Methodological workshops

The Methodological Unit of HSSH organizes workshops and courses on methodology, data processing and data analysis in the social sciences and humanities. Our aim is to support researchers in social science and humanities in strengthening their methodological competence and in adopting novel methods.

Information about upcoming workshops will be posted on our website and mailing list.

The Methodological Unit also welcomes suggestions for future workshops and courses. Please post your suggestion for a topic by filling this form.

The suggestions are checked regularly, and they are used to plan future methodological training.

Click here to read about past workshops hosted by MU.
14.4.2025 AI and SSH-research: possibilities, disruptions, responses

A critical roundtable with Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science

Monday April 14, 15-17, HSSH Fabianinkatu 24 A, room 524  (on-site -event).

While the transformative and disruptive breakthrough of general artificial intelligence reorganizes societies, institutions and peoples in everyday life, it raises specific questions to critical, academic knowledge productions. This poses particular and concrete challenges to social science and humanist inquiry. 

We invite all colleagues and interested parties to join a roundtable session where we hope to launch a vibrant and critical discussion how the SSH-research community can and how it should meet the intersection of opportunities and disruptions that the rapid advance of AI has raised and will continue to raise. 

The roundtable will kick off with remarks from HSSH Visiting Professor Nick Couldry who has written extensively on datafication, social media and AI.   

We ask participants to come to the sessions with questions, concerns, new ideas and – hopefully – tangible examples of the questions and changes that applying AI enhanced tools have generated in their work processes. Here are some preliminary questions:

  • How is the field and nature of SSH-knowledge production reshaping?
  • How relevant are our inherited categories and genres of knowledge production (e.g. qualitative vs quantitative, grounded vs theoretical approaches)? If not relevant, does this matter and why?
  •  How should we redefine questions related to validity, reliability, replication or transparency?
  • What do responsible work-flows with AI look like? How should they be documented?
  • What might resistance to commercial forms of AI look like? How might we imagine the appropriate limits of AI?
Sign up here: 

We ask you to register for the event by using this link.

 

Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and since 2017 a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is the author or editor of seventeen books including The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012) and Why Voice Matters (Sage 2010). His latest books include The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can’t?  (Polity 2024), Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (Penguin/W. H. Allen 2024, with Ulises Mejias), Media: Why It Matters (Polity: 2019) and Media, Voice, Space and Power: Essays of Refraction (Routledge 2021). Nick is also the co-founder of the Tierra Común network of scholars and activists (https://www.tierracomun.net/).