions focused on stress, psychosomatic illnesses and public health.
I am a historian with a multidisciplinary background in the humanities and social Sciences. I did my MA in cultural history (2009) and my PhD in gender studies (2015) at the University of Turku. In 2021, I was granted the title of docent in political history at the University of Helsinki. In recent years, my research interest has focused on the history of fatigue and stress. In 2026, I will start working as a University Researcher at the Centre for Consumer Society Research, University of Helsinki.
This project investigates the development of philosophical virtue ethics in the Islamic world between ca. 900 and 1500 CE. The big question concerns the philosophical and religious components of ethical thought. Many recent studies have shown the philosophical interest of ethical arguments in theology and jurisprudence; in contrast, scholarship of philosophical virtue ethics has been scarce. Yet, during this period, virtue became a central concept in religious disciplines, and thus an important component of "Islamic ethics". The big question can be divided into a historical and a philosophical part: 1) How is philosophical virtue ethics, ultimately grounded in Greek philosophy, fused with the Islamic components of jurisprudence and theology, as well as with Arabic, Persian, and Sufi notions of virtue; 2) how can the focus on the moral status of acts in jurisprudence and theology be combined with the focus on moral agent in philosophy?
This big question is approached through various case studies. The first concerns the reception of Miskawayh (d. 1030), the most prominent moral philosopher of the Islamic tradition: In what ways do later authors adapt his seminal treatise of the Purification of Character Traits into their respective religious contexts? A second case study addresses the taxonomy of virtues: How and by what grounds are the initially Platonic and Aristotelian classifications of virtues transformed by later authors?
Janne Mattila earned his PhD from the University of Helsinki in 2011. He is a researcher of the history of Islamic philosophy and philosophical theology. His research interests have primarily related to ethics, including animal ethics, and philosophical interpretation of religion, as well as to technical questions concerning the formation of the philosophical encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity.
Corded Ware culture (c 2900–2200 BCE) changed the Stone Age life of the Finnish coast when it arrived 5000 years ago, bringing potentially a new language, genes, material culture, burial practices and subsistence to an area previously inhabited by hunter-fisher-gatherers. This project studies the establishment and adaptation (even – disappearance) of Corded Ware communities in Finland in general and the regional differences within the country in particular: how these groups responded and coped with the challenges of the northern environment, both socio-cultural (local hunter-fisher-gatherers) and natural (boreal biogeographical region under climate change)? Key questions are: 1) how did the Corded Ware societies react to the local natural and cultural environments? 2) what kind of networks and relationships prevailed between different communities? 3) are there dissimilarities in development within and/or between different regions of Finland and what is the reason for them? Even if the focus is on past events, the themes of this project – cultural encounters in the age of climate change – are also relevant in the world of the 2020s.
Kerkko Nordqvist is a prehistoric archaeologist and did his PhD in the University of Oulu in 2018. His main fields of research are prehistoric archaeology and boreal hunter-gatherer archaeology in particular, as well as the interaction of forager and farmer populations. His research interests include prehistoric material cultures and their manufacture, distribution and exchange, economy and subsistence, as well as culture and society in eastern and northern boreal Europe. Nordqvist is the author of two hundred publications, including numerous scientific articles, edited volumes and popular scientific papers.
Elina’s research in HCAS will complete her long-term project on expectations, and implicit and explicit ideals, for how scientific knowledge should and could matter in society, among academics, university students, activists, government officials and the general public, in Finnish research collaborations that relate to Africa. Such collaborations usually have explicitly pronounced hopes for relevance regarding knowledge production and development, especially in the fields of health and gender. The project focuses on the fields of biomedicine and Gender Studies, two fields with highly different epistemic and ontological discussions and aspired societal roles. Epistemic questions are often regarded as internal debates of quality; here the questions are about future oriented affective desires for how knowledge should matter in the world. The overall book project includes sub-studies, authored in collaboration with colleagues, on a vaccine trial set in Benin 2017–2020 by a team of Finnish biomedical researchers; a study on the experienced relevance of an increased emphasis and visibility of questions regarding race, racialization and global LGBTIQ rights and processes of knowledge production among gender studies scholars and students that deal with imagined or real “Africa”, and a study on policy-academia collaborations in the field of development.
