“Dangerous Research”: Doing Research in Dangerous Times, on Dangerous Issues, or While Being in Danger

Posted on October 20, 2026 by Oscar Winberg

By Oleksandra Nenko, Collegium Fellow (TIAS), and Tahani Al Dahdouh, Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Tampere IAS). This conversation is based on a roundtable moderated by Martin Cloonan at the annual meeting of the Finnish Institutes for Advanced Studies in January 2025.

Academic research is often imagined as a safe pursuit: long hours in archives, carefully designed surveys, or thoughtful analysis behind the closed door of an office. Yet for many of us, research is entangled with danger. Danger may come from political regimes that restrict freedom of research, from themes that touch upon sensitive societal issues or vulnerable social groups, or from being a researcher in the contexts affected by crises or wars. To do research “in dangerous times” means acknowledging risk, fragility, and exposure — while also insisting on the responsibility of scholarship to illuminate what sociopolitical tolerance or, contrariwise, exclusionary epistemologies prefer to conceal.

In what follows, we, representatives of two Finnish Institutes for Advanced Studies, reflect on our experiences with “dangerous research” and on the role of “danger” as a dimension of our academic practice. We discuss research themes that contain elements of risk, the turbulent contexts in which we pursue our research, and the ways our approaches, methods, and positionalities adapt in response to the critical situations we study.

  1. Research Themes in Dangerous Times

Oleksandra Nenko (ON): In my recent research projects, I approach “danger” as a multifaceted condition that shapes research themes, contexts, and lived experiences. With the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I could not help but refocus my research, previously related to emotional mapping, placemaking, and urban sustainability, on the wartime cities. Staying in the relative safety of Finland, I address the themes of place and identity in conditions of wartime displacement.

One of my recent projects focuses on Ukrainian wartime art, which has been negatively impacted by the war but has paradoxically boomed since the full-scale invasion. In their recent artworks, Ukrainian artists discursively and materially address fundamental transformations of time and space, identities and places, while formulating new artistic languages to speak about wartime trauma and the formation of national culture. Their works carry the signatures of danger and rupture: fragmented geographies and places, challenged memoryscapes, and an intensified sensitivity to the fragility of individual and collective Selves. Wartime artworks artistically reexamine basic identity tropes and concepts, such as home, country, land, belonging, and even humanity. What is “home” when it has been destroyed, and what remains of “humanity” when civilian suffering becomes routine?

Artists’ own practices also bear the imprint of wartime dangers: the precarities of rebuilding professional and personal routines in damaged home places or within unfamiliar environments of displacement. War alters not only physical landscapes but also artistic identities and the conditions of artistic work. Displaced Ukrainian artists undergo a dramatic reconfiguration of their professional roles — from locally rooted cultural figures to “exiles” negotiating recognition, legitimacy, and belonging abroad.

In another research project, developed together with my colleagues — geographers from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv — I examine how wartime danger transforms the emotional landscape of Kyiv and the different types of emotional places emerging in a city at war. This work is based on collective autoethnography and digital participatory emotional mapping of places that acquire a specific emotional charge due to the war. We discovered that the city at war is subjectively shaped through a network of places of safety and danger, trauma and dignity.

As a cross-over with the previous project, we also examine artistic interventions appearing on the streets of wartime Kyiv and Kharkiv. These artworks contribute to the symbolic healing of wartime cities by intensifying feelings of patriotism and visualising cultural codes in central public spaces, commemorating losses in ruined sites, and re-signifying military infrastructures within everyday urban landscapes. My colleagues in Kyiv work in the immediate context of danger — between air raids, amid electricity blackouts and heating cuts — daily witnessing how the city is transformed by military aggression. Yet we conduct this work together, believing that it communicates the reality of the war to the international community and provides academic insight into the resilience of wartime cities.

Memorial consisting of Ukrainian flags, flowers, and photographs at Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kyiv, 2025.

Spontaneous memorial at Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kyiv, 2025. Photo by Olena Kononenko (used with permission).

Tahani Al Dahdouh (TAD): As a Palestinian researcher originally from Gaza, my research themes emerge from a sense of injustice, a refusal to remain helpless, and a commitment to act rather than stay silent while witnessing the genocidal war from abroad. I was formerly an academic in Gaza and am currently a volunteer. I have experienced hardship myself and later witnessed firsthand the suffering of university students and academics. I see how they struggle to keep higher education functioning even under extraordinary circumstances. This is why I chose to study and rethink resilience in higher education within contexts of genocidal war.

Findings from my research on Gaza’s university students revealed that personal attributes such as determination and beliefs about the value of time supported students’ focus on learning. Another study, conducted at the institutional level, aimed to understand how Gaza’s universities continued teaching and learning during the war. The findings pointed to three underlying mechanisms developed to preserve identity and refuse erasure: externalization, decentralization, and randomness.

These findings challenged the concept of “resilience.” They brought forward not coping or adapting strategies, but agency — insistence on legitimacy and declaration to the world: we are still here. Although buildings were destroyed, “our universities live on.” The findings also highlighted the Palestinian concept of “sumud,” related to resilience and resistance, however, distinctive from them. The interplay of these concepts was insightful however not investigated in detail, so I applied for funding from the Kone Foundation to continue my research. Currently, I delineate the overlapping concepts of resilience, resistance, and sumud, whose vagueness generates analytical ambiguity and, at times, political misuse and epistemic injustice.

My research topics also stem from personal and collaborative reflections on my academic practice. I volunteered to teach remotely at Gaza’s universities during the genocidal war. I must say, it was not easy at all. Teaching is always an emotionally charged profession; even in stable contexts, it can be stressful. Teaching in wartime requires bearing witness, sharing in grief, and holding space for hope. I was not alone in this; my coteacher’s support was essential in caring for students, supporting each other pedagogically, and, most importantly, sustaining emotional strength at times when grief dominated our interactions. We faced many challenging situations and a continuous tension between regulating our own emotions, feeling empathy toward students, and maintaining standards of quality education. This experience led us to reflect on ourselves as teachers and learners and to conduct a research study grounded in our lived experiences.

No title, 2024, by Anu Paajanen (used with permission).

  1. Research Approaches in Dangerous Times

ON: I think, dangerous contexts require methodological innovation. Conventional methods are rarely sufficient when working with wartime art, displaced professional communities or war-torn urban landscapes. Instead, research becomes a dialogical, intersubjective, and embodied practice. In my recent projects I turn to the following research approaches that treat knowledge as relational, situated, and deeply affected by conditions of danger.

  • Participatory action research (McIntyre, 2008) to ensure that those most affected are not mere subjects but co-creators of the project, e.g. co-researchers.
  • Mixed methods (Hesse-Biber, 2010) to help integrate and relate subjective and objective data, or different dimensions of qualitative data, such as narrative and ethnographic, to establish a better comprehension of agencies and spaces, distorted by the war.
  • Autoethnography, individual or collective, to explore researcher’s own thoughts, feelings, and embodied experiences, bringing the personal and tacit knowledge into the spotlight as a valuable resource (Denshire, 2014).
  • Narrative interviews with deep listening to create a discursive space where sensitive issues and personal and emotional experiences can be voiced with care.
  • Interdisciplinary collaboration, for example with artists, to open new avenues of insight, as well as explore alternative archives of knowledge, such as artworks.

