University of Turku Collegia TCSMT & TIAS

Reima Välimäki is a Postdoctoral Researcher at TIAS and the Department of Cultural History, as well as an Adjunct Professor of Medieval History

When writing this, my child is having a cold. Again. Once again, cancelled meetings. Again, a time reserved for concentrated reading and data collection is interrupted by wiping a runny nose and pleas to put Peppa Pig on. Peppa Pig (incarnated as a balloon) was also floating behind the back of my colleague while we had a Zoom meeting. He wisely pointed out that we have a certain disadvantage compared to the medieval intellectuals we study. Peppa hardly broke Bernard of Clairvaux’s contemplation – but of course, Bernard had chosen what we hadn’t: a life in celibacy.

Bernard of Clairvaux, who was not interrupted by Peppa Pig. However, in 1146 he saw a vision of lactating Virgin Mary, but that is another story.

The first comparison that occurs to most researchers with family is not, however, cloistered medieval men but our colleagues without children. In the horrible Academic September in Finland (our very special purgatory with the start of the semester and major funding calls overlapping) such a comparison becomes acute and frustrating. How are we to compete with colleagues conversing with Kant while our heads are filled with the opening tune of Caillou? How is one supposed to produce a paradigm shift when sometimes it is a challenge to shift all the puzzles and children’s books that have invaded one’s desk? The “career breaks” line in the academic CV does not quite cover all the everyday interruptions that come with the package.

Yet, I still manage to believe that children can enrich also our research in addition to the obvious enrichment of our personal lives. At least in the humanities, where the focus is the wonderfully messy human condition. In the past decades, the array of subjects covered by academic history has expanded immensely: workers, women, family, children, minorities, everyday life, sexuality, disability, to name but a few. Behind this development are not only paradigm shifts but the increased diversity of academic historians.

While personal experience does not guide our research methods, it very much affects what we pay attention to in the first place. I noticed this when re-reading the Stettin inquisition protocols from 1392-1394, a group of documents I’ve been used in various studies since my MA thesis. However, only after becoming a father myself, I spotted this piece of information:  (I have written about it before in Finnish)

In her interrogation, a 24-year-old woman Grete Joris told that both she and her husband Mathias had been summoned by the inquisitor. Mathias had been unable to answer the summons because after walking a mile, he had had to turn back home carrying their son. Probably it was a small child getting tired – or a father realising that he cannot carry the child for the whole journey, dozens of miles. A very human moment, and familiar to anyone trying to walk with a toddler. And one I only paid attention to after struggling with my own kid.

So while taking care of our children – or elderly relatives – inevitably occupies our research time, we can perhaps cherish the thought that those frustrating moments make us more aware of the fragility, imperfectness, exhaustion, and support given and needed that are an essential part of humanity past and present.

I am yet to discover how to frame that in a grant application.

Nina Gieseler, Collegium Researcher, Space Research Laboratory

The Sun, humanity’s personal star, is known by all of us. We all have embraced it’s warmth, enjoyed beautiful sunsets, or experienced a sunburn. Like everybody might have their own perspective on the Sun, my personal relationship is a particular one. While I really enjoy sunbathing I see the Sun also as a kind of employer. The Sun produces what I study: energetic particles, accelerated to high energies in solar eruptions.

I am, therefore, very familiar with the Sun’s rough side, its dangerous aspects, its ugly face. I imagine the Sun as a dragon. Right now it is a sleepy dragon, just about to fully wake up. That might sound a bit scary, and yes, it is! While the Sun never stops to shine, this other kind of radiation, the energetic particle radiation, occurs sporadically, and if it hits Earth, it can harm all life! We call this space weather, and when these solar storms blow, you better get inside if you are an astronaut; you better power off if you are a satellite. And you better don’t fly with a plane over the poles, where the Earth’s magnetic field can’t significantly shield you.

The last deep-sleep phase was in 2019/2020, characterized by the dragon not changing its appearance, nothing happening, boring even. This is called solar minimum. We know this phase but we also know what comes after! The question is, “when will it happen and how bad will it be?” Continue reading →

Mona Mannevuo is a Postdoctoral Researcher at TIAS and the Department of Contemporary History

This post is based on a talk given at the international online symposium Across Boundaries in Sciences. The event was hosted by All European Academics (ALLEA) and the Council of Finnish Academies on 5 May 2021. The program, talks and more detailed information of the event can be found here.

Interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity… The cherished idea of crossing boundaries in science has many names. Sometimes, we forget that boundary crossings may be a risky business for young academics working in highly precarious and competitive academia.

Although I am at an early stage of my career, I have a multidisciplinary academic background in the humanities and social sciences. I did my MA in cultural history (2009), but I defended my PhD in gender studies (2015). After finishing this PhD, I was employed as a research fellow in a FiDiPro project ‘Social Science for the Twenty-First Century: Employment Activation and the Changing Economy-Society Relation’. Subsequently, I was recruited to the ‘Tackling Biases and Bubbles in Participation’ (BIBU) consortium. While contributing to this project, my research environment was the Centre for Parliamentary Studies.

Since January 2021, I have been working on my own three-year post-doctoral project at Turku Institute for Advanced Studies. At TIAS, my affiliation is contemporary history, but I am also leading a project titled ‘Communication across borders: Shifting boundaries of politics, science and public relations’, which is funded by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation.

Working in these different environments has taught me several things. First of all, my background has equipped me with rich knowledge of various fields and perhaps even strategic tools to survive in contemporary academia. However, academia is quite conventional and hierarchical, and I sometimes feel like an outsider (see Interdisciplinary Madness comic). In fact, I can feel a bit queasy when someone asks what my actual field of study is. I would like to pretend that it is just my curiosity that has led me to this situation, but truthfully, it is the difficulty of making long-term plans in contemporary academia.

Academic life as a succession of projects

Whereas ‘interdisciplinarity’ sounds exciting as a buzzword, the reality in interdisciplinary projects can be quite exhaustive and draining. In particular, early-career scholars often need to change topics rather drastically according to the themes of the projects for which they are employed.

It also feels like the society puts unrealistic expectations on interdisciplinary projects: they are expected to change the world, solve societal maladies and yield an astronomical return on invest. The problem is not the idea of interdisciplinarity but the project culture in which, paraphrasing Eve Boltanski and Luc Chiapello (2007), the actual content of the project seems less important than the general impression of networked scholars’ ability to juggle competing commitments at once.

But science is not magic. In 2015, when Nature published a special issue on interdisciplinarity, the editorial stated that ‘true interdisciplinary science cannot be rushed’. We may have hopes, but interdisciplinarity research is a risky business, because it often takes time to achieve results. It also takes time to build academic relationships and to see the value in other approaches, but competitive, fast-paced academia does not always foster collegiality.

Therefore, as the Nature editorial continued, we must rethink hierarchies: ‘All involved must be confident that colleagues from other disciplines use equal academic rigour and scientific standing, even if the methods used in rival fields seem alien’. Otherwise, the project exists as one main subject that depletes most of the resources and leaves the partners as orbiting satellites.

The main risk for young scholars working on interdisciplinary projects is that they may not offer career advancement but, rather, advance someone else’s strategic agenda. Thus, early-career scholars need to be acutely aware of the possible power relations in interdisciplinary projects. It is easy to make a project look interdisciplinary, but it is on the ‘shop floor’ where epistemological boundaries are negotiated.

In reality, the political economy of academia does not encourage young scholars to take the risk of crossing boundaries. Instead, they learn to promote interdisciplinarity within proper limits. They learn to ask critical questions, but not too critical, because there is no time for that. They learn to follow their curiosity, but not too much; interesting issues are noted but never actually explored, because the next project is waiting.

The order of knowledge

The problems in interdisciplinary project culture are not entirely new. They were already puzzling critical scholars in the 1950s. In The Organization Man (1956), William H. Whyte ponders how ‘the bureaucratization of the scientist’ leads to ‘projectism’, where scholars play a role set for them by funding committees with the hope of producing a sophisticated research design:

As one young scientist, Walter Roberts puts it: ‘There is a tremendous difference between science as it is done in the laboratory and science as it is reported. True science is helter-skelter, depending on one’s hunches, angers, and inspirations, and the research itself is done in a very personal fashion. Thirty or forty years ago [in the 1920s] it was written up this way. In reporting a great discovery a scientist would say, ‘I was working on such-and-such reaction when I dropped some sulphuric acid by mistake. When I examined it I found, to my surprise, a strange thing going on…’ But today nobody would write it up this way.

