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.
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.
Podcasts have gained global popularity with steadily growing number of podcast channels and recent survey studies reporting increasing levels of podcast listening especially among younger audiences (Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025; Radio Media 2024). The rise of podcasting has also attracted attention within media scholarship which has been mainly focusing on content production and the role of podcasts as part of wider media ecology.Despite this increased scholarly interest, little is known about the motivations of podcast listeners to seek information about current affairs through podcasts. This gap in research is reinforced by major audio and podcasting platforms, such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and PodMe, that provide only limited data on podcast listening and the audiences that listens to podcasts.Data donation and data mirroring have emerged as methods to study media consumption across the digital public sphere, including podcasts (Jurg et al. 2024; Sejersen & Lai, 2025). In data donation—a method based on the recruitment and voluntary participation of research subjects—the researchers gain access to individual media users’ Data Download Packages (DDPs) provided by the platforms under GDPR requirements. The data is then processed and analysed for data mirroring, where the data is used to activate subsequent research methods and activities, such as in-depth or focus group interviews with the research subjects, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the motivations behind the specific media use (Jurg et al. 2024).This Brown Bag seminar sheds light on the current ethical and methodological challenges in the study of podcast audiences and podcast listening and offers an opportunity to share ideas and experiences on data donation and data mirroring as methods for studying digital media consumption in the era of closed APIs and limited data access.
Viljami Vaarala is a doctoral researcher at the Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki. His PhD examines the construction of journalism’s epistemic authority by focusing on the debates and controversies surrounding the concept of journalistic truth. As part of the PhD project, he has conducted a case study on independent podcasting content on YouTube in which the concept of truth has been invoked to challenge legacy media and to establish epistemic authority for podcasting. He is part of a research team developing a project to study the role of podcasts in informing citizens about current affairs and creating senses of belonging to (political) communities among listeners.