This year, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies celebrates its 25th anniversary. Established in 2001, the Collegium was founded to follow the original Institute for Advanced Study model by providing outstanding scholars in the humanities and social sciences with the freedom necessary for cutting-edge, curiosity-driven research. Over the past quarter-century, the Collegium has grown into a vibrant international community known for its collegial and multidisciplinary atmosphere.

In addition to the main celebration, the Collegium organizes various events during the three first weeks of June.

Program

2:15 pm              

Musical Performance

Anniversary Greetings 

Hanne Appelqvist, Director of HCAS

Kari Raivio, Chancellor Emeritus of the University of Helsinki

Hanna Snellman, Vice-Rector of the University of Helsinki, Chair of the HCAS Board

Ann Phoenix, Professor of Psychosocial Studies (University College London), Member of the HCAS Academic Advisory Board

Screening of HCAS Video

Keynote Address

Jane Cowan, Professor Emerita of Anthropology (University of Sussex), Former Jane and Aatos Erkko Visiting Professor in Studies on Contemporary Society

Professor Cowan will be introduced by Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology Sarah Green (University of Helsinki).

Musical Performance

4:30 pm               

Reception in the Foyer

7:00 pm               

Dinner at Katajanokan Kasino (Laivastonkatu 1)

Dress Code: Dark suit

Across social and historical contexts, claims to artificiality often breed mistrust. To be “natural” is almost always a virtue, while things deemed “artificial,” from the sweeteners and dyes in processed foods to crypto-currencies, more commonly provoke suspicion. Through its panels and presentations, this symposium asks: What is it about artifice that sparks such concern and ambivalence? And, if artifice produces a unique set of insecurities, by what techniques have social actors sought to shore up the authority of decidedly “artificial” constructions?

In asking these questions, the symposium seeks to contribute to historical studies of epistemology and authority. The philosophical elaboration of artifice as a distinct kind of agency emerged in the early modern period in Europe, during a time when nascent colonialism and religious conflict undermined a once hegemonic Christian cosmopolitics. When confronted both with stories from the Americas and also sectarian warfare across Europe, claims to a natural or divine order were newly contestable. In this milieu, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes pointed to artifice as a new principle and justification for institutions. Where others saw polity as an outgrowth of natural law or divine right, Hobbes argued that the state itself was an “artificial man,” crafted by humans to serve common ends. Such “artifice” gave license to a new understanding of politics and history. But, it also unleashed a line of questioning that remains with us into the present: if our knowledge and institutions are not ordained by nature or god, how are they authorized and secured?

The symposium assembles an interdisciplinary group of scholars to offer complementary perspectives on the problem and power of artifice. By design, we will bring intellectual, legal, and cultural historians, literary scholars, political theorists, and anthropologists into dialogue. Case studies will span eras and geographies. Organizing the discussion, however, are four core themes: ontologies, affordances, ambivalences, and fixes.

The symposium is organized by HCAS Alumni Andrew Graan and Tim Stuart-Buttle at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

10:00 Welcome by HCAS Director

10:15 Opening Remarks by Symposium Organizers (Tim Stuart-Buttle and Andrew Graan)

10:45 Coffee/Tea Break

11:15 Session 1: Panel on “Ontologies” 

12:45 Lunch Break

13:45 Session 2: Panel on “Affordances” 

15:15 Coffee/Tea Break

15:45 Session 3: Keynote Address by Charlotte Epstein 

17:15 Reception

10:00 Session 4: Keynote Address by Pasi Väliaho 

11:30 Lunch Break

12:30 Session 5: Panel on “Ambivalences.” 

14:00 Coffee/Tea Break

14:30 Session 6: Panel on “Fixes.” 

16:00 Concluding Discussion

Human Interaction in the Age of the Internet brings together scholars across social psychology, communication, linguistics, anthropology, and computational research to explore how digital infrastructures are reshaping social life.

The conference focuses on three intertwined questions:

1. Interaction: What happens to sociality when conversation is mediated by platforms, metrics, and machines?
2. Language: How do narratives, identity, and public opinion form through distributed micro-utterances—posts, comments, clips, and memes?
3. Models: How can computational methods (including LLMs) help us understand these shifts—without reducing them to “content” or “information”?

This is a meeting about the new norms of interaction that organize belonging, truth, civility, and conflict in connected worlds.

The conference is organized by Jane and Aatos Erkko Visiting Professor Kevin Durrheim at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

09:00–12:00 Group session: introductions + 2-minute provocations; constellation mapping and session formation

12:00–13:30 Lunch

13:30–15:30 Session 1 (5 × 8-min starters + extended discussion)

16:00–18:00 Session 2 (5 × 8-min starters + extended discussion)

09:00–11:00 Session 3 (5 × 8-min starters + extended discussion)

11:30–13:30 Session 4 (5 × 8-min starters + extended discussion)

13:30–15:00 Lunch

15:00–17:00 Plenary: open discussion + harvesting “what emerged”

What constitutes a text? How do shared assumptions emerge about what texts are and how they function in the world? How are authorship and authority connected to these historically contingent “text ideologies”? This symposium takes the advent of digital technologies as a timely opportunity to challenge the dominant text ideologies of modernity. Bound up with the establishment of literacy as essential to cultural competence, and with the legitimacy structures of post-Enlightenment polities, these dominant text ideologies affected who produced public texts – literary, legal, popular and more – and how. Historically oriented research has wrestled with these dominant ideologies for decades, seeing them as ill-suited to non-modernized milieux; it is only recently, however, that such critiques have become augmented by ideologies and practices associated with digital media. For many researchers today, these changes are still only vaguely sensed and appreciated: the symposium will illuminate and interrogate them through discussions between scholars investigating diverse cultural contexts and historical periods, from oral and scribal cultures through modern “mass” media to contemporary digital technologies. Bringing into dialogue perspectives from different phenomena and disciplines, the symposium aims to forge new theoretical frameworks for texts and textuality, opening paths for future scholarship at a potentially transformative moment in history.

Organized by HCAS Fellows Frog, Paul Frosh, and Katja Kujanpää.