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.
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.
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 Intelligence that 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.
Artificial intelligence and religion are often imagined as separate domains: one associated with computation, automation, and technical rationality, the other with transcendence, tradition, and meaning. Yet they are increasingly entangled. Religious metaphors and narratives have long shaped how AI is imagined and understood, while generative AI systems are now being used to produce devotional imagery, simulate sacred voices, and generate content that may circulate as religiously effective media.
This presentation introduces the synthetic sacred as a working concept for naming this emergent terrain. The synthetic sacred, here, refers to a configuration in which generative systems co-produce devotional, mythological, and heritage content that circulates as religiously effective media. It does not designate a bounded technology or a discrete set of practices. Rather, it identifies a configuration of mediation in which computational systems become entangled with religious aesthetics, creative labour, and infrastructural power.
The research focuses on two empirical sites. The first is Godbots: conversational AI systems that speak as or about gods, divine figures, sacred texts, or religious authority. The second is AI-generated religious imagery, including deities, saints, mythological scenes, sacred atmospheres, and other visually coded forms of religious presence produced through prompts, models, and platform conventions.
The talk uses these cases to ask how such objects can be studied when they exist simultaneously as cultural forms, socio-technical systems, and sites of mediated meaning. Rather than presenting a finished framework, the seminar introduces the synthetic sacred as an exploratory research and opens discussion on how AI–religion entanglements might best be approached methodologically.
Feeza Vasudeva is an Academy Research Fellow at the Study of Religions, University of Helsinki. Her works sit at the intersection of politics, religion, and technology. She is currently leading her Research Council of Finland-funded project DIVINE, which examines virtual innovationSeminars and emerging expressions of faith.
Please note! On 22.4. we're holding a 2-hour Brown Bag Seminar special: A guest lecture with Visiting Professor Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (Northwestern University), 12.00–14.00 at Fabianinkatu 24A, room 532. Coffee and snacks will be served –
Drawing on Hurd’s new book Heaven Has a Wall, this lecture excavates and explores a cultural, religious and political consensus that appears to unite the US and Israel as if they were one supra-national state: “AmericaIsrael.” The political, religious, cultural, and commercial investments that sustain this consensus lend themselves to an eschatological American foreign policy reflecting not only Zionist religious and political ideals but also a wide spectrum of US nationalist fantasies. AmericaIsrael banks on a historical, religious, eschatological, topographical, and commercial fascination with the Holy Land among many Americans which predates 1948 and encompasses and exceeds Christian and Jewish Zionisms. This suspension of the US border with Israel is also bound up with the suspension of the border between Zionism and Judaism, such that to be or become American is to be or become a Zionist. In recent months and years, however, this consensus has begun to crumble.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science. She studies the politics of religion in U.S. foreign and immigration policy, the global politics of secularism and religious freedom, religion, politics, and American borders, the US and the Middle East, and the intersections of political theory and political theology. She co-directs the Global Religion & Politics Research Group, is a core faculty member in the MENA Studies program, and is a member of the French Interdisciplinary Group’s Sciences Po Partnership Advisory Committee.