Elina Oinas is professor in Sociology at the Swedish School of Social Science at the University of Helsinki since 2015. She has also worked in Global Development Studies and Gender Studies departments. She has been visiting scholar in Addis Ababa, Cambridge, Witwatersrand, Berkeley, Western Cape; and as staff member in University of Turku, Åbo Akademi, and the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala. She is currently serving as Vice President of the International Sociological Association 2023–2027. Her long-term research interests are gender, the body, health, feminist science studies, global sociology, development and critical studies of the Nordic.
My current research explores the Holy Land as an idea. I read this idea of the Holy Land as a culturally constructed ideological phenomenon, and I’m interested in how this landscape of the mind has taken countless forms in the Christian imagination. The manifold ideas of the Holy Land are projections of a multiplicity of religious and cultural narratives, collective memories, and ideals that each contribute to reimagining a sacred landscape and conceptually imprinting it upon the physical place. I focus on processes of ideological competition and interreligious contestation in the formation of ideas of the Holy Land. As Christian visions of the Holy Land are enacted and reinforced on the ground, they entangle with Jewish and Muslim constructions of sacred place which weave different histories and meanings around the same locations, and lay claim to the same place. My work investigates how these encounters with the religious and cultural other shape diverse concepts and expressions of sacred space.
I am Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Merrimack College, and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lund University. I received a Ph.D. from Boston College, as well as degrees from Boston University and Bard College. My 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 state-sponsored targeted killing of terrorists and external or internal enemies is a key component of contemporary warfare and political strategy. While neutralizing enemies through individual targeting may appear to be a suitable tool for countering terrorist entities and avoiding large-scale military operations, there are concerns regarding the compliance of this practice with international human rights, the laws of war and domestic laws. This project contributes to a better understanding of the present situation by investigating the history of state-sponsored assassinations and targeted killing in early-modern times, in particular in the period 1600–1800, when lawyers and government officials developed a set of core arguments on the matter. The project addresses the legal, political and ethical issues at stake in targeted killing and why it is important to rethink this practice today.
Walter works at the intersection of international law, history and philosophy, and his research focuses on issues of war and security. He is especially interested in the interaction between legal and political languages, structures and actors, for instance in how legal vocabularies restrain or allow specific forms of conflict and thereby legitimize or delegitimize certain political players. Among Walter’s publications is the monograph Enemies of Mankind: Vattel’s Theory of Collective Security, Brill 2013. Walter has previously worked as a project coordinator and postdoctoral researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights after earning his PhD from the University of Melbourne. He has work experience in regulatory agencies and financial services.
In the face of today's governance failures—such as irreversible climate change, global pandemics, ongoing conflicts, and the unsustainable use of resources—interest in "wicked problems" has peaked. Wicked problems are political challenges that, while unsolvable, must still be addressed by planners who, as Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber noted 50 years ago, “have no right to be wrong.” This project seeks to put forth a relational explanation why the concept of wicked problems has become so prevalent, arguing that it stems from a success-oriented governance paradigm that equates governing with planning or engineering. Without this paradigm, the need to define such problems as "wicked" would not exist, as the real challenge lies in recognizing that governance is inherently about struggling with uncertainty and failure. Besides going beyond the notion of wickedness, the project aims to revive a failure-oriented approach to governance—termed "failure governance"—as essential for societal endurance. It does so by tracing the historical roots, contemporary relevance, and normative implications of this approach, offering a new perspective on future governance challenges.
Peeter Selg, PhD, is a Full Professor of Governance and Political Analysis in the School of Governance, Law and Society at Tallinn University, Tallinn Estonia. His work has been published among other outlets in Sociological Theory, PS: Political Science; Politics, Journal of Political Power and The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology. His most recent book (with Georg Sootla and Benjamin Klasche) is titled A Relational Approach to Governing Wicked Problems: From Governance Failure to Failure Governance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). He is the editor (with Nick Crossley) of the book series "Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology".
