- 9.4. lecture with HSSH Visiting Professor Nick Couldry (LSE): The Space of the World – Can human solidarity survive social media & what if it can't?
- 10.4. Seminar with HSSH Visiting Professor Nick Couldry (LSE): AI and the Commercialization of Mind
- 14.4. AI and SSH-research: possibilities, disruptions, responses – A critical roundtable with Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science
- 6.5. lecture with HSSH Visiting Professor Isaac Reed (University of Virginia): Working towards the Rector – Agency in Social Theory and the Question of Modern Politics
- 8.4. "Are Finnish values becoming more divided?" A panel discussion in Finnish at Tiedekulma with HSSH’s Sointu Leikas
- English translations of research data management handbooks now available
- HSSH website now available in Swedish
- Apply for Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon #DHH25 | 14.-23.5.2025
- Register now – 2.–4.6.2025 Method and Convergence — International Conference on Methodology of Philosophy, University of Helsinki
- OA publication of special issue "Religious populism in hybrid media"
9.4. lecture with HSSH Visiting Professor Nick Couldry (LSE): The Space of the World – Can human solidarity survive social media & what if it can't?
9th of April 2025, 16–18, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies Common Room, Fabianinkatu 24A, 3rd floor. Drinks and snacks will be served after the lecture – please sign up here for catering by 7.4.2025!
The space of the world: can human solidarity survive social media and what if it can’t?
Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science
In this lecture, drawing on his recent book for Polity, Nick Couldry will reflect on the global space of social communications and interaction that has been constructed over the past three decades through a commercialized internet and the emergence of digital platforms whose business model depends on the extraction of data from their users and the shaping of user behaviour in order to optimize user behaviour that will generate advertising value. What if those conditions – valid perhaps in their own commercial terms – have guaranteed a space of human interaction that is larger, more polarized, more intense, and more toxic than is compatible with human solidarity? So how might we imagine a different space of the world that would be less likely to be toxic, and more likely to generate the solidarity and effective cooperation that humanity needs if it is to have any chance of addressing its huge, shared challenges? And how, practically, might we advocate for that space at a time when tech regulation is being weaponized in wider geopolitics?
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/).
10.4. Seminar with HSSH Visiting Professor Nick Couldry (LSE): AI and the Commercialization of Mind
10.4.2025, 14–17 at HSSH Seminar room 524, Fabianinkatu 24 A, 5th floor (access via door on Fabianinkatu, not courtyard).
This seminar will consider AI, and in particular the recent popularization of large language/image models that invite human prompting (so-called ‘generative AI’), not as a technology, nor as an economic opportunity, but as a sociological phenomenon: specifically, as a social redefinition, or reconstruction, of what counts as knowledge and expertise.
What is strange about this social reconstruction is not that it is happening (which it clearly is), but that it is passing almost without comment, and certainly without much debate. School teachers are being told to use Chat-GPT to write their lesson-plans; school students are becoming encouraged (by Open AI) to use Chat-GPT) to generate their essay drafts; lawyers are, whether with their employers’ approval or not, using GenAI to draft their letters; and UK diplomats are being asked to use AI in their preparations. But no one is asking whether AI generates knowledge, or what sort of output AI is, or whether there might be social costs in using AI in such a general way in social life. Will knowledge institutions (schools, universities, government ministries) be undermined by AI? Or are we simultaneously, and again without debate, renegotiating what our knowledge institutions will look like? What might social theory have to say about these issues?
Prof. Couldry will start the seminar with introductory remarks, for which participants are asked to familiarize themselves with three selected readings (listed below).
Participants are also welcome to prepare short discussion items on issues related to AI and social theory. If you wish to present, please send max 500 word abstract to risto.kunelius@helsinki.fi by Monday April 7. You can participate without an abstract too!
Readings:
Bender, Emily, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell, (2021) ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots : Can Language Models be too Big?’, https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922
Lisa Messeri and Moya Crockett, ‘Artificial intelligence and Illusions of Understanding in Scientific Research’, Nature 2024 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38448693/
Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, The Mediated Construction of Reality (Polity 20216), chapter 7 on Data.
