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.
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Click here for more information on past Brown Bag Seminar and Brown Bag Lunch events.
The discussion on ethical challenges is timely because co-research is becoming more common in various disciplines. However, there is no clear instruction on the ethical procedures, which is a concern raised by TENK, as well. This panel discussion of four experts at the University of Helsinki will commence with brief introductions from each presenter. This Brown Bag seminar is part of a Catalyst Grant project led by Auli Vähäkangas, who will also moderate the discussion.
Meri Kulmala is a sociologist and a specialist in inequality studies, with extensive experience in co-research involving various marginalized and minoritized groups. She serves as Research Director at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. Among her responsibilities, she leads two interdisciplinary research networks: the Helsinki Inequality Initiative (INEQ) and Resilient and Just Systems (RESET). She also leads the SRC OBaMa Consortium, which co-investigates and co-creates solutions to inequalities in democratic participation together with marginalized and minoritized groups. She is also a founding member of the Finnish Co-research Network. Her interests in co-research in relation to research ethics focuses particularly on identifying and addressing situations where the core principles of co-research—such as participation, power-sharing, and valuing lived and embodied expertise—come into conflict with the structural constraints of academia. These tensions often emerge throughout the research process: beginning with the inclusion of lived experience in the design phase, continuing through the balancing of power during empirical work itself, and culminating in the dissemination stage, where issues of ownership and authorship become especially pronounced.
Reetta Mietola a university researcher in RESET – Resilient and Just Systems, at Faculty of Social Sciences, UH, and the deputy PI in the SRC funded OBaMa project, studying barriers of democratic participation with marginalized and minoritized groups. Her interest in co-research was initiated by disability studies, more specifically inclusive research developed in this field. She is particularly interested in how co-research challenges ideas and practices taken for granted in academic research: who can lead research, what kind of capacity is required from a researcher and in relation to this, what is needed for research to be inclusive. This also presents challenges for research ethics: how to balance protection with access to participation; what does informed consent mean in practice and in a co-research process; how are risks and related responsibilities negotiated within the research team; how to deal with authorship, and what kind of ethical consideration does this involve.
Auli Vähäkangas is Professor in Practical Theology and Vice Dean at the Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki. She is a member of the Research Ethics Committee in the Humanities and Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Helsinki as well as a member in RESET and INEQ. Vähäkangas’ research has focused on death and dying and on people in vulnerable situations. Presently she is leading Meaningful Deathscapes: Worldview minority cemeteries in Finland (MeDea, 2024-2028). Ethical review practices are also challenged by collaborative research. It is important to discuss how far the current ethical guidelines fit the settings of collaborative research, and to what extent we can assume that different research collaborators adhere to our research ethics. Vähäkangas acknowledges the risks existing with the researchers’ roles and questions of power in connection to co-research method. Questions of power are multidimensional, both between academic and participant researchers and between those PRs who are in a leadership position in the worldview communities and those who have a member status in them. Questions of power bring ethical challenges to the co-research project from the planning stages to the dissemination of research, but especially challenging are the power relations during the field work.
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This talk presents both empirical findings and methodological insights from the Belgian interuniversity research project TACOS, which investigates preschool teachers’ language-supporting competencies through a multimethod approach. The study uses mobile eye-tracking (MET) to examine, before and after a professional development intervention, the question: Which children are being overlooked, and with what consequences for their language development opportunities?
In a randomized controlled trial with a posttest-only comparison group, we captured 1,300 minutes of classroom interaction involving 65 preschool teachers and 575 children. Multilevel negative binomial regression models revealed systematic inequalities in teacher attention: linguistically vulnerable children—those perceived by teachers as having low speaking confidence, weaker language skills, and/or a different home language—received less attention. Importantly, results provide novel evidence that teachers’ attention allocation can be positively influenced through targeted professional development.
The talk will address the following themes:
Thibaut Duthois is a Belgian doctoral researcher at Ghent University, working on educational inequality and teacher professionalization under the supervision of Prof. Ruben Vanderlinde, Prof. Maribel Montero Perez, and Prof. Piet Van Avermaet. His main research interest lies in early childhood education, with a particular focus on uncovering mechanisms of inequality at the teacher level. To this end, he employs mobile eye-tracking technology to study teachers’ visual attention and interaction patterns in the classroom.
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Whose Angels? is a project funded by the Kone Foundation that integrates photographic art with interdisciplinary research, encompassing the study of religions, art history, and folkloristics. The project aims to investigate contemporary vernacular and popular imagination and worldviews. We utilize contemporary fine-art angel-themed phogographs, created by our artist Hanne Kiiveri, as prompts to elicit thoughts and feelings from diverse audiences. These photographs have been exhibited in various venues and presented to a range of audiences during workshops. The responses—opinions, memories, critiques, and associations—gathered from viewers serve as research material, primarily documented in real-time. Additionally, some audience members have volunteered to collaborate with the artist in designing new angel images, and this creative process has also been recorded as part of our research, including interviews, observations, and the final artworks. One of the objectives of our project is to explore and assess this kind of ethnographic methodology (in which we first construct our case and then study it) and its potential for future research.
Terhi Utriainen is professor in the Study of religions at the University of Helsinki. Her interests include ethnographic study of contemporary vernacular religion, religion, gender and embodiment, and ritual studies. She has recently directed the project Learning from new religion and spirituality (funded by the Research council of Finland 2019-2023) and presently directs the 3,5-year project Whose Angels? funded by the Kone Foundation.
Oscar Ortiz-Nieminen holds a PhD in Art History and a MTh in the Study of Religion. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. His research interests lie in the intersections of religions and worldviews with visual culture and with the built environment.
Click here for practical information on the Brown Bag Seminar events.