TAD: Conducting dangerous research requires careful methodological design and thoughtful implementation. Research questions, of course, guide the methodology, but researchers doing dangerous research must also remain flexible in designing data collection tools that best capture the phenomenon under investigation. For instance, in my qualitative research with Gaza’s academics, I found that they preferred to be interviewed rather than respond to open-ended survey questions. This preference stemmed from their overloaded work schedules, limited resources of the working environment, and limited time available for writing. These experiences have taught me that methodology must remain sensitive to people’s realities and constraints, especially in war-affected contexts. With this in mind, I primarily use:

  • Narrative interviews (Mueller, 2019): to capture participants’ voices, lived experiences, and meaning-making processes.
  • Selfstudy research approaches (Butler & Horton, 2025): to reflect on, critically analyze, understand, and improve one’s own practice and professional actions.
  • Mixed methods: combining survey data with open-ended questions to enrich and contextualize insights.

In my upcoming studies, together with my collaborator I aim to use:

  • Integrative literature reviews: to synthesize and evaluate current knowledge on the research topic. This approach is central to Huff’s (2009) “sensemaking/sensegiving circle of scholarship” (p. 4).
  • Bricolage (KiniSingh, 2023): an artistic, flexible method of investigation and creation that brings together diverse materials, perspectives, and analytical tools.

It is worth noting that even when the study design and data collection instruments are carefully planned, implementation is not always straightforward. For instance, in one of my previous studies — despite its ethical approval and informed consent forms with clearly outlined research objectives and data confidentiality — some students were hesitant to participate. Their hesitation was understandable given the political instability and the fact that Gaza is under colonial occupation. This hesitation reflected students’ heightened political alertness as well as awareness. In such cases, when the researcher’s background is known to participants, familiarity can help ease concerns and establish a trusting relationship throughout the research process.

Children's artworks in Kharkiv subway station hall, Kharkiv, 2025.

Children’s artworks in Kharkiv subway station hall, Kharkiv, 2025. Photo by Oleksandra Nenko.

  1. Positionality in Dangerous Times

ON: To research under dangerous conditions is to constantly negotiate one’s positionality. For me, this involves being a displaced intellectual in search of new points of reference, someone who both witnesses and enables other witnesses to be heard. It also means reaching beyond the purely rational into the emotional, the felt, and the imaginary. Dangerous research requires engagement rather than detachment. The researcher becomes an equilibrist, balancing empathy with analysis, involvement with reflection, exposure with self-care. Positionality is not a fixed standpoint but a moving equilibrium shaped by the risks and solidarities of the research journey.

TAD: I constantly reflect on my role, position, and the impact of my presence on the research process. Doing research in dangerous, politically charged, or colonially shaped contexts requires acknowledging that I am never a neutral observer. My identity as a Palestinian researcher from Gaza shapes not only how participants relate to me but also how I interpret their narratives, silences, and emotions. This contextual embeddedness is essential for understanding nuances in the data and contributes to achieving what Bruner (1986, p. 52) refers to as verisimilitude, whereby interpretations offered in research can be regarded as “true to conceivable experience.”

Maintaining awareness of positionality means engaging in transparent dialogue with research participants and acknowledging potential power imbalances. I continuously examine the intersecting layers of insiderness and outsiderness I inhabit: an insider through shared history, language, and experiences of loss; an outsider through my work abroad, my physical distance, and my absence from Gaza over the past eleven years.

No title, 2024, by Anu Paajanen (used with permission).

  1. Social Impact of Research in Dangerous Times

ON: Research in dangerous times is not only about producing academic knowledge; it is also about shaping public conversations and supporting vulnerable communities. Working with displaced artists, for example, I see the importance of collaboration: co-designing research and action projects with artists themselves and ensuring that their visions and voices remain at the centre.

Following this idea, together with Ukrainian artists in Finland we launched an initiative to establish a professional Ukrainian Artists Association in Finland (UAAF). Together with stakeholders from the Finnish arts, culture, academia, and civil society, we organised an interdisciplinary seminar titled “War-ning Art: Resilience, Response, and Artistic Knowledge in Finland” on December 3rd last year (2025). The seminar addressed the role of the arts and artists in times of war and polycrisis, the professional resilience of artists who have experienced displacement, and the significance of their artistic knowledge within the contemporary Finnish art scene. Social impact also involves making voices and stories public through digital platform-based solutions. In this spirit, within the UAAF initiative we are currently working on a web platform representing Ukrainian artists in Finland (www.ukrfinart.com).

It is also important for me to contribute, in the ways available to me, to the well-being of Ukrainian cities. At present, I participate remotely as an invited lecturer and mentor in research activities of the Faculty of Geography at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Building on our findings from emotional mapping, with students we do research on Maidan Nezalezhnosti and Mykhailivska Square as central public spaces, sites of political and cultural representation and sites of memory-making during wartime.

TAD: The recent shift in my research towards incorporating artistic methods to investigate resilience, resistance, and sumud is driven by the belief that art can enable a plurality of stories and complexify visions about experiences Gazan academics have been enduring. The creative artistic process is grounded in an ethical stance that refuses to flatten teachers’ experiences, neither as ‘helpless victims’ nor as ‘superheroes’ who can miraculously keep their work moving despite unimaginable psychological and physical pain.

We plan to create a multisensory installation that will bring under the same roof stories and experiences of teachers in Gaza and in the diaspora, generating new meanings through their assembling. Teachers’ experiences will be honoured also by creating a digital memory archive that showcases academics’ stories, work, and activities during wartime via audio, video, and photographic materials. This artistic approach not only documents experiences but also facilitates cross-cultural dialogue, provokes Finland’s cultural diplomacy, and invites national and international audiences into urgent discourses often absent from mainstream narratives. In doing so, it positions art and research as intertwined practices that mobilize public engagement and support broader social understanding and solidarity.

***

Doing research in dangerous times is not a heroic act but a vulnerable, risky, and deeply relational process. It involves navigating personal danger of being in endangered contexts or working with a sensitive theme, obscurity of displacement experiences in peaceful contexts, ethical complexities and emotional weight of working with communities in distress. Yet it also opens pathways to reimagine scholarship itself: as participatory, embodied, interdisciplinary, and socially engaged.

The task of dangerous research is not only to document suffering but also to illuminate possibilities of resilience, solidarity, and recovery. Whether through the art of displaced Ukrainian artists or the activities of Gaza university students and teachers, dangerous times generate alternative visions on agency and ways to act in the society, even in the most dramatic circumstances. Recognizing danger as an immediate part of everyday life in many parts of the world, including lives of researchers, gives ground for critical, decolonial, engaged scientific rethinking of the status quo of concepts and interpretative frameworks.

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New Fellows

Posted on September 28, 2026 by Oscar Winberg

Editor’s note: As the leaves are turning yellow and the air is getting crisper, I asked the new cohort of fellows to reflect on what they are hoping to achieve during their time at TIAS. Here are some of their thoughts on their research projects and fellowship.

