The language that we use to describe the world around us is not an objective mirror of reality. Instead, it is a lens that profoundly shapes what we see and what we do not see. It shapes what questions we ask, which problems we identify and what kind of solutions we design.
But that language is anchored in our values, our assumptions about how the world works and our worldviews. The essence of those layers of our understanding of the world is that they are not-reflected-upon. That makes them omnipresent and at the same time hidden in plain sight.
In this workshop we will work with concepts and attempt to figure out what our own underlying worldviews are. What are the unquestioned assumptions in your research or work? In which worldviews are you embedded? And what happens if you challenge those? Through a number of steps in which you need others to show you your blind spots we develop a higher level of cognitive lenience. To become more aware of the choices that underlie our understanding. And maybe to come to even better questions to ask!
Participants are required to do two (relatively short) pieces of reading in advance of the workshop:
Marco te Brömmelstroet holds the chair of Urban Mobility Futures at the University of Amsterdam. In his teaching he focuses on the reciprocal relations between urban form and individual mobility behavior. In his research he is interested in the role of cycling in individual lives, the city and society. As founding academic director of the Lab of Thought he aims to accelerate mobility transitions through unsolicited provocations and training cognitive leniency.
How does the idea of ‘a national literature’ come to be established? What part does the writing of literary history play in such a process, and what, exactly, is literary history a history of? If the scope of national literatures has largely followed the contours of the main European vernacular languages, what has been the role of philology in determining the character and standing of these languages? How should we now write about the process by which any given national literature came to be an object of academic study?
This workshop will, in the first instance, address these questions by examining an example that was to have a global influence – the origins in the nineteenth century of the teaching of ‘English Literature’ – but participants will be encouraged to reflect comparatively on similarities and differences in the case of other vernacular literatures.
Participants will be required to do two (relatively short) pieces of reading in advance of the workshop:
Stefan Collini is Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of, among other books, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006), Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (2008), Common Writing: Literary Culture and Public Debate (2016), and The Nostalgic Imagination: History in English Criticism (2019). His edition (with Helen Thaventhiran) of William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words appeared in 2020, and his edition of George Orwell, Selected Essays in 2021. He is also a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Nation, and other publications. In addition, he has contributed to international debates about higher education, principally through his 2012 book What Are Universities For? and its sequel Speaking of Universities (2017).
Public anthropology is a strand of anthropology that focuses on making research results accessible beyond academia. This workshop will take a hands-on approach to exploring the practical aspects of how to best communicate anthropological insights to broader audiences, including policymakers and the media. We also discuss the importance of considering ethical dimensions of public anthropology and community collaboration. The topics covered include different methodological approaches and various communication and outreach strategies. The goal of the workshop is to give participants the skills and knowledge to apply anthropological insights to real-world issues and communicate the impact of their work effectively to different audiences.
Marko Uibu is an Associate Professor of Social Innovation at the Institute of Social Studies, University of Tartu. With an interdisciplinary background in anthropology and media studies, his research focuses on various aspects of social change and innovation, spanning religious and health perspectives to the application of co-creative methods. He is a co-founder of the Estonian Social Innovation Lab and has served as an expert on several social innovation programs, including a co-creative intervention aimed at increasing children’s physical activity in schools (Liikuma Kutsuv Kool).
Maarja Kaaristo is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tallinn University and Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Tourism Mobilities at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Her research (in the intersections of anthropology, geography and tourism studies) focuses on inland waterways, (rural) tourism, water mobilities, place management, and qualitative research methods. She is also active in the voluntary sector and has experience in disseminating her research to wider audiences and relevant stakeholders.
Environmental humanities developed in the last few decades as modes of inquiry that recognise that humans are part of – and change – living conditions on the planet. Ultimately, the aspiration is that humanities research can help build social and cultural understanding and societal resilience. These are tall orders, but there are successful examples in the environmental humanities. The workshop will discuss the conundrum of academic detachment from and engagement with promoting pro-environmental behaviour, consider some effective strategies, and identify how the humanities have made strides forward in recent years.
In preparation, the students should read:
Holm et al., Humanities for the Environment—A Manifesto for Research and Action https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/4/4/977.
