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 12.15.
Exceptions: On Wednesday 15.10. there will be no seminar – have a nice autumn break!
You are welcome to join us at seminar room 524, Fabianinkatu 24 A (access via door, not courtyard), 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.
We all want to read less so we make robots do the reading. Sadly, the lazy language models do not have the patience to read the long texts either, and so they read a bit from the beginning, a bit from the end and then make up the rest. How much time is actually saved, if the robot reader is not reliable enough and one has to fact check it and essentially read the long texts?
This talk presents an extension to the findings of the paper “
Erkki Mervaala is a researcher at the Finnish Environment Institute’s Politics of Knowledge group, and a PhD student at the University of Helsinki. His research interests include climate change & economic growth representations and intersections in the media, and the buzz and hype around large language models and generative artificial intelligence.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is typically framed as a biomedical and microbiological problem, yet the conditions under which resistance emerges and circulates are profoundly social and infrastructural. The Finnish Centre of Excellence in Multidisciplinary AMR Research (FIMAR) is a multidisciplinary consortium comprising five disciplines: clinical microbiology, environmental microbiology, evolutionary biology, bioinformatics - and ourselves, Sociology. Together, we seek a paradigm change in AMR research by developing a method to integrate microbiological and sociological data for the purposes of understanding AMR spread and evolution across various scales from the molecular to the level of political economies. Often, qualitative and quantitative methods are siloed, both in terms of practices within academia and in terms of journal publications. Problems like AMR which are micro-bio-social and therefore multiple by nature necessitate moving beyond these silos. As the ultimate aim of FIMAR is to integrate AMR data from multiple disciplines, we have taken a mixed-methods approach to our data set that draws on both qualitative and quantitative analyses. At stake in this work, situated as it is in a multidisciplinary context, is how to hold complexity across multiple epistemological registers in such a way that enhances our shared understanding of AMR.
As such, we developed a multi-model study to recruit 'index' households (diverse by setting and socioeconomic risk) in Cotonou, Abomey-Calavi, and Grand-Popo (Benin) to characterise how exposures arise in everyday life and how these relate to microbial findings. As the sociological component of the research project, we conducted in-depth interviews and mapping exercises with 9 index households on daily routines, practices and understandings of microbial riskiness. Our analysis thus far have led us to conceptualise 12 dimensions of practices participants discussed in relation to microbes and their daily lives and we are continuing to explore analytical avenues to push our findings further. We hope that this work-in-progress talk will invite discussion, comments and questions about using mixed methods approaches in hopes that this will support and invigorate future efforts in this area.
Iona Walker is a medical anthropologist fascinated by the poetry and science of being human in a more-than-human world. Iona completed her PhD in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh (funded by the Wellcome Trust) where she conducted ethnographic fieldwork with scientists at British research-intensive university during the Covid-19 pandemic. This work explored how scientists imagine, respond to and understand human-microbe relationships in the context of their research on antimicrobial resistance and respiratory tract infections. In particular, Iona’s research explores how researchers reconfigure their understandings of health, infection and human-microbe relationships, through their AMR research, away from antagonism and toward more situated, emergent forms of relations; as well as how scientists construct and articulate their everyday research practices as ‘AMR’ through the imperatives of academic knowledge production in the UK. Iona is a founding member of Beyond Resistance, an interdisciplinary network designed to catalyse curiosity and collaboration between the sciences, arts and humanities in regards to microbial challenges like AMR.