“With my research project – A heritage ethics for relational ontologies – I hope to conduct research that can have a real-world impact. Heritage policies, legislation and governance have material consequences in the world, determining what is protected, how it is managed, and, in extension, what more-than-human congregations will be sustained or changed. Consequently, it has direct implications for more-than-human care and justice. Heritage institutions, however, remain bound by frameworks that are poorly suited to address questions of ecological processes and multispecies relations and interdependencies. My research aims to reconceptualise cultural and natural preservation and governance as a moral and political act that shapes ecological relations over time.” – Anna Karlson (Senior Research Fellow, Turku Intersectoral Excellence Scheme 2/Marie Skłodowska-Curie)

“My research at TIAS will focus on two main areas. First, I will examine the relevance of the Baltic region as a major cultural crossroads through the performing arts in the early twentieth century with a particular focus on the artistic exchanges and transnational networks between Latvia and Spain. Second, I will unravel the meaning of gestures, examining the embodied identities, imaginaries, and ideologies that can be traced using the concept of the “Body as Archive” and Digital Humanities techniques. By doing so, the outcomes of my project will enable me to develop a new gesture-based approach to analyse socio-political shifts that took place in the Baltic region during the interwar period, using a meaningful acronym for Latvian citizens: BRIVS (which means free).” – Gonzalo Preciado Azanza (Senior Research Fellow, TIES2/MSCA)

“I have—for better and for worse—always been motivated to do research that eclectically and creatively combines and reworks elements from multiple disciplines to better understand global sexual and gender diversity, drawing on insights from International Relations, political theory, gender studies, and European studies. During my time at TIAS, I plan to continue on this path by expanding my theoretical, empirical and methodological expertise beyond what I thought possible during my PhD. Having explored polarisation over LGBTIQ+ equality within the EU, I look forward to engaging more broadly with contestation over sexual and gender diversity in global politics and in the EU’s engagement with the rest of the world. The freedom, trust, interdisciplinary collegial support and encouragement for blue-sky thinking that come with this position at TIAS are a great privilege.” – Malte Breiding (Senior Research Fellow, TIES2/MSCA)

“I want to use this fellowship to really establish myself as an expert on doctoral education in Cameroon and across Africa. The topic is only just starting to grow in importance, and TIAS gives me protected time and support to study it in depth and from a comparative angle, including other African countries and, eventually, the Nordic region. My goal is for the research I do here to become a solid foundation for my long-term work, i.e., something that others can build on, and that can feed into practical solutions to the challenges facing doctoral education on the continent. Strengthening my expertise in this area will also help me position myself for a future tenure-track role. Along the way, I hope to build lasting connections and work closely with colleagues who are interested in similar questions around higher education reform.” – Ransom Ngenge (Senior Research Fellow, TIES2/MSCA)

“My research study at TIAS focuses on advancing the inclusive co-design of financial cybersecurity literacy education with people with intellectual disabilities and people with deafblindness in Finland and South Africa. The study responds to the growing need for financial cybersecurity education, products, and services that are accessible, inclusive, and responsive to the diverse needs and experiences of persons with disabilities. It seeks to contribute to strengthening financial consumer protection for persons with disabilities, particularly those who may experience greater barriers to accessing and safely using digital financial services, products and environment. In addition, the project will contribute to the co-development of inclusive co-design principles and practical guidelines for improving the accessibility of financial cybersecurity literacy products and services. These principles and guidelines will be co-developed collaboratively with diverse people with intellectual disabilities, people with deafblindness and others. Ultimately, the study seeks to contribute to a more inclusive, accessible, and secure digital financial ecosystem in which persons with disabilities can participate meaningfully, exercise greater autonomy, and access financial services with confidence and security.” – James  Rwampigi Aniyamuzaala (Senior Research Fellow, TIES2/MSCA)

“My research project at TIAS examines overtourism through the concept I call “wounded destinations.” It asks which harms become visible when overtourism is understood not simply as a problem of excessive visitor numbers, but as a process that can leave lasting social, spatial, and emotional effects on places and communities. At the centre of the project is the idea that tourism related harms can accumulate over time and remain embedded in everyday life through processes of touristification. The project therefore pays particular attention to residents’ lived experiences, emotions, perceptions, and expressions of discontent. I seek to develop a justice-oriented governance framework for European cultural destinations that can respond to both the immediate pressures of overtourism and the longer-term consequences of touristification. TIAS will play an important role in this journey by providing the academic environment, support, and opportunities that will help me develop my research.” – Abolfazl Siyamiyan Gorji (Senior Research Fellow, TIES2/MSCA)

 

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Philosopher in a First-Class Lounge

Posted on September 21, 2026 by Oscar Winberg

By Joona Räsänen, Senior Research Fellow, TIAS

As I have worked in Denmark and Norway in recent years while also keeping my home base in Finland, I have commuted quite a lot between the Nordic countries. I also regularly travel to conferences in Europe and do some leisure travel, so I have become quite familiar with Finnair’s frequent flyer program and the many lounges to which their top members are entitled. A few years ago, I reached Finnair’s Gold status, and for a while now I have held Platinum status. Finnair Platinum status equals oneworld Emerald status: the highest tier of perhaps the greatest airline alliance. In this post, I offer a glimpse of what perks the top-tier members of Finnair and the oneworld alliance get. Much of my flying is in economy class; the experiences described below come from frequent-flyer status and the various benefits that come with it.

The foremost benefit of the highest tiers is lounge access. Finnair Gold members get access to business-class lounges with one travel companion when flying in economy class on any oneworld carrier (Finnair, Iberia, British Airways, etc.). The perk is excellent, and I have guested a colleague in lounges, and on leisure trips my wife, and sometimes family members. One of the peculiarities of airline status is that some of the most luxurious parts of the journey have remarkably little to do with the ticket you have bought. It is perfectly possible to spend hours in first-class lounges and then walk onto the aircraft and into economy class.

The quality of the lounges varies between airports. The most glamorous ones are at Heathrow, but even the smaller lounges in Europe are better than nothing, as there are snacks and beverages available. Lounges are quiet and, because of their exclusivity, have more vacant seats than other parts of the airports, as well as Wi-Fi, which makes them great places for working too. Alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, as well as the buffet, are free – or, as frequent flyers say, complimentary.

The Qantas Business-Class Lounge at Heathrow Terminal 3 includes a famous gin bar that serves 18 different gins from around the world to mix with your favorite gin-based cocktail. Photo by Joona Räsänen.

At Heathrow, there are plenty of lounges to choose from. With Finnair Gold status or a business-class ticket, one can access basically any oneworld carrier lounge. At Heathrow Terminal 3, where Finnair operates, these include American Airlines (AA), British Airways (BA), Cathay Pacific (CX), and Qantas (QF) lounges. There is no need to stick to the one your boarding pass suggests you go to; you are entitled to select the one you like, go for the quietest one to make that important Zoom call or answer emails before your flight home, or even visit all the lounges if you feel like doing some lounge hopping. The Qantas lounge is a personal favorite of mine. During one recent visit, the bartender greeted me with the words, “I remember you.” This was perhaps a sign that my familiarity with the lounge had progressed slightly further than intended.

While Finnair Gold entitles you and your travel companion to access business-class lounges, Platinum members get access to first-class lounges – even when flying in economy class. Dedicated first-class lounges are relatively rare, but a few of them are located at Heathrow.

Oneworld carriers’ first-class lounges at Heathrow are among the top airport lounges in Europe and globally. At Heathrow Terminal 3 you have three options: American Airlines, British Airways, and Cathay Pacific. American and Cathay offer à la carte dining, while British Airways offers a champagne bar with several different champagnes and sparkling wines to choose from. All of the lounges also have showers where you can freshen up before the flight. This is especially nice if you have a long travel day behind you and have already travelled by train or taken another flight to Heathrow.

Champagne is a drink for two. Á la carte dining at the Cathay Pacific First-Class Lounge at Heathrow. Photo by Joona Räsänen.

At Helsinki-Vantaa, there is an excellent lounge for oneworld travelers: the Finnair Platinum Wing. The lounge is located on the non-Schengen side of the airport. While technically not a first-class lounge (since Finnair does not offer first class on its flights), it is effectively a first-class lounge as access is not granted with a business-class ticket alone; entry requires Finnair Platinum or another oneworld Emerald status. The Platinum Wing at Helsinki-Vantaa offers à la carte dining, a buffet, as well as a bar with champagnes and cocktails. The Platinum Wing is also the only airport lounge in the world with a traditional Finnish sauna. Is there any better way to start your flight than experiencing a sauna before boarding?

The dessert table at the Platinum Wing offers a selection of cheeses, fruits, and cakes. Photo by Joona Räsänen.

