Wednesday 25 May 2016

Exploratory Workshop for Participatory Visual Methods

I was among the organizers and presenters of the first Exploratory Workshop for Participatory Visual Methods at our university. The full-day workshop was held on 13 May 2016 as a cooperation of researchers from the Department of Arts and Culture Studies, the Centre for Applied Language Studies and the Department of Languages. Six papers, three exhibitions and 77 registered participants were included in discussions of societally engaged scholarly work. By the end of the day, the significance of the relationship between researchers and participants was underlined. That is, visual methods do not only explore stories about the people investigated, but also reflect on the researcher's position.
An attractive poster invited the attendees to the venue

Wednesday 11 May 2016

My article on university language policies

I wrote an article about my lived experiences with some tensions between de iure and de facto language policies at my university from an international staff member point of view. I often experience that international researchers with limited proficiency in Finnish are excluded from discussions at meetings and various other events. I summarized my goals with the article as follows:
Managing a huge multilingual workplace such a university is [...] challenging. However, negotiating language policies and implementing them in a flexible way would make the barriers between the 'Finns' and the 'international staff' less visible and would create a working environment that is much more comfortable for everyone included in our academic community. I hope that sharing my experience invites others to tell theirs so that we can initiate or extend such negotiations.