The project contextualizes the plays of Václav Havel – former President of Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic, as well as an internationally renowned playwright – within the broader literary tradition of European drama. Although Havel’s work has been examined in relation to the Theatre of the Absurd, the influence of ‘canonical’ authors such as Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Goethe on his writing has not been systematically explored. This project identifies how Havel’s recurring references to these authors allowed him to comment on the challenges and dilemmas of living in a socialist and, later, neoliberal society. It also investigates how Havel's dramatic and dramaturgical approach informed his political thought. More broadly, the project highlights the transcultural importance of European authors from the 16th to early 20th centuries in shaping ideas around conscience, identity, and dissent in Central and Eastern Europe during the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Jitka Štollová is a literary scholar with a focus on the intersection of literature and history, the concept of tyranny, and early modern drama and its reception. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2018. Before joining the Collegium, she held a Title A Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford. She has taught modules on Shakespeare and early modern print culture at Cambridge, Oxford, and Queen Mary University of London. Her BA dissertation, Anatomy of Villainy, was awarded the Jan Palach Award, the highest honour conferred by the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague.
We have inherited a story about the distinctive nature of modern Western moral and political philosophy. One casualty in this story is gratitude, which was relegated by the most influential seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers from the pre-eminent position it had previously occupied in classical and Christian thought. It was displaced by an emaciated conception of justice which, enforced by the sovereign state, bids us to honour our contractual commitments. This story has exercised a powerful role in defining and sustaining our common life. The moral importance of historical study lies in engaging critically with such stories; yet in the case of this story, scholars of early modern moral and political thought have largely taken their bearings from it. This project critically interrogates the story by showing that the historical texts frequently invoked to justify it – notably by Hobbes, Locke, and Adam Smith – teach us something quite different about the relationship between justice and gratitude.
After completing my doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, I was fortunate to secure multiyear postdoctoral positions on two collaborative, interdisciplinary research projects in Cambridge (2014–17) and York (2018–21), where I secured a lectureship. During these years, my wife Cerys and I have been blessed with three lovely (most of the time) and lively (all the time) boys, who have accompanied us to Finland for the year. My research focuses on early modern political, moral and religious thought – broadly, from Hobbes to Hegel – and on twentieth-century interpretations of its most significant aspects.
Social media is a crucial platform for contemporary efforts to speak against various forms of violence and rights violations, including human gender-based violence as well as violence and harm-doing toward animals and the environment. Whereas social media activism focused on such topics can be effective and empowering, anti-violence social media activists face constant resistance and hate speech, which can pose limits to the sustenance of their activism. My project delves into the affective dynamics and experiences of participation in social media struggles focused on human and more-than-human violences. The research aims to develop an understanding of the particularities, continuities and interconnections of affects created in struggles over different forms of violence and harm-doing on social media, and of the ways in which anti-violence activists’ intersectional positionings and identifications get shaped in and shape their participation and possibilities to be heard in such struggles.
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.
What can humans and more-than-human creatures learn from one another after durational, large-scale environmental disaster, and what types of interspecies infrastructures can be developed to sustainable post-disaster coexistence?
The nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan that occurred after the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, have sparked a long-term international crisis that is at once environmental, social, and political. The radioactive fallout created the Fukushima exclusion zone spanning an area larger than the city of Tampere and has been closed to the public since 2011, displacing tens of thousands of human residents. Remarkably, amidst this uninhabitable zone, a flourishing community of wild boars, martens, macaques, and various other species have not only survived but, in some cases, thrived in this toxic environment.
My project explores the hidden lives of this new species through an interdisciplinary analysis of new video footage from cameras that I installed in the zone. These never-before-seen images offer a glimpse to uncover how more-than-humans have adapted to their radioactive environment. Unlike Chernobyl where the human community has been permanently evacuated, humans will be moving back to the Fukushima zone in the near future so what interspecies structures can facilitate co-existence.