Sign up here:
Please sign up for the seminar through 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/).
14.4. 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/).
6.5. lecture with HSSH Visiting Professor Isaac Reed (University of Virginia): Working towards the Rector – Agency in Social Theory and the Question of Modern Politics
Tuesday 6th of May 2025, 15–17, HSSH Seminar room 524, Fabianinkatu 24 A, 5th floor (access via door on Fabianinkatu, not courtyard). Drinks and snacks will be served after the lecture – please sign up here for catering by 2.5.2025!
Working towards the Rector – Agency in Social Theory and the Question of Modern Politics
Isaac Ariail Reed is Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, US. He is a historical and cultural sociologist whose recent work has concentrated on power and transitions to modernity. He draws on Arendt and American pragmatism to theorize the questions of agency, signification, authority, delegation, and modernity. He is the author of Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies (2020) and one the authors and editors of New Pragmatist Sociology (2022).
Isaac is a HSSH visiting professor at the Sociology and Political Science disciplines of the Faculty of Social Sciences in 2025, and will give this public lecture as part of his visit.
8.4. "Are Finnish values becoming more divided?" A panel discussion in Finnish at Tiedekulma with HSSH’s Sointu Leikas
Please note! This event is only in Finnish. Read more on the Tiedekulma website.
Women as left-wing liberals, men more right-leaning and conservative? News reports have frequently highlighted the growing divide in values, political attitudes, and religiosity between young women and men. This international trend of emerging value gaps has also been applied to the Finnish context.
But what do we actually know about recent changes in Finnish values and attitudes? Are the most significant dividing lines found somewhere other than between the genders? And has religion made a comeback in Finnish society and politics?
Joining the discussion on Finnish values, identities, and political attitudes are Professor of Study of Religions Titus Hjelm, Doctoral Researcher Veikko Isotalo, and University Researcher Sointu Leikas from HSSH. The conversation will be moderated by Suomen Kuvalehti's managing editor, Vappu Kaarenoja.
The event is organized by the University of Helsinki in collaboration with Suomen Kuvalehti.
You can follow the event in person on Tuesday, April 8th from 5–6:30 PM at Think Corner (Yliopistonkatu 4, Helsinki), or via live stream. Recordings of the interviews will later be published on the Think Corner YouTube channel, popular podcast platforms, and in the Suomen Kuvalehti app.
English translations of research data management handbooks now available
Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH) and University of Helsinki Data Support have published English versions of the data management handbooks that were published in Finnish last year. These resources were developed to support researchers, teachers, and students in applying general data management principles to the practical realities of academic work in the social sciences and humanities.
The five handbooks focus on commonly used data types in SSH research: survey data, social media data, research-ready text data, registry data, and video/audio recordings. Each handbook offers guidance tailored to the specific challenges of handling these data types, highlighting how good data management is shaped by both the nature of the data and the research context.
The handbooks are living documents and will continue to evolve based on user feedback and developments in the field. Additional handbooks are also in development, with future topics including interview research, ethnography, and experimental measurement data.
HSSH website now available in Swedish
The University of Helsinki is a bilingual university, with Finnish and Swedish as its official languages. English also plays a key role, especially within the international research community.
We’re happy to announce that the HSSH website now includes a Swedish-language version. Key information about our basic services is now available in Swedish, alongside the existing Finnish and English versions.
Please note, however, that our English-language site remains the most up-to-date. Due to our fast-paced event schedule and limited translation capacity, not all content can be translated into Swedish or Finnish in real time.
Apply for Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon #DHH25 | 14.-23.5.2025
Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon #DHH25 | 14.–23.5.2025
Join us to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the award-winning Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon 2025—an exciting chance to collaborate, innovate and push your own boundaries. Apply and be part of this milestone event!
* #DHH25 application period has started: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdRZjbYo02mf9jq8dbD5l_0r5YwUTOFTVwo9ZGAq0ISzEj7Ew/viewform (until 12.4.2025).
