11.08.2010

Important to destabilize ideas of society

Another year of my FiDiPro grant has passed and a new, the fourth, is about to begin. My major problem is that time passes all too fast.

My main work deals with the big project ‘Europe between 1815 and 1914', sponsored by the European Research Council and co-directed with Martti Koskenniemi (www.helsinki.fi/erere). I experience the discussions in our team with our six postdoc fellows from Albania, Austria, Britain, Columbia and the US, plus the two of us, as extremely rich and intellectually stimulating, often with invited guests but also as more closed project meetings. This was the first year of the project. We have the privilege to work in newly renovated premises in Metsätalo two minutes from the Senate Square. Metsätalo is a great example of Finnish functionalist architecture and used to host the College of Forestry. We are travelling a lot and we have many visitors to seminars, conferences and workshops. We are happy to have Minna Vainio as our administrative coordinator to organize all these activities and keep everything of interest in terms of information posted on our homepage. 

One of the main issues on our research agenda deals with coming to terms with teleology, i.e. the idea that modern societies are propelling towards predefined goals on path-dependent development trajectories. Our enlightenment heritage and destiny means that we probably cannot live without some understanding of progress and goals in social activities. However, we find it important to destabilize ideas of societies as self-propelling machines under conditions of permanent progress and to develop theoretical reflection to underpin our argument. Destabilize means to emphasize the fragility, openness and contingency in social and human arrangements. To this purpose the project has established a working group with some 15 external participants. The working group on teleology had its first meeting at the Finnish Institute in Berlin on 11‒12 June. There was great agreement that the organizers of this working group, Henning Trüper and Dipesh Chakrabarty, had brought together an excellent selection of contributions. The sessions connected well to each other and the presentations were all convincing with clear arguments. The second meeting will be in October in Rome. The project also has similar working groups on constitutions, which met for the first time in Helsinki in May, and on paradoxes of peace, which will have its first meeting in Helsinki in November.

My second project deals with Conceptual Histories of the World and Global Translations: The Euro-Asian and African Semantics of the Social and the Economic (www.helsinki.fi/strath). This project is organized within the framework of a consortium of researchers at European, Asian and African universities. The project is coordinated from Helsinki where I cooperate with Axel Fleisch, a linguist and specialist on African languages. In March the final meeting with the Asian team was held at the Finnish Institute in Damascus, and in February the first meeting with the African team at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies in South Africa. The second meeting will be organized in Helsinki next spring. Kone Foundation has benevolently sponsored several of the meetings.

After a couple of months with reduced speed in Tuscany, on Elba and at the German Weinstrasse, the pace will accelerate in September in Helsinki.

Bo Stråth 

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