Jason Waite is a curator, writer, and researcher. He is part of the collective Don't Follow the Wind curating an ongoing project inside the uninhabited Fukushima exclusion zone and co-editor of the book Don't Follow the Wind (2021) published by Sternberg Press. Waite was curator at Casco Art Institute in Utrecht and holds a PhD in Contemporary Art History and Theory from the University of Oxford, an MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, London. Presently, he is the editor of Art Review Oxford and an affiliated fellow at the Panel on Planetary Thinking at Justus Liebig University.
Political sociology
Social movements
Environmental politics
Energy transition
Right-wing populism
In the Shadow of Populism and the War in Ukraine: Challenges for Energy Transition and Environmental Policy under the Conditions of the Crisis of Democracy
The project aims to analyse the dynamic process of energy transition in a country that is dependent on coal, is sceptical of the EU energy and climate policy, breaks the rules of democracy and is ruled by right-wing populists under the conditions of energy crisis. The implementation of this project, which combines the environmental, political, cultural and economic dimensions, will make it possible to capture and understand the interrelationships and challenges related to the impact of the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis on the attitude of Polish society towards the goals of green transition. This is a good reason to ask about the relationship between energy security and acceptance of social innovation, and to reflect on whether energy transition can be connected with the democratisation of society. Recent years have shown that energy policy is not limited to technological issues and that control over the energy sector is an important tool for doing politics.
Hence, the main question in the project is: Can concerns about the costs of energy transition and related challenges be another potential “new political fuel” for right-wing populists and authoritarian politics or will they be rather an impulse to develop democratisation and accelerate the bottom-up transition?
Graduated in sociology and defended his PhD in sociology at the University of Wrocław (based on his distinguished doctoral dissertation entitled ‘Environmentalists, Feminists and Squatters: A Sociological Analysis of New Social Movements in Poland’). He obtained a postdoctoral degree (habilitation) at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Adam Mickiewicz University based on his dissertation ‘Structure and Culture: Conditions of Emancipation Orientation in Polish Society’.In 2014, co-founded the Centre for Civil Rights and Research on Democracy. Since 2022, he has been the president of the Institute for Sustainable Development and Renewable Energy foundation. He combines scientific work with social activity.
To stream chart-topping songs over the Internet or to listen soul classics played in coffee shops is to hear sonic imprints of many African American women singers who have fashioned gospel vocal idiom and fostered its cross-over to secular music since the mid-20th century. Yet at the same time, firmly rooted in the longstanding, and often subversive religious culture of the Black Church, gospel vocal expression has become a major element in the audible history of the African American quest for social justice.
It is against this background that my project focuses on gospel music as women-led music and explores the work of many African American women singers whose ideas and creative visions are set to music. Specifically, my project seeks to understand how gospel singers have forged vocal expression as a subversive medium of value. In practice, through ethnography and historical research on leading and local gospel singers in the United States, my project seeks to elucidate values, meanings, and practices surrounding gospel singing in the marketplace. Essentially, my work builds upon literature on music and capitalism, gospel music scholarship and popular music studies centering Black women’s experiences in music. I also draw upon anthropological theories of value and exchange. Altogether, by proceeding from the intersect of gender, race, and religion, my project seeks to direct serious attention to the power of singing voice within capitalism.
I am a musicologist/ethnomusicologist studying women’s roles in music cultures, the singing voice, and American popular music. While situated broadly in musicology my work incorporates varied branches of knowledge including, inter alia, economic ethnomusicology, gender studies, postcolonial studies, religious studies, anthropology, and sociology. In parallel, I am interested in academically-based community engagement and collaborative research methods. Recently I have worked as a University Lecturer in Musicology at the Department of Philosophy, History and Arts, University of Helsinki. I completed my doctoral degree at the University of Pennsylvania. I also have a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Maryland, College Park. I am currently the president of the board of the Finnish American Studies Association (FASA) and the vice-chair of the Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology (SES).