Safety and Security in Diverse Society Research Group Seminar II

The research group Safety and Security in Diverse Society organises a methodological summer school at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu on 10-11 June 2024. The keynote speaker is Dr Lou Harvey from the University of Leeds (UK).

The seminar is open to everyone interested in creative, participatory, and embodied methods – scholars, teachers, artists, activists, and others who might be interested – and includes lectures and practical workshops. We particularly welcome the members of The Co-research Network.

In this years’ seminar the focus will be on analysing materials that are produced collaboratively, creatively and through embodied means. We also welcome participants to present and discuss their ongoing and published research in a supportive and collegial environment. The seminar will be held in English. Participants can attend free of charge onsite in Joensuu or join in the lectures virtually via Zoom. 

Participation requires registration by Sunday 26 May. The final program and Zoom links will be sent to participants after the registration has closed.

The seminar is organised in collaboration with Borders, Mobilities and Cultural encounters - BOMOCULT research community and the Department of Social Sciences.

Program

Monday 10 June

12.15–13.30 Lou Harvey’s lecture: 'To be is to communicate': Neuroqueering understanding for communicative hospitality in research
13.30–13.50 Coffee/tea
13.50–15.15 Workshop convened by Lou: Bring Up the Bodies: Listening in (post)qualitative research (onsite)
Following the talk, this workshop offers an invitation to collectively consider:
1) what happens when we do not have access to meaning in the ways we might expect; 2) how we might listen - as researchers, and fellow beings - to others' embodied being-as-communicating and 3) how we might better accept others' performances of their being, rather than trying to represent them.
15.15–15.30 Refreshments
15.30–17.30 Participants’ presentations (onsite)
18.30– Evening program (food self-funded)

Tuesday 11 June

9.15–10.00 Open meeting of the Co-research Network (onsite, to be confirmed)
10.15–11.30 Jari Martikainen’s lecture: Visual content and rhetorical analysis (onsite and zoom)
11.30–12.30 Lunch (self-funded)
12.30–14.00 Sanna Ryynänen’s and Tiina Sotkasiira’s workshop: Analysing Affects. Reflexive embodied dialogue as a method of analysis (onsite)
14.00–14.30 Planning for future activities (onsite)

Abstract:
'To be is to communicate': Neuroqueering understanding for communicative hospitality in research
I have been trained as a qualitative researcher in the field of Education. Qualitative researchers often claim an emancipatory orientation to their participants, seeking to 'give voice' to or 'make voices heard' for marginalised people - an invitation to speak which appears to be a hospitable act. However, in my research in intercultural and peace education, and as an autistic person, I have found this hospitality to operate largely within binary orientations to knowledge (e.g. self/other, host/guest) and within the communicative parameters of sayability, which culminate in representational understanding of the Other. However, as Mikhail Bakhtin knew, 'to be is to communicate' (1984). In this talk I therefore offer the concept of neuroqueering, an intentional creative estranging of our own bodyminds (following Walker 2021), as a tool for expanding communicative hospitality and enabling us to let go of the tyranny of understanding in our engagements with others. I posit that neuroqueering understanding offers a more hospitable approach to research which can enable us to engage with the unsayable, and which moves beyond binary relations towards the more complex and fluid positions of host, guest, and stranger to both others and ourselves (following Basil 2019). 

Speakers:
Lou Harvey (she/they) is Associate Professor in Education at University of Leeds, UK. Lou's work in intercultural and peace education focuses on expanding the concept of voice to engage with the communication of the unsayable, using methods and approaches at the intersection of language and the arts and with a commitment to a collaborative and neuroqueer ethos. Lou is a reader and writer of fiction, a thwarted foodie, and a cheerful iconoclast with the eyeshadow of a much younger woman.

Jari Martikainen works as a University Lecturer in Social Psychology at the University of Eastern Finland. His research areas include social representations theory, visual and social representations of teachership and leadership, populist communication, arts-based and visual research methods and teaching methods of art history

Sanna Ryynänen and Tiina Sotkasiira both work at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Eastern Finland, Sanna as a university lecturer in social pedagogy and Tiina as an associate professor in social and public policy. As part of their academic and activist work they, for example, are part of the Breaking Borders collective which aims to make visible bordering practices that exclude and marginalize asylum seekers and refugees in Finnish society, as well as to identify and participate in activities of de-bordering to challenge and remove such borders.

For further information, please contact Tiina Sotkasiira, email tiina.sotkasiira@uef.fi, phone +358504423770.