It seems, then, that academics have struggled with the idea of instrumental, top-down, problem-focused research for decades. What worries me about the current trend of evidence-based policymaking is that it may give the impression that there is some apolitical, pragmatic way to turn research into the administrative language of ‘best practices’ and ‘what works’. Instead, we have to admit that uncertain times are filled with messy, conflicting interests; the more evidence we have, the more decisions and selections we must make and the more accountable we are for our actions.

Interdisciplinarity as a buzzword may give an impression of consensus. However, critical interdisciplinary research is far from finding the one best solution. Transformative interdisciplinary fields, such as cultural studies and science and technology studies, emerged from the various disciplinary subfields. Indeed, the most interesting problems often evolve in the margins, and they are so strange that they cannot be understood or explained without consulting various actors within and outside the university. From a critical perspective, interdisciplinarity is a strategy – not for instrumental purposes but for restructuring the order of knowledge.

References:

Boltanski, Luc & Chiapello, Eve. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Gregory Elliott. Verso, 2007. Originally published 1999.

Editorial, ‘Mind Meld’. Nature, Volume 525 Issue 7569, 16 September 2015.

Whyte, William H. The Organization Man. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Originally published 1956.

Helena Duffy is a Collegium Researcher at TIAS and the Department of Literary Studies

I have been invaded, I am under siege. There was one of them first. A fast-moving, black spot on the kitchen counter. Then two, three, twenty, three hundred. Moving forward, swaying lines. The man from the management company looking after the terrace where I live tells me that it’s a very Finnish problem. “Every other rivitalo has ants”, he says. My landlady (a biologist) recommends a “product”, just as if it were a shampoo that was to give my hair more volume and shine. In “Prisma”, I locate a shelf full of ant “products”, which, as I later read on the internet, kill the ants by acting on their nervous system. I imagine a Novichok agent-type poison and an ant dying in terrible agony. No. I buy vinegar, a cheap packet of coffee, washing soda and a big packet of salt. I locate lavender and pepper mint in the set of sauna oils. With these scents, I will tell the ants they are unwelcome; they will understand and go. As simple as that. But they don’t listen or can’t hear.

What to do? I talk to mum, of course, but I don’t get the answer I need (“you need to learn to coexist with the ants”). I wish I could go and see a rabbi. But what if he tells me to poison the ants? Or, worse still, what if he tells me that I have to take the decision myself and then live with it for the rest of my life. For lack of a real one, I conjure up an imaginary rabbi and go through various arguments. Ok. It is my house, you (the ants) have come in uninvited, I have the right to defend myself. Then the ants’ defending barrister gets to her feet and asks me where is my unconditional Derridean hospitality about which I so eloquently and passionately write in my work. Changing her tone, she says that the terrace had been built in the woods, ants’ legitimate territory. So I am the intruder, not them. No, no, no. The house has been here for thirty years, so I am the legitimate tenant. Human law clearly doesn’t work here. God’s law? Moral law?

Or should I look for an answer in philosophy and literature, my familiar stomping ground? I don’t have far to travel. The Jewish mother of Hélène Cixous, on whose book, The Day I Wasn’t There (2000), I have been working recently, fumigates her clinic with a German product which “killed all the pests”, but which, surprisingly, was banned after the war. Her daughter says: “One cannot kill what one can see”. I can see the ants all right. So what? I serve them the Novichok agent-type “product” in a bait, they crawl away and die out of my sight, and the next day no ants in my kettle, dishwasher, honey, sugar, oven, fridge, butter, yoghurt, bread bin, dustbin. Or perhaps, to rephrase Cixous following Levinas, “You cannot kill the one whose face you can see and whom you can look in the eye.”