* Participation to #DHH25 is free to all accepted participants. In addition, we will have bursaries for travel and lodging.
* 5 ECTS credits may be gained from participating in the hackathon for students in University of Helsinki and other universities.
Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon #DHH25 will be organised 14.–23.5.2025 as CLARIN and DARIAH international summer school. The event will be organized as an in-person hackathon.
Application schedule for #DHH25:
* NOW: 13.3.-12.4.2025 Application period
* 16.4.2025 Applicants informed of acceptance
* 16.–23.4.2025 Registration to #DHH25 for accepted participants
* 29.4. & 6.5.2025 Two #DHH25 pre-hackathon online preparatory sessions, 2 – 4 PM UTC+03:00
* 14.–23.5.2025 #DHH25 hackathon in Helsinki
The Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon is a chance to experience an interdisciplinary research project from start to finish within the span of 10 days.
For more information on this year's hackathon, including the themes, data, team leaders, and what the hackathon was like in previous years, see: http://heldig.fi/dhh25
Regards,
#DHH25 General organizers
Mikko Tolonen, Eetu Mäkelä, Jukka Suomela & Jouni Tuominen
Welcome to Method and Convergence — International Conference on Methodology of Philosophy 2-4 June 2025, University of Helsinki, Finland
This conference brings together thinkers exploring philosophical methodology from different viewpoints. The focus is on the question of what kind of methodology could foster progress in philosophy, and on the question of how philosophy could foster progress in science. The conference will address these and other questions under the following themes:
- Methodology and progress of philosophy in general
- How can philosophy foster progress in science?
- How can scientific methods foster progress in philosophy?
- How can artificial intelligence foster progress in science and philosophy?
- Forms of peer review bias and their resolutions
Register now!
Keynote speakers
- Nina Emery, Mount Holyoke College
- Ilkka Niiniluoto, University of Helsinki
- Gerhard Schurz, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
- Ron Chrisley, University of Sussex
- Andrew Brenner, Hong Kong Baptist University
The conference is organised by the research project Appearance and Reality in Physics and Beyond, located in the Department of Philosophy, History and Art Studies, at the University of Helsinki, in cooperation with Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities, Physics Foundations Society, Philosophical Society of Finland, The Finnish Society for Natural Philosophy, and The Finnish Society for the History of Science and Learning.
Click here to visit the conference website.
OA publication of special issue "Religious populism in hybrid media"
A special issue titled "Religious Populism in Hybrid Media" has been published as an open-access edition in the journal Populism, forthcoming in issue 8. The advance online version is available following this link.
This issue features five original research articles from diverse geographical and religious contexts:
- Dayei Oh, “American abortion culture wars as religious populism: ‘Truth’ and ‘fight for truth’ as floating signifiers”
- Silvija Vuković and Nina Krapić, “A Populist, Influencer, and Religious Politician: A qualitative analysis of Marin Miletić’s communication on Instagram during the Croatian election campaign”
- Ihsan Yilmaz, Susan de Groot Heupener, Nicholas Morieson and Ana-Maria Bliuc,“Disruptive Signification in a Hybrid Media Ecology: Civilisational Populism in Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia”
- Ali Alsayegh, “The Epistemic Modes of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Charisma Production on Hybrid Media”
- Feeza Vasudeva, “Political Deification and Religious Populism in Modi’s India”
The issue concludes with an afterword by Katja Valaskivi and Johanna Sumiala (University of Helsinki), titled “Religious Populism: A Paradigmatic Mode of Address of the Hybrid Media Environment?”
The introductory article, "Rush Hour of Populists: Religious Populism and Hybrid Media," seeks to develop a framework moving beyond conventional approaches to religious populism (either as the politicisation of religion or the sacralisation of politics) and advance a framework to highlight its role in shaping collective identities through transcendencies within hybrid media environments.
Enjoy the issue, and please contact the guest editors if you encounter any access issues, Dayei Oh dayei.oh@helsinki.fi & Feeza Vazudeva feeza.vasudeva@helsinki.fi