As airlines often recommend that passengers arrive at the airport well before their flight to make sure they catch it in case of unusually long queues or disruptions, one normally has some spare time at the airport. Lounges are great places to spend this time checking emails, preparing a conference presentation, etc. While the lounges at Oslo and Copenhagen are nothing special, even those are good places to grab something to eat and relax a bit. When travelling to Helsinki from Denmark, the lounge at Copenhagen Airport served as a very useful pit stop for me after the three-hour train ride from Aarhus.

Finnair also offers its Gold and Platinum members some complimentary business class upgrades. For the efficiency-minded traveler, dining in the skies has the pleasing consequence that there is no need to look for a restaurant after arrival. Status holders also get free seat selection, a free checked bag, as well as a free carry-on bag on the cheapest tickets. A surprisingly useful perk is also the Gold and Platinum members’ own customer service, also available on WhatsApp, so there is no need to queue on the phone when plans go awry and flight arrangements need to be changed.

Does it make sense to fly just for the sake of it to get access to lounges and other perks? Probably not, especially since, to achieve and maintain the highest status, you need to spend several thousand euros on flights annually. But if your work and life already put you on dozens of flights per year, it would be foolish not to learn how the system works. Of course, achieving a high status in a frequent flyer program by flying a lot during the ongoing climate crisis can itself be seen as morally problematic. As we know, travelling by plane has a much higher carbon footprint than travelling by rail, for instance. Discussions of personal ethical obligations regarding climate change are important, but they should not be considered in isolation.

Philosopher in a first-class lounge during the ongoing climate crisis.

Academic careers often generate a surprising amount of travel. Because of the precarious nature of the academic job market, scholars are often expected to relocate to another country or continent every few years, leaving their friends and family behind. The arms race over publications, conference presentations, and research visits also creates incentives to travel. Understanding the peculiar economy of airline status can make the many hours spent in airports rather productive — and much more pleasant. Whether that is a reward for travelling too much or merely compensation for having to do so, I leave for the reader to decide.

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“In Defence of the Numbers:” Lottery Games and the Labour of Luck

Posted on April 20, 2026 by Oscar Winberg

Note from the editors: this is the second in a series of posts about games for the TIAS blog. What can our research tell us about various games, what can games tell us about our research, our society, and our culture? Game on.

By Xin Liu, Collegium Fellow, TIAS.

Lottery is one of the most popular gambling games in the world. Over 100 countries run state-authorized lotteries.  Modern lottery games include number games, scratch cards, raffles and sweepstakes. My project at TIAS examines state-sponsored lotteries in China. The China Welfare Lottery, established in 1987, and the China Sports Lottery, founded in 1994, are two national lotteries overseen by the Ministry of Finance. Both providers sell number games and scratch cards while sports betting is monopolised by China Sports Lottery. The Chinese lottery market has been expanding rapidly, in line with the global trend of growth in lottery sales. It is now the second largest in the world after the United States.

My research is driven by a question that can be asked across cultural, social and historical contexts: why do people continue to play the lottery despite being fully aware of the slim chances of winning? The answer to this question seems to lie in a self-perpetuating lottery fantasy. A desire to become wealthy drives the lottery play. The lottery’s potential for wealth engenders desire.  However, once contextualised, the lottery fantasy appears to be more of a myth than an axiom. And as a myth, it is both maintained and constantly challenged. A key aim of my research is to understand how this myth of the lottery fantasy is produced, communicated and negotiated in China. The Chinese lottery both resembles and differs from those in other places. Understanding the lottery fantasy in China offers important insights into the global interconnections and local, historical specificities of the lottery game.

A recycling center that used to be a welfare lottery shop. Photo by Xin Liu.

I call the production and negotiation of the lottery fantasy ‘the labour of luck’. By ‘labour’, I mean the temporal, financial, physical and emotional work involved in creating opportunities for luck.  Through observation at lottery shops and interviews with vendors and lottery players, I study the institutions and people that participate in this labour, as well as the cultural and material artefacts that facilitate it.

A good example of the labour of luck is the practice of ‘keeping the numbers’ (守 号). This phrase frequently occurs in discussions between vendors and customers. For instance, the vendor might ask the customer if they would like to choose the same numbers as they did for their previous purchase. However,守has more connotations than ‘to keep’. It also means to observe, to guard, to defend and to serve. The numbers that are kept or continuously purchased are typically carefully selected by the customer. This selection may be based on observation of past winning numbers. They may also select numbers that hold personal significance, such as important dates like birthdays.

A usual sight at the shops is players sitting in front of a lottery trend board, studying and analysing numbers from past lottery games. They analyse the ‘hot’ numbers, which are those that appear often in draws, the frequency of odd and even numbers, big numbers and small numbers, and the pattern of their appearance. Players often discuss their findings with each other and with the vendors. Sometimes they consult the vendor because of their expected expertise in the game. At other times, discussions about the numbers and the board form a major part of the social interaction between the players and the vendors.

To make players’ labour of luck more enjoyable, the vendors equip the shops with chairs, computers, water, air conditioning, and colourful decorations. To demonstrate the wealth-attracting capacity of the shops, the vendors display figurines such as the beckoning cat Maneki-neko and the Chinese God of wealth, as well as ‘honour rolls’ or ‘hero rolls’ of winning tickets bought from the shop, in easily visible places. Maintaining good relations with customers is important for the lottery vendors who are facing increasingly tough competition in the lottery market. An elimination system has been introduced to sports betting licence in recent years. Failure to meet the sales quota or violation of the rules can result in the loss of the licence. Acts that encourage lottery players to irrationally purchase lottery tickets, for example, by stating that lottery results are predictable and calculable, are considered violations.

A lottery shop using the “A fun and lucky store” retail concept launched in 2021 by the Chinese sports lottery regulator. Photo by Xin Liu.

The prospect of losing a licence is a cause of concern for many vendors.  As one shop owner told me, they were lucky to have obtained a licence in the first place.  She and her husband were both made redundant during China’s pension reform in the early 2000s. They both come from a rural area. With only high school education and experience of working in a factory, they found it difficult to land new jobs. Running a lottery shop is a good solution. It does not require education or a specific set of skills. However, at the time of the vendor’s application, a condition for the licence was to demonstrate that there was enough capital to rent and renovate the shop according to the regulator’s standards. Fortunately,  the owners’ relatives offered to rent them a space in their grocery store. They also managed to borrow money for renovation, which has been paid off .  

Lottery shops are a distinctive feature of the Chinese lottery. Unlike many national lotteries, which can be purchased online and at supermarket checkouts, such as in Finland, the Chinese lottery can only be bought at a lottery shop. These shops therefore function as places where gambling, state regulation, financial pressure and interpersonal relations converge. Both the vendors and the lottery players contribute to the unequally distributed labour of luck that produces and games the lottery fantasy.

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Trust, Polarization, and Diplomacy

Posted on March 11, 2026 by Oscar Winberg

Note from the editors: this is the first in a series of posts about games for the TIAS blog. What can our research tell us about various games, what can games tell us about our research, our society, and our culture? Game on.

By Aleksi Karhula, Collegium Fellow, TIAS.

I am currently a TIAS collegium fellow focusing my research on the effects of increasing socioeconomic residential segregation. One of the aims of my TIAS project is to connect residential segregation to societal trust, political radicalization and attitudes towards other population groups. With our excellent INVEST survey data we can analyze how residential segregation is connected to the erosion of societal trust. Incidentally, my all-time favorite board game, Diplomacy, also deals with the topic of trust.

