The Methodological Unit organizes a weekly Brown Bag Seminar to highlight novel methodological approaches in humanities and social sciences. The idea of the meetings is to introduce methodological innovations and cutting-edge research in various disciplines in an easily accessible manner and have an interdisciplinary discussion in an easy-going atmosphere over lunch. Bring your own lunch, we bring fresh methodological topics!
Every Wednesday at 12.00.
Please note: Starting on Wednesday 11.2. the seminar is starting and ending 15 minutes earlier – 12.00 (sharp) to 13.00.
You are welcome to join us at room 532, Fabianinkatu 24 A, 5th floor, or online via Zoom.
There will be a 20-minute introduction to the methodological theme, followed by an open discussion of 40 minutes. The seminars are open to everybody. We expect a multidisciplinary and methodologically curious audience from different faculties and units of the central campus. The language of the meetings can be Finnish or English.
The most important prerequisite for participation is not methodological expertise, but an open mind towards new methodological innovations and discussion across methodological and disciplinary boundaries.
Scroll down for the upcoming program of Brown Bag Seminars. To get notified on updates sign up for our mailing list or follow us on social media.
Research on the long-run effects of shocks and crises on the health, socioeconomic outcomes and human capital of individuals has developed rapidly in historical demography and economic and social history in recent decades. A key factor has been the acceleration of technologies available for generating and matching data from various historical sources. A fine-grained research corpus has elaborated the negative impact of different kinds of shocks based on the type of event, the life stage of the affected individuals, and the outcomes looked at. While so-called technophysio evolution theory traditionally emphasized the role of nutrition and economic factors in damaging human capital, recent empirical evidence from historical demography suggests that health shocks exert the most significant influence on long-term outcomes. Even when the primary shock is non-epidemiological (e.g., a crisis in livelihoods, war or incarceration), health is typically the primary dimension in which such scars are formed and perpetuated throughout the life course. Such findings could carry high policy relevance.
A classic issue with correctly measuring such effects is the interplay of scarring (long-run damage) and selection (the immediate elimination of more frail individuals from the data by the crisis biasing results upwards). In real-world contexts, causal factors typically cumulate and overlap, and so do their impacts along several dimensions. The interaction of different factors, including different types of crises, gender and inequalities in socioeconomic status (SES), has been identified as a research area where more work is needed. In our ongoing Academy project A Scarred People, building on individual level data construction from historical urban settings in 20th century Tampere and Helsinki, we are focusing particularly on the impact and interaction of three shocks: the 1916 typhoid epidemic; the 1918 Civil War; and the employment crisis of the Great Depression of the 1930s. We are able to look at the heterogeneity in impact of each of these by conditioning on SES (occupation, residence), sex, and age at occurrence. On the outcome side, in addition to end point variables like death, we can look at entire trajectories and life courses over time.
In this talk, I will provide empirical examples of the early challenges of identifying the longevity effects of two factors, being exposed to a Typhoid epidemic in 1916 and being a member of the Red Guard in 1918 during the Civil War.
Sakari Saaritsa is a Professor of Social History at the University of Helsinki. His research interests include the quantitative history of human development (particularly health, education and physiological capital), social inequality, historical indicators of well-being, and relationships between economic and human development over time. He is working with several historical datasets on Finland with local population and individual level data on demographics, anthropometrics, health and education, and involved in efforts to build national historical data infrastructure with Nordic partners. His research has been published in journals including the European Review of Economic History, Social Science History, The History of the Family and Cliometrica.
Exceptions: Different room for this week's seminar – room 531 (Fabianinkatu 24a, 5th floor).
In urban planning and development, decisions are made that affect the living environment of all of us – as well as future generations. These decisions shape how daily life unfolds in the city: what kind of nature experiences the local environment offers, where and how we can meet other people and different species, how long our journeys take, and what kinds of futures we can envision. To support these decisions, experiential knowledge of urban residents is needed. The importance of experiential geographical information is increasingly recognized, yet participatory approaches in urban planning often remain limited.
By experiential knowledge, we refer to information based on people's personal experiences, and the concept emphasizes the nature of this knowledge as a distinct category. The underlying idea is that in urban planning and development, experiential knowledge is often easily excluded and may not be understood as information alongside other forms of knowledge. Even if residents' experiential knowledge is valued, there are no established forms for utilizing it as part of planning or development processes, and it may remain an isolated part of the process.
Terhi Ainiala is a Professor of Finnish Language at the University of Helsinki. Her main research areas are onomastics and urban studies. She is interested in the diverse linguistic ways of identifying places and talking about them, as well as the meanings and images associated with places.
Pia Olsson is a Professor of Ethnology at the University of Helsinki. She has studied urban experiences from ethnographic and cultural memory perspectives. She is interested in the ways experiential knowledge can be applied in questions of urban planning and heritage.
Henri Schildt (Aalto University), in collaboration with Stine Grodal (Northeastern University)
Technological tools have always shaped research and, in turn, the theories we create. While new artificial intelligence (AI) tools offer powerful affordances for qualitative researchers, their implications for theory development remain unclear. Drawing on technology studies and the distinction between AI automation and augmentation, we recast qualitative inquiry as a socio-technically situated, fundamentally abductive process. We argue that AI should not be treated as a substitute for interpretation, but as a collaborative device that can help research teams expand, align, and justify their emerging understandings. To specify how AI can augment (rather than automate) qualitative theorizing, we unpack the analytic tasks that constitute abductive theory development and consider which may be supported by AI and which must remain human-led. We conceptualize the abductive process as involving cycles of diverging and converging on (1) the puzzle and (2) explanations for the puzzle. We theorize the AI tools to be particularly good for surfacing alternative framings, patterns, and candidate explanations, helping divergent ideas. Humans, in contrast, retain responsibility for convergence: scrutinizing suggestions, exercising judgment, and selecting interpretations that form coherent theoretical contributions.
Henri Schildt is a professor of strategy with a joint appointment at the Aalto School of Business and the School of Science. His research interests span artificial intelligence, strategic change, and social sustainability. His work has been published in leading academic journals, including Organization Studies, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal. He is currently co-leading the research project Smarter Work with Generative Artificial Intelligencethat examines how companies are integrating large language models in their internal processes and services. Henri is also the founder of Skimle.com, an AI-native qualitative analysis service.