Chapter 5 ‘Translating the Humanities’ in the open access book Holm, Jarrick & Scott, Humanities World Report, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137500281_5
And for a radically different view:
Stover, There is no case for the humanities, https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/no-case-humanities/
Poul Holm is Professor of Environmental History at Trinity College Dublin, as well as Vice President of the Academia Europaea (Chair of the Humanities Class, 2018–2025) and former President of the European Alliance for the Social Sciences and Humanities (2015–2018). His research focuses on human exploitation of the sea. Over the past twenty-five years, he has led major research projects that have established marine environmental history as a new and productive field of collaboration between the humanities and the natural sciences. From 2021 to 2027, funded by the European Research Council, he is leading a team to build a World Atlas of Human Marine Exploitation over the last two millennia. His most recent main publications (all open access) include: P. Holm, P. W. Hayes, and J. Nicholls. Historical Marine Footprint for Atlantic Europe, 1500-2019. Ambio 53 (2024): 624–36; P. Holm, SDG14. Exploiting and managing the alien and unseen world below water. In: Martin Gutman and Daniel Gorman (eds.), Before the SDGs: A Historical Companion to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Oxford University Press, 2022); P. Holm, J. Barrett, C. Brito & F. Ludlow, New challenges for the Human Oceans Past agenda. Open Research Europe 2:114 (2022), 1–24.; P. Holm, J. Nicholls, P. W. Hayes, J. Ivinson, B. Allaire, Accelerated Extractions of North Atlantic Cod and Herring, 1520-1790. Fish and Fisheries (2022).
This workshop poses a question on how architecture, and the built environment more broadly, constructs its public and how do changes in the material environment mirror the socio-political circumstances of its era. We will focus on selected cases from the history of 20th and 21st century cultural institutions that highlight the interaction between the public and architecture in a distinctive way: houses of culture as “social condensers” in 1920s avant-garde, social-democratic vs Socialist cultural centres of the Cold War period, and rooms for creative and cultural industries in the neoliberal times. In each case we will look at the ways in which spatial means and design features have been utilised for activating the users or encouraging participation and test their efficiency or relevance in today’s circumstances. More broadly, we will ask about the relationship between politics and space and how this relationship has been mediated in different periods. The workshop will combine methods of cultural history and theory with tools from architectural history.
Participants are asked to read one text in advance:
Kenny Cupers, The Cultural Center: Architecture as Cultural Policy in Postwar Europe. – Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74, no. 4 (December 2015), 464-484.
Andres Kurg is professor of architectural history and theory at the Institute of Art History, Estonian Academy of Arts, in Tallinn. His academic work specialises on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, with a special focus on the influence of technological transformations and changes in everyday life to architecture from 1960s to 1980s.
Outreach activities provide opportunities to broaden the impact of research, encourage citizen science and ensure that academic work positively contributes to society at large. This hands-on workshop is designed for PhD students who want to improve their outreach efforts and gain practical experience with user-centred design tools such as personas and the customer journey. Applying a design thinking approach – whether in disseminating research findings, promoting a project or seeking public support – offers a fresh perspective on the stakeholders. In addition, researchers may assume that they understand their target audience and their needs, but the demographics and expectations of individuals attending events may differ significantly from their initial perceptions. With these considerations in mind, participants of the workshop will work in small groups on different scenarios and use design thinking tools to design meaningful outreach activities. By the end of the session, all participants will have gained hands-on experience with real-world scenarios that are valuable for planning impactful and strategic outreach initiatives.
Participants are asked to read one text in advance:
El-Adawy, S., Lau, A. C., Sayre, E. C., & Fracchiolla, C. (2024). Motivation and needs of informal physics practitioners. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 20(1), 010125. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.20.010125
Tuuli Kurisoo is an archaeologist with a passion for service design and design thinking tools, and is currently a researcher at the School of Humanities at Tallinn University. She has extensive experience in public outreach through her Marie Sklodowska-Curie post-doctoral fellowship and beyond, engaging audiences through a variety of media and formats, including popular science articles, websites, exhibitions, audio theatre, public lectures, colouring books and workshops for middle school students. Through her work, Tuuli aims to provide new ways for different audiences to engage with archaeology and hopes to inspire individuals to appreciate and care for archaeological heritage.
This workshop will consider two recent attempts to define the impact of developments in digital and computing technologies as they are putting pressure on two areas of intellectual work central to the Humanities: the criticism of culture (including the identification and evaluation of culture’s objects); the nature and remit of ethical inquiry, especially the articulation and scrutiny of ‘humanistic values’.