Diplomacy is an old board game dating back to the 1950s, and often advertised as being Henry Kissinger’s favorite board game. In Diplomacy each player represents one of seven nations roughly corresponding to great powers around Europe before World War I. The goal is to conquer all of Europe under your own rule. This might sound boring, and it did to me at first as I am not a big fan of war games in general, but one round of Diplomacy convinced me that the game connects to something very fundamental in human nature – something that intrigues you to play again and again.

Custom map of Europe based on the classic board of Diplomacy (Avalon Hill).

Rendering of the Diplomacy board of Europe divided into territories. (EWhale, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Compared to many other strategic games the rules are very simple, you move your pieces or support moves from other pieces. The game leaves you no option to defeat your opponents just with brilliant moves of your own pieces. The trick is cutting deals with other players and building trust. The game proceeds several rounds, starting with a phase of negotiations that are free form between all the players. In negotiations you offer support for others’ moves in exchange for their support in other ways. After negotiations everybody writes down their moves on a slip of paper in secret. These are then revealed at the same time to see where the pieces on the board move or fail to move. This is followed by a new round of negotiations and moves. And at certain intervals you get new pieces on the board, if you have conquered regions, and lose them if you have lost regions. Ultimately the mechanics of the game revolve around trust. You build alliances that you try to keep intact, or at the crucial moments break. In both cases it is essential that you have other players that trust you and that you in turn can trust.

Add to the mix that board gamers (myself included) are a curious lot, during the game everything else outside of it is most often forgotten. You do not favor your family members, friends or neighbors when you are playing a board game. So where does the trust in other players come from? Would you trust Henry Kissinger making promises from the other side of the table?

Henry Kissinger on the phone, April 1975.

Would you trust Henry Kissinger in a game of Diplomacy? (White House Photographic Office, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).

I have played dozens of rounds of Diplomacy, and through experience I have learned that there are three types of new players in Diplomacy. Some do not trust anyone. They know the reputation of the game for backstabbing and avoid any moves that would require trust in any other players. The second type of player chooses very early another player, usually someone they know personally, that they place their trust in completely. Both of these strategies lead to certain loss in the game. And then, of course, there is the third type of player who swims like fish in the water straight-away – I would bet Henry Kissinger was one of them. They negotiate and place their confidence, but never all of it, in someone who seems trustworthy. They re-evaluate their trust in others constantly based on both negotiations with others and the position on the board. It is a constant state of uncertainty – much like life in general. And if you place your trust with skill, it leads to victory.

In essence, Diplomacy is a very sophisticated model example of how people build trust out of nothing. Every nation in the game has multiple strategies from the beginning regarding whom to attack and whom to ally with. There is even an internet library of Diplomacy openings illustrating the variability. Any attack or alliance is possible. Still, as you start to play you begin to build trust in some players and a lack of it in others. Trust is built slowly in the interaction through the negotiations and moves. There is very rarely complete trust, but often a considerable degree of it. It takes a long time to build trust, but only a second to completely erase it.

The notable aspect of the game is how it illustrates what happens when trust is betrayed. One game of Diplomacy can last hours, even a weekend. When you have built up your trust in someone for several hours and then they betray you, this seldom results in a cold, calculated re-evaluation of the game situation. Instead, it often leads to an immense feeling of hate and a desire for revenge no matter the cost. Indeed, if you can remember the feeling of losing a long game of Monopoly as a child, you have a faint echo of what it feels like to be betrayed in a long game of Diplomacy. Unlike in Monopoly, the mechanics of the game do not force anyone to take money from some unlucky soul landing on the property with your hotel, it is more like you choose to place the hotel where the other player is. And this feels extremely bad as you have trusted them, afterwards realizing you should not have done so. What happens after betrayal often is that the betrayed player places their trust completely in some other player with a strong position on the board, just to get back at the one who betrayed them. It does not matter if you lose, as long as the betrayer does not get a single thing and also loses in the end.

Does this sound familiar to other aspects of life? Whether you think of Brexit, Trump, or anti-immigration parties, there is a strong rhetoric of betrayal in these movements. The erosion of trust in institutions and mainstream politicians paves the way for populist movements. And, as in the game of Diplomacy, I am quite certain that some voters understand well that the movements might not be fully beneficial for them, but as long as you get back at traitors, this is tolerated. What is the answer then? The easy answer is, of course, do not betray people and expect that nothing happens. However, avoiding betrayal works well in Diplomacy, but real life tends to be more complicated. Often people are not actively betrayed by anyone, even those who they see as traitors. The decline of jobs or the diminishing of other opportunities result from a complex economic system that nobody fully understands. Not even the armies of economists who are nowadays often paraded in to give you certain – but usually contrary – answers to questions nobody can answer.

Would there then be a way to avoid both betrayals and feelings of betrayal? The best Diplomacy players can conquer the whole board without betraying anyone. How do they do this? By listening, talking, and interacting. Indeed, the interaction or the lack of it has long been seen as the theoretical foundation for trust in society. Through interaction, trust is strengthened. If we bowl alone, erosion of trust is only a matter of time.

If, for example, neighborhoods become more polarized by socioeconomic status, it is a very important question if this erodes the trust in others and society in general. And on the other side of the coin, it is much easier to demonize and hate people you do not interact with. One of the earliest things I learned in Diplomacy is that when someone is not talking to you, they are very likely attacking you on the next turn. It is not easy to interact with someone and then treat them badly; it is much easier to cut ties and treat them badly. If society becomes more fragmented it is not only the disadvantaged groups that lose trust in society, it is also the advantaged groups that find it easier to treat the less advantaged badly.

As the virtual environments seem to become more and more polarized, it is essential that we listen, talk, and interact with different people, whether in neighborhoods or elsewhere. And the research on the divides and how to bridge them becomes even more relevant. Talk with the Kissinger on the other side of the table, otherwise he might attack you during the next turn.

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Footnotes and Flamingos: Land-Based Travels of a TIAS Fellow

Posted on January 23, 2026 by Oscar Winberg

By Antti Lampinen, Collegium Fellow, TIAS.

Conference travel tends to generate a peculiar blend of faff and delight. There are timetables to hit, transfers to juggle, presentations to polish in awkward corners of terminals, and then – occasionally almost as an afterthought – the conference itself. At least for myself, these trips are always bifocal. On the one hand, there is the official academic self, temporarily defined by a paper or a panel. On the other, there is everything else: the excitement and tedium of travel, local delicacies to be tasted, news doom-scrolled with one eye on roaming charges, late walks through familiar cities now oddly estranged, or unfamiliar ones briefly made one’s own. Around and after the conference programme one may want to visit an interesting museum, restaurant, bookshop, or vintage store, or perhaps spend a few days with old friends before heading back to wherever one calls home at that particular time.

For myself, however, this familiar rhythm had been overshadowed by unease for several years now. Working in a field that cannot plausibly claim to solve the climate crisis, I found it increasingly difficult to justify flying across continents for a few days of scholarly sociability and twenty minutes at a lectern. I have never enjoyed flying anyway, and the anodyne airport spaces – those interchangeable monuments to globalised luxury consumption – never held an ounce of interest to me. Quite the opposite: the sight of designer brands in flashy displays nowadays prompts me to imagine acts of vandalism, if anything. Carbon-offset schemes, meanwhile, seemed less like solutions than moral outsourcing. The pandemic unexpectedly clarified matters. Online conferences proved not only tolerable but often better: lighter on emissions, lighter on performative networking, and vastly more accessible from all over the world. In April 2020, I resolved not only to minimise flying but, where possible, to commit to land-based conference travel altogether.

View out a train window in Spain with a book in the foreground.

On the train in Spain. Among the travel reading I had with me Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse, a sweeping comparison of societal collapses from the Stone Age to the contemporary world.

