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.
Exceptions: The seminar on 22.4. is exceptionally two hours long. There is coffee served for those who signed up in advance.
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.
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.