Students are asked to read two recent essays:
Lori Emerson, ‘Interfaced’, in Leah Price and Matthew Rubery (eds), Further Reading, Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020), pp. 350-362;
John Tasioulas, ‘Artificial Intelligence, Humanistic Ethics’, Daedalus, 151 (2), 2022, https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d06f17c9-97ad-4d2d-be91-6494ba5c8c59/files/s1r66j251g
Our discussions will attend not just to the arguments of the essays but to their occasions and venues of publication, their styles of reasoning, their assumptions of audience (implicit or explicit) and their (implicit or explicit) sense of cultural purpose.
Helen Small is Merton Professor of English at the University of Oxford. Her books include The Value of the Humanities (2013), which identifies and tests the arguments most often relied upon by advocates for the Humanities. Recent work includes The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time (2022); and an Afterword to George Levine, ed., The Question of the Aesthetic (2022). She is in the early stages of a book entitled Changing Humanities.
This workshop critically examines the role of political commitment within the humanities, particularly in the context of contemporary debates surrounding the “academic liberal left” and the ongoing “culture wars.” We will explore the possibilities and limitations of overtly political engagement for humanistic scholarship, considering potential impacts on academic freedom, the production of knowledge, and the humanities’ relationship to broader power structures and social struggles. Through discussion of the readings and analysis of relevant case studies, the workshop aims to foster nuanced perspectives on the complex interplay between humanistic inquiry, cultural wars and political action.
Readings:
Andrew Hartman (2017). “Culture Wars and the Humanities in the Age of Neoliberalism”, Raritan 36: 4, 128–140.
Ladan Rahbari, Dion Kramer, Marie Deserno, Tommy Tse & Tiago R. Matos (2025). “Activism and academia: an interdisciplinary dialogue on academic freedom and social engagement”, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 47:1, 73–89. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1360080X.2024.2390197 (open access)
NB! Preparing for the seminar, the participants are asked to choose one recent concrete case in which the constellation of humanities-academia-political activism has generated debates and struggle. Students are asked to reflect on the different aspects of the mini case-study they chose on the background of the two readings. These mini case-studies will be briefly introduced by the students at the seminar and will form the basis for our discussion.
Daniele Monticelli is a Professor of Semiotics and Translation Studies at Tallinn University. His research is characterized by a wide range of interests which include translation history, comparative literature and contemporary critical theory. More recently his work has focused on the potentialities and constraints of translation in contexts of radical cultural and social change – the construction and deconstruction of national identities in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, censorship and dissidence under communism and the contemporary debates on world literature and translation. Another focus of his research has been later Juri Lotman’s works with particular attention to the notions of history and unpredictability. Monticelli is the co-editor of the collective volumes and special issues Between Cultures and Texts. Itineraries in Translation History (2011), Testo e metodo. Prospettive teoriche sulla letteratura italiana (2011), L’incipit et l’explicit. Perpectives interdisciplinaires (2017), Translation Under Communism (2021), The Routledge Handbook of the History of Translation Studies (2024), and Semiotics of Conflict. A Lotmanian Perspective (2024).
Models of performance and auditing prevalent in today’s academia prioritize productivity in publication and success in securing competitive research funding. The latter is often tied to various national and international public policy priorities which tend to be far from the questions that humanities scholars work with on a daily basis. To prove their social relevance, humanities scholars are often encouraged to enter into interdisciplinary partnerships with natural or social sciences. However, the humanities should not to be viewed as an auxiliary discipline. In this workshop, we will focus on the question of how we can show that the core research questions and methods in the humanities are socially relevant. We will read Chapter 2, “Method: Formalism for Survival” from Caroline Levine’s The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (2023) and will discuss a series of case studies in which humanities methods can help address social challenges. We will touch on research on gender, climate change and affect.
Raili Marling is Professor of English Studies at the University of Tartu. Her research brings together her interest in gender, affect and power in contemporary literature and public discourse. Among other things, she is currently involved in research projects that seek to uncover underlying causes of gender inequality and the political emotions related to climate change. In addition to her academic research, she has collaborated with Estonian government offices and NGOs on questions related to gender equality.
Jaak Tomberg is Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Tartu. His main areas of research are science fiction, literary utopias, and the relations between poetic forms and contemporary reality. Currently, he is interested in how science fiction renders available and enables to negotiate the many complexities of the technologically saturated present. Besides research, he organizes cultural events that aim to catalyze the utopian imagination.