By any sensible measure, 2025 was not the year to test that resolve. A move from Athens back to Finland, the demands of a first year at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, and a dense cluster of autumn conferences all conspired against the intrinsic complexity of planning land-based travel. Yet within three months I travelled to four academic events around Europe – by land. Finland is hardly well placed within the European rail network, but ferries to Sweden make Stockholm an effective gateway towards the continent. In preparation for the autumn travels, earlier in the year I had snapped up a sensible offer of 10 Interrail travel days, to be spent within 2 months, with the total cost of 357 €. My partner had done the same thing, so we were happily able to combine the conference travels with a decent amount of non-work-related exploration.

With the discounted Interrail passes and some logistical patience, what initially seemed quixotic turned out to be not only feasible but deeply pleasurable and conducive to deeper thought. A conference in Oxford (Domesticating enslavement through group discrimination: Mediterranean systems of enslavement from Antiquity to the Middle Ages) was folded into a brief return to my former hometown in Scotland and old friendships. Reaching a colloquium in Potsdam (Divination and Authority in Graeco-Roman Antiquity) brought with it a Berlin-Stockholm night train whose mechanical failures (not at all uncommon, I am sorry to say) provided both delay and camaraderie. Finally, Málaga (The People and Its Enemies: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Logics of Exclusion) and Oslo (a paper at a departmental research seminar) were linked in a single, improbable meander across the continent. Plans were adjusted, routes improvised, luggage packed to include both the Mediterranean and Nordic autumn weather. I had the chance to see several world-class museums along the travels, all for the first time: the Altes Museum in Berlin, the Musée gallo-romain in Lyon, and the Musée d’histoire de Marseille – all of which were rich in objects I had written about for years, but never yet had had the chance to take a proper peek at. In Oslo, I was given a wonderful tour of the university’s papyrological collection by Professor Anastasia Maravela.

The Interrail app pretty nicely illustrates the journeys conducted with each ticket: in my case, the Potsdam trip and the Oslo-Stockholm stretch were not made with an Interrail ticket.

Geography stipulated that all the journeys began with a Stockholm-Hamburg stretch. For Oxford, we headed onwards to Cologne and then to Brussels to catch the Eurostar; the return was essentially the same way. For Potsdam, I snored on straight to Berlin – from where the local trains take less than an hour to Potsdam – and took the same route back. The grand Málaga-Oslo anabasis headed from Hamburg via Frankfurt (quick döner break!) to Marseille and then via Madrid to Málaga; the return trip choo-chooed first to Barcelona – again with Madrid, since the Spanish rail network is very centripetally arranged – then to Lyon, and then via Hamburg and Göteborg to Oslo. The rough estimate for the distance covered in all the three journeys jointly would come to around 16 000 km of rail travel: the Interrail app helpfully offers all manner of interesting data on the journeys made with each ticket. When thinking about the overall costs of travel, the total price per kilometre comes to around 0,07€.

Yet what really mattered during these travels was not efficiency, but texture. Travel days became genuine working days – reading, writing, thinking – punctuated by scenery, conversation, snacks, and sleep. The gradual shift of landscapes mattered to me in particular. As an ancient historian, I care about landforms, vegetation, rivers, and distances: about how environments have shaped societies, and vice versa. Watching biomes change from the window of a train offered insights no flight ever could. Somewhere near Narbonne, salt marshes dotted with flamingos unfurled outside the carriage – an almost absurd reward for slowness, unnoticed by the businessmen across the aisle, eyes fixed on their screens.

Flamingos in salt marshes in Southern France.

Flamingos! The salt marshes near Narbonne and Beziers were still hosting some of the birds.

The distances covered in autumn 2025 were substantial; the emissions were not. The conferences were all excellent and stimulating, and their topics dovetailed nicely with my TIAS project. Overall, I had a growing sense that travel itself could align with and highlight scholarly values rather than undermine them. Land-based travel fits naturally with the ethos of the Slow Academy – it reminds one that speed is rarely neutral, and almost never free. Incidentally, the TIAS reading group in Helsinki has recently been reading Maggie Berg’s and Barbara Seeber’s well-known manifesto The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (University of Toronto Press, 2016). Such travel insists on limits, attentiveness, and continuity. Slowness is not an inconvenience to be endured for ethical reasons. It can be a condition of pleasure, attentiveness, and better work. Professors are not the only ones who might benefit from taking it slower.

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Learning from Loss: When the People You Study Pass Away

Posted on December 17, 2025 by Oscar Winberg

On Monday, I awoke to the news that director, actor, and political activist Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer and producer Michele Singer Reiner, had been killed in their home. Reiner became famous for his role as Michael Stivic on television’s All in the Family in the 1970s, established himself as one of the most respected directors in the 1980s with masterpieces such as This Is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride, and Stand by Me, and turned his fame and money into political activism fighting against the tobacco industry, for children’s education, and leading the charge for same-sex marriage in California and nationally. 

Rob Reiner: I'm going to make a coming of age drama, a fantasy adventure story, a romantic comedy, a psychological horror and then a courtroom drama.Us: Across your entire career?Reiner: In a 6 year period. Us: That sounds-Reiner: -Each one will be arguably the best movie in that genre.

— Richy Craven (@richycraven.bsky.social) 2025-12-15T08:04:08.202Z

The tragedy left me with a deeper sense of unease than I expected. I have spent the past decade researching the television show on which Reiner made his name and the political activism at which Reiner excelled.  

No, I didn’t lose a friend. In fact, I never met Reiner. But I have listened to countless hours of oral histories and interviews with him, read an endless number of articles about his work, and watched and re-watched him on the screen more times than I can count. So yes, I did lose somebody. You do form some kind of relationship with the people you study – even if we seldom talk enough about that connection. 

Rob Reiner at an event in 2016.

Rob Reiner at an event at the LBJ Presidential Library in 2016.

Most historians have the reassuring knowledge that their cast of characters are dead and buried long ago. It’s easier, in a certain sense, to riffle through somebody’s private letters or secret diary when you know that they are no longer around. Sometimes, I can feel a sense of envy towards my colleagues specializing in ancient Greece, medieval monasteries, or early modern nobility. 

The ethical considerations are different when you know that the people you study, and their family, are still among us. The responsibilities are also different. The subtitle of Claire Bond Potter and Renee C. Romano’s edited collection on Doing Recent History begins to capture the challenges inherent in the field: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back. There is not, however, a chapter on what happens when a central figure in your research passes away. 

I began thinking about these questions more around two years ago, when producer Norman Lear passed away at age 101. Lear is the central figure in my first monograph. When doing the research, I met with Lear, interviewed him on two occasions, and received access to his private archive. I have close friends I have spent less time with than the total number of hours I used reading Lear’s letters, listening to him talk about his work and life, reading about him in everything from the New York Times to Playboy (yes, they are digitized and available on Internet Archives), and laughing at his stories on Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and Jimmy Kimmel. 

It’s not exactly a parasocial relationship, the historian is not a fan and the archives are not mass mediated. But it is often a one-sided and non-reciprocal bond that is formed in the archive. Both Lear and Reiner were kind and decent people looking to make people laugh while working to make the world a better place, but this isn’t about idolization. I have colleagues who recognize a similar bond with the most vile and objectionable figures imaginable. I think this is about storytelling. The people you study are also the characters in your story. 

Novelists often talk about their fictional characters as real and beloved friends or even as their children. An article in the Atlantic, from 1887, on the subject notes that “[e]ven the elder Dumas, whose stories were made up of adventure and intrigue, with only here and there an attempt at portraiture, would shed tears over the memory of his genial giant, Porthos.” More recently, a study at the Edinburgh international book festival found that over 60% of authors could hear their characters speak or viewed them as capable of acting independently. Crime novelist Val McDermid, for example, acknowledged that “when I’m working on a novel, I have conversations in my head with them.” 