It’s widely known that Levinas didn’t care for animals, let alone ants. Ok, there is Bobby, but the stray dog greeting Jewish POWs with cheerful barking and tail wagging interests the philosopher only insofar as the dog recognises a human in him. Despite Levinas’s pledge to rescue Bobby from the slavery of symbolism, Levinas enslaves him as a sign of his own humanness. And so Bobby floats out of the camp and out of the narrative, his lot a matter of indifference to the philosopher. At least you can look the dog in the eye. Have a face-to-face with the dog (but not with a snake, according to Levinas, for whom the snake simply doesn’t have a face). But an ant? Where is the border between what deserves to live and what deserves no moral consideration? Size? Intelligence? Colour? Shape of the skull? And who am I, in any case, to install this border, shift it, erase it?

Agamben: zoe (the naked life) and bios (life in the polis). Is the ant the naked, mere life that knows no culture, law, morality, language, writing, philosophy, Bach and Goethe? And therefore can be killed with impunity? Does the ant not have its own polis that is perhaps even more sophisticated and complex than mine? Or is the ant, like me, the naked life that merits respect. My situation is the reification of Cixous’s dream about her house being invaded by all sorts of needy creatures. Shoo, go away. I need to work, write, live, eat, sleep, all undisturbed. I have a small child. Etc. There are no answers to my questions, at least I cannot find them in the quagmire of relativism into which I have got myself. If I have no law or religion, I should perhaps be true to my work and to what I preach. And I preach hospitality.

Reima Välimäki is a Postdoctoral Researcher at TIAS and the Department of Cultural History, as well as an Adjunct Professor of Medieval History

In Emily St. John Mandel’s science fiction novel Station Eleven, a nomadic group of actors and musicians travels through North America devastated by a lethal pandemic, ”Georgia flu”. The troupe performs William Shakespeare’s plays, which have found new appeal in a society where life is uncertain, much like in Shakespeare’s days.

Although our real-life pandemic has proven to be less dramatic than in dystopic fiction, it has marked our society, and we have turned to books written in troubled times. A year ago, library loans of works like Boccaccio’s Decameron and Albert Camus The Plague surged. Recently, Ylioppilaslehti (student magazine for the University of Helsinki) asked four historians to name old books that help to understand our own times (article in Finnish). Recommendations were: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Gilgamesh, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Empire 1875–1914.

My personal favourite, and the favourite of many others in the course of centuries, is The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, a sixth-century Roman senator. Sometimes described as the last of the classical and first of the medieval authors, Boethius, and above all his Consolation, was copied, translated, commented and cited throughout the Middle Ages. Neither did humanist scholars shun Boethius, unlike many medieval best-sellers.

Illustrations from a manuscript of The Consolation of Philosophy (Italy, 1385). MS Hunter 374 (V.1.11), folio 4r. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Consolation of Philosophy, written as a dialogue between a female personification of Philosophy and the narrator, describes the problems of evil, free will, destiny, and virtues. Boethius, writing as a convict waiting for his execution, is preoccupied with the unfairness of the world: why do the virtuous suffer while vile men succeed:

Harsh punishment, deserved by the criminal, afflicts the innocent. Immoral scoundrels now occupy positions of power and unjustly trample the rights of good men. (1. Poem 5, transl. Richard Green, 1962).

Such reflections have certainly appealed to all who have felt that the Feel of Fortune has cast them down. With a certain irony, the Consolation has also been favourite reading of those who have condemned others to prison, torture and death. Boethius is the only author – besides the Bible – that the late fourteenth-century inquisitor Petrus Zwicker, whom I studied in my recent book, cites in his writings. Perhaps reading Boethius was a healthy reminder: Zwicker’s days were the times of plague, schism and war, and Fortune was fickle.

Boethius’s Consolation is definitely reading for troubled times. For those who find the original Latin a bit arduous, there are many translations available. For Finnish readers, I can recommend Juhani Sarsila’s translation (2001).

References:

Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. Filosofian lohdutus. Suom. Juhani Sarsila. Vastapaino, 2001.

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by Richard Green. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1962.

Onninen, Oskari, ’Tuntuuko, että maailma on monimutkainen paikka ja elämä hankalaa’. Ylioppilaslehti 7.4.2021.

St. John Mandel, Emily, Station Eleven, 2014.

Välimäki, Reima. Heresy in Late Medieval Germany: The Inquisitor Petrus Zwicker and the Waldensians. York Medieval Press, 2019.