Academic writing is, of course, different. Scholars cannot form the characters through imaginative conversations. We are limited by the historical record and the ethical and methodological considerations of our disciplines. This also means we have no control over the actions or fates of our characters.  

Based on the number of messages I received from fellow historians after the tragic news of Reiner’s death, there is a wide recognition of the connection between scholar and the subject of the study even if none of my colleagues could find the right words to describe it. An “unsettling feeling” is the closest I have come to a definition.  

I recognize, of course, that the tragic death of Reiner is distinct in 1) his celebrity, 2) the violent nature of his death, and 3) the cruel reaction by the president of the United States to the news. Still, I would welcome further conversations on the general subject of how to cope with the passing of a figure you study and, in particular, I want to hear experiences from scholars in other fields (for example literature, media studies, or sociology) on this sensation. 

It should, perhaps, surprise no one that I turned to the trade of the historian to process my own thinking and feelings – going back to the sources (including revisiting some of his oral history interviews and re-watching Reiner in an episode of All in the Family and screening his directorial masterpiece A Few Good Men), talking with colleagues, and writing down my thoughts. That’s what historians do.

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September Vibes

Posted on September 30, 2025 by Oscar Winberg

For many in academia, September is the busiest month of the year. We are no exception. It’s been applications, meetings, deadlines, and syllabi all month long. And this September we, Xin Liu and Oscar Winberg, are also taking over the editorship of the TIAS blog. So, as the month is drawing to an end it seems appropriate for us to introduce ourselves and tell you a little bit about our work and our vision for the blog.


Who are you?
Xin: I’m Xin Liu. I am a TIAS collegium fellow, a social scientist, and a game enthusiast. I also hold the position of Associate Professor in Gender Studies at Karlstad University.

Oscar: I’m Oscar Winberg. I am a TIAS postdoctoral fellow, a historian, and a professional television viewer. I’m also the dude people turn to with their questions about Donald Trump.


What do you work on and why?
Xin: My research interests range from wealth and environment to popular culture and digitalization. At TIAS, I study the phenomenon of lottery and the promise of wealth in the Chinese context from historical cultural, political economic, and social perspectives. Before that, I researched issues such as the racial politics of language acquisition in the context of migration, air pollution and digitally mediated environmental politics, and the political economy and affective dynamics of digital games and gamification practices. In addition, I have been collaborating with artists exploring forms of artistic research on the topic of atmosphere. My work explores and explains the production of differences such as the mechanisms of exclusion, hierarchization, and exploitation that underpin socio-cultural, political economic, and technological processes.

Oscar: My focus is the relationship between media and politics in the modern history of the United States. For my TIAS project, I study congressional attempts to control, combat, and change television news through hearings, investigations, and legislation in the 1960s and 1970s. Before that, I worked on the role of television entertainment in political life in the modern United States. My work is informed by a belief that historians spend too much time consuming media content and too little time analyzing media coverage. Media forms popular understandings not only of candidates and campaigns but of what politics is and what politics can do.


What do you bring to the role of editor?
Xin: As a researcher and educator in multi-disciplinary fields and international settings, I find translation a crucial and challenging task. By translation I mean the process through which an idea is explained in a different language, concept, representational genre. Translation is important because it generates shared meaning making practices while making visible different ways in which a problem is understood, experienced and framed. Translation is also important for bridging academic and societal debates, especially in a political climate that is shaped by digitally mediated “echo chambers” that feed into anti-scientism, autocracy and authoritarianism. The blog can offer a space for engagement and time for reflection that breaks away from the algorithmically mediated social media opinion battle fields. As a co-editor of the blog, I am committed to facilitate the TIAS blog as a platform where basic science meets hot topics, and where practices of “in other words” are generative of new approaches to major issues defining our time.

Oscar: Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to participate in media discussions of the politics, culture, and history of the United States. I have almost ten years of experience of national and international press, radio, and television interviews. My take-away? We need academics to bring context, nuance, and expertise to public conversations. Finland, a country that regularly ranks among the first in media literacy and trust in the media, is actually a really good place to do this.
But an evening news interview on public broadcasting is very short. Last week, I was given three minutes (which is considered a lot in television news!) to explain the complex issues of free speech, government censorship, the consolidation of media companies, and Jimmy Kimmel. As co-editor of the TIAS blog, I cannot guarantee the reach of an international online publication such as The Conversation or even the local newspaper, but we can provide a space to try out new ideas (in more than three minutes!). And I believe that is valuable.

 

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“Music makes a city a home”: Notes on Helsinki Live Music Census 2024

Posted on February 14, 2025 by pmkole

Photo of Roosa Tuukkanen.

Roosa Tuukkanen
Research Assistant, Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS)

On 11 October 2024 we – as in the author of this blog post, TIAS research assistant Roosa Tuukkanen, and the TIAS Director, Martin Cloonan, undertook the first ever music census in Helsinki, as a part of European Live Music Census research project conducted by the OpenMusE consortium (www.openmuse.eu). The project comprised of a total of five Censuses taking place simultaneously across Europe in the cities of Helsinki, Vilnius, Lviv, Heidelberg and Mannheim. Our methodology followed the template provided by UK’s first ever national live music census in 2017 (see Brennan et al. 2020; Webster et al. 2018), drawing mainly on survey data, both quantitative and qualitative, regarding the relationships between the cultural, social and economic value of live music on the one hand and the current challenges facing the live music sector in Helsinki on the other. Additionally, during a 24-hour period on the snapshot census date of 11 October, a group of volunteers and the two researchers working on the Helsinki Census collected data to assess different sectors of the live music scene in the city – from open mics to pub gigs, concert halls and theatres. The online surveys were made available for venues (N=15 pre-census, N=12 post-census) and audiences (N=167) before and after the snapshot census date.

The project began with mapping of various kinds of venues located in Helsinki. Following our predecessors in the UK we adapted a broad definition of a ‘live music’, ranging from libraries hosting live music performances on a regular basis to musical theatre with live music playing a key role and featured DJ’s, all the way to open mics at community centres, concert halls and pubs to dedicated music venues of varying capacities. Following the open access live music venue list provided by the Live Music Advocacy Organization LiveFIN ry I eventually located 115 venues around Helsinki. A mapping of snapshot census date events was the next step, resulting in a total of 43 events identified to take place on 11 October. Mapping of venues and events was followed by a publicity campaign to get the local stakeholders, e.g. associations, unions, the city council and the media involved. The campaign included a search for volunteers for the Snapshot Census, conducted in cooperation with the Helsinki Live Music Association ELMU ry. A total of 13 volunteers signed up to visit and observe 26 events taking place in 24 venues on the Snapshot Census date. On the date around 10,400 people went to see live music solely in the 26 events our team visited across Helsinki. The number of music enthusiasts heading out to gigs, concerts, choirs and musical theatre equates to roughly 1,5% of Helsinki residents.

Martin and I set off the Census day by attending an open mic at a community centre in Oulunkylä. We decided to break the ice by performing a famous murder ballad by Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue, called “Where the wild roses grow” with the in-house band. Suffice to say there are still things to unpack in our professional relationship after working together closely for some time now… Only kidding! We spent such a warm and wholesome afternoon in Oulunkylä, engaging in thought-provoking conversations e.g. concerning the significance of attending open mics on a regular basis as a space for meaningful weekly social encounters built around shared love of live music. As it turned out, similar tones echoed across the dataset gathered during Census. Live music was considered a ‘unifying force’, ‘bringing people together,’ and ‘making a city a home’ in an increasingly polarised society both by the audiences and venues in their survey responses. This was accompanied by acknowledging the economic significance of the live music sector as an industry employing a considerable number of people (estimated at 30,000 in 2023 by Music Finland). By contrast, numerous concerns were raised concerning the accessibility of live music on the one hand, and the health and future of smaller venues on the other. As one of the responding smaller venues summarised their concerns about the venue’s future: “People would do well to remember, that the path to stadiums often starts from the smallest of venues”. The social and cultural importance of live music in fact formed the dominant strands of reasoning across the surveys, when asked about the significance of a healthy local live music scene. Personally, this notion seems worth highlighting, given the societal context in which the first-ever Helsinki Census was undertaken.

This took place over a transitional and turbulent period for cultural politics in Finland. Prior to Census the Finnish Government released the state budget for 2025 with significant cuts to the budgeting of Ministry of Education and Culture, concentrating explicitly on cutting the state budgeting for culture. In the light of the cuts Forum Artis (the national cooperation organ for Finnish Artists’ associations) in cooperation with the Mitta on täysi activist group launched a campaign opposing the budget cuts using the campaign slogan “Sakset seis! / Cut the cuts!”. The campaign comprised of the launch of the ‘Great Culture Petition’ and a mass demonstration which took place in Helsinki’s Kansalaistori square on 5 December. The demonstration was named after the organising activist group Mitta on täysi, which roughly translates into the saying ‘We’ve had enough!’. By the end of 2024 the petition had received over 100,000 signatures – and can be signed online until the municipal and regional elections of spring 2025: https://www.adressit.com/sakset_seis. The petition will be handed over to policymakers in April 2025.

“Currently the VAT increases and e.g. all cuts in social benefits destroy the entire country’s economy, and these also affect the purchasing power of event industry customers in a very negative way. These changes should be reversed immediately.” (Venue survey respondent)

Similarly, we have our work cut out for us in terms of communicating the results and findings to policymakers in support of local live music ecology. While having been described as ‘time-consuming, recourse intensive…and far from straightforward’ (Behr et al 2021, 111), a live music census has also proven to be a useful tool for illustrating the varying and overlapping forms of value of music to decision-makers, and has accordingly resulted in policy changes (Behr et al. 2020). We hope that our findings will encourage future efforts and that data gathered will result in action.

We will be launching the report for the Helsinki Live Music Census 2024 and any friend of live music is warmly welcome this event. As our findings illustrate, the more, the merrier.

Please join us in Helsinki at Bar Loose on Thursday 27 February at 5 PM & sign up here: https://link.webropolsurveys.com/EP/8C65BDA5EDF1CB37.

Pidetään ääntä yhdessä, let’s keep making our voices heard together.

 

References

Behr, A., Brennan, M. and Cloonan, M. 2020. “The UK live music census: making live music count in Glasgow, Newcastle, Oxford, and beyond” in C. Ballico and A. Watson (ed.): Music Cities: evaluating a global cultural policy concept. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.167-188.

Behr, A., Brennan, M., Cloonan, M. and Webster, E. 2021. “Stop making census! Some experiential reflections on conducting a Live Music Census” in R. Osborne (ed.) Music By Numbers. London: Intellect, pp.104-120.

Brennan, M., A. Behr, M. Cloonan, E. Webster, and J. Ansell. 2020. UK Live Music Census Toolkit: How-to-Guide. Available online: http://uklivemusiccensus.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/UK-Live-Music-Census-Toolkit-how-to-guide.pdf. Accessed 20 January 2025.

LiveFIN ry (2024) Elävän musiikin toimialatutkimus 2023 [The annual report of the live music industry 2023]. Available online: Elavan-musiikin-toimialatutkimus-2023.pdf. Accessed 20 January 2025.

Music Finland 2023: Finnish Music Industry in 2023. Available online: www.musicfinland.com/en/finnish-music-industry-in-2023. Accessed 29 January 2025.

Webster, E., Brennan, M., Behr, A, Cloonan, M. and Ansell, J. (2018) Valuing live music: The UK Live Music Census 2017 report. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh.

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Breast Milk is Best but…does it also contain Virtues / Vices?

Posted on November 30, 2023 by pmkole

Photo of Ranjana Saha.

Ranjana Saha
Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) COFUND Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) Turku Intersectoral Excellence Scheme (TIES) Fellow, Department of European and World History

Hello everyone, my current MSCA COFUND TIAS TIES project is about decolonising ‘scientific’ motherhood titled ‘Mothers, Mothercraft & Materialities: Urban India and Transnational Histories of ‘Scientific’ Motherhood in the Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries’.

I am trained in the field of social history of medicine in colonial India. I have completed my PhD research from the Department of History, University of Delhi, Delhi, India. My research was funded by national and international grants which allowed me to conduct research at various archives and libraries in Delhi and Kolkata, India, and in London, United Kingdom. I will remain indebted to my PhD supervisor Dr. Biswamoy Pati for this entire journey and beyond. His untimely passing has left an irreplaceable void. I wrote this book to fulfil what was actually his dream.

I am, therefore, happy to share that my PhD thesis has finally begun to see the light of day as it has now turned into a book, Modern Maternities Medical Advice about Breastfeeding in Colonial Calcutta (2023), published by Routledge (London & New York) about three months ago. Here is the link in case you might like to have a look sometime:

https://www.routledge.com/Modern-Maternities-Medical-Advice-about-Breastfeeding-in-Colonial-Calcutta/Saha/p/book/9781032066196

So, what can I say to encourage you to give this book a chance? Well, I think my strongest argument would have to be that Modern Maternities is one of the first books to focus entirely on breastfeeding advice in colonial India with a spotlight on Calcutta.

The subject of breastfeeding in colonial Calcutta is an important yet relatively unexplored topic. ‘Pure’/ ‘polluting’ and ‘good’ / ‘bad’ biocultural qualities believed to have been transmissible through blood and milk are central to my interrogation of the crisscrossing perceptions of colonial modernity, medicine and motherhood. The rationale behind the book is to bring to light rare British and Bengali textual and visual materials on breastfeeding in colonial Calcutta.

It explores medical opinions about breastfeeding by the bhadramahila (my focus is mainly on the ‘respectable’ Bengali-Hindu women from upper and middle classes and castes), memsahibs (European women), and dais (indigenous midwives and/or wet nurses from lower classes and/or castes, derived from dhā meaning ‘to nurse’). I locate breastfeeding advice at the centre of the very making of ‘modern’ maternities in nineteenth and twentieth century Calcutta. Maternities were usually characterised by age, bodily and emotional ‘maturity’, socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds of the mother and wet nurse, various infant feeding methods, customary and socio-religious beliefs and practices, and medicalised guidelines about motherhood, often popularised as ‘mothercraft’ and central to the global infant welfare movement.

Could a mother or wet nurse feed milk along with her virtues/vices through breast milk? Why was medical surveillance over ‘who’ was breastfeeding the baby necessary? Were ‘race’, class and/or caste, and character relevant when breastfeeding? Did breastfeeding figure in the very definition of who was a ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ mother? How was breastfeeding related to ideas and initiatives concerning the medicalisation of childbirth and midwifery? How did child welfare exhibitions display ‘ideal’ motherhood and care of the newborn? Were tradition/modernity, colonialism and nationalism connected with breastfeeding? Did breastfeeding advice in a colonial setting like Calcutta have global resonances? These are few of the questions I raise and attempt to find answers to in my book – I am curious to learn what would be your main question(s) if you decide to read this book?

If you are interested in my research, please feel free to contact me at ranjana.saha@utu.fi

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