on hungarian riots 22 october 2007

This video - despite the problems that it might have for privacy - is a very good one for seeing what was going on in the riots on the one-year anniversary of the riots of 2006 on the eve of the national day commemorating the revolution of 1956.

See elsewhere in this blog for my analysis of last year’s riots, that started after the exposure of the lie of the Hungarian Prime Minister.

professional news: new post as the editor of ydin

There might be some traffic here on my relatively rarely updated professional webpage.

Besides working in the Academy of Finland funded project, at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and teaching ideology and discourse analysis in two Universities in Finland, I’ve also ended up on the practical field of ideology and discourse analysis as the Editor of Ydin magazine. Ydin is a non(party)-aligned magazine analysing politics and society in Finland. Established in 1966 (I’m hoping to get this figure right) it has its roots in the Finnish Peace Movement. This is not a job - doesn’t pay me money as most these kind of things, but it should be a great hobby.

Having been a member of the Finnish Committee of 100 for the whole of my adult life, and a member of the CND and Stop the War Coalition - but crucially an active member and for some time the figure head of the Essex Uni Peace Campaign - I’m glad and honoured to have such a post (although it means having a good hobby rather than a job with a salary).

The aim is to rejuvenate the magazine, which as many political fora, is greying after having failed to attract young readership. I’m visioning a turn towards, but perhaps not as far in the young, sexy and colourful side as the Red Pepper in the UK, but to start covering more issues beyond peace and security and renew the layout and hopefully some of the readership and contributors. Also, the currently web presence of this magazine is minimal. Ydin should become a forum for political activity and discussions.

The connections to other political magazines, such as the Red Pepper will be a great asset for Ydin, I believe. Internationalisation of the magazine should not come through translation only. All its potential readers in my age would be able to get interesting insights into international politics in other languages over the internet - what’s lacking is the contextualisation of that in the Finnish political and everyday realities.

In a country plagued by consensus - where the election debates often end up in agreement and not in the teasing out of the differences in the parties, it’s important to open up the discussion on an issue by bringing up different perspectives to it. That’s exactly what we plan to do with Ydin from its first issue in 2008.

The beautiful thing about this is that I can now start integrating into the Finnish society - having a fixed point of professional identification - direct my frustrations and the need to change the world to somewhere beyond the academia.

how to organise low-budget, low-maintenance conference

How to organise an international academic conference with a low budget?

1) make sure you’ve got even a low budget, or a clear plan of how to get one.

2) get partners. there are two things you should be interested in a) institutional support and finance: if you have a budget to share, they might chip in. make sure they realise it’s not gonna be too much work for them and that they get their names on the organisers’ list. b) practical help: it is much easier and more fun to organise a conference with someone else, but it is important that this person should be working near-by (not in a different country) and you should share a common vision about the practicalities, too.

3) write the Call for Papers (CFP): choose and clarify a theme that is wide enough, but not too wide, depending the audience you look for. pose the research question and the thematic in an interesting and even challenging way. this ensures that people who really want to engage with this would bother to send in a paper, and you are not overloaded with papers.

4) set up a deadline in the CFP that is far enough from the conference date so you can make sure that you can organise the rest of the conference with more confidence about its contents and close enough that you would be confident that these people actually will be able to make it and are motivated to plan sending in a paper. send out reminders and if needed extend the deadline.

5) distribute the CFP - remember that once it’s in email distribution it may end up anywhere. there is also a difference  in the results between sending it to all possible networks that one knows and just certain ones. there is also a difference between national and international networks - even if they feed into one another. you might want to target the call so that you do not get a load of responses - or you might want to reach far (especially with a narrow topic).

6) choosing the papers makes sense to talk consult other people. never think that you do not want to invite people that you already know - think rather that these are the backbone for your confidence with the conference. if you know them they are likely to come. don’t, nevertheless, only rely on people you know: it’s much more intellectually stimulating to have a real mixture. (and anyway, you are the organiser will have little time to socialise.) reject weak papers. make sure people understand that you really appreciate they sent their abstracts.

7) decide on the scope of the conference once you’ve seen the proposals. it makes sense to ask others to participate (by giving a paper too, if you find suitable sets of papers they are interested in. obviously financial possibilities etc. restrict the size of the conference. and the more people the more work. if possible gather the abstracts into a set, since that’s easier to show it around to your partners, (potential) sponsors, publishing houses etc.

9) book rooms in advance. nevertheless, you might realise only closer to the conference how much of the ‘ordinary’ audience (non-paper-givers) will be present, so try to be realistic from the start but do make new estimates if things change. check the rooms you book and advertise in person, if at all possible, and make sure the official booking and the advertised ones match. make sure they are not too far apart from each other.

10) fix the catering: offering coffee may be the most expensive thing in your conference, but it might be just that what people remember about it. even a nominal fee might make the visitors unsatisfied, even if this would be a perfectly reasonable system. remember, that they have come a long way to contribute to your conference. try to get sponsors (university, city hall, foundations, think thanks or any institution that may benefit from your conference) for the coffee breaks - and also importantly wine and soft-drink receptions after key notes. it is very important not to let people just wither away - especially in conferences like the european ones which take place on university campuses, often in city centres. if you can’t get sponsors go for coffee tickets or ask for donations - or a conference fee that would cover at least these. (but if you ask for a conference fee, do not ask money for coffee!) fix one conference dinner - making sure it’s not too expensive for most people and asking for menu and participation figures well ahead of time.

11) conference packs - having some set of papers to offer to all participants, especially paper givers is important. in major conferences conference bags are also somehow seen as important: doing a low-budget conference, you must make sure that people do not expect all the material things and focus on the contents!

12) one of the thing to fill the conference bags with is material from publishers, while doing advertisement you are creating a conference atmosphere. in larger conferences also invite publishers along if possible. do make sure that you invite them ahead of time and book space for them. otherwise you can try to find way to exhibit things without the publishers themselves being present. in larger conferences publishers sponsor receptions, which is handy for the conference organiser and for the publishers themselves.

13) advertisement. once the conference venues are fixed, start doing advertisement. also do it after the panels are drawn. posters are useful thing, especially on location - but nowadays the internet has taken over. make sure you have a conference web page, which you keep updated. it is easy for the paper-givers and participants to keep updated with it. it is also good for cross-linking and web searches. also inform the press and the university, faculty, department (and their public relations people) about the conference. close to the time of the conference make sure it’s on the university webpage, mailing list etc. you might be surprised how many people would actually have been interested in the conference had they known about it.

14) reserve time for email enquiries and other contacts.

15) organising a low-budget, low-maintenance conference - never offer any funding for people. if you have the chance collect a list of other available funds, do so and send it on. you can of course spend a lot of time trying to get these funds, and it would be lovely to get people from especially from beyond the richest countries to participate, but if you are limited with time and resources, skip this step. remember that administering the available funds will require an effort (booking and paying tickets, etc.) so do it if you can.

16) if you can, recycle left over things from previous conferences that have been organised in your university. also recycle the badges. keep low profile: do not impose pre-registration or fees, if you do not have the infrastructure (people) to help you on the day.

17) to cope with stress make sure that you have some institutional support, and someone who tells you that it will be alright. it is good to have people around who tell you that your are facing a challenge, but that one could imagine you know and believe yourself. it’s more important to have those who support you.

1 make sure you have some volonteers (or if you can afford paid aid) for the days you organise the conference, preferably already a few days before. make sure that they know what they are supposed to help you with - even have tasks to fulfill and responsibilities to take. that is why it is vital to confer before the conference days itself. you can also ask your friends, if nothing else, but do it directly so that they understand what you ask from them and that they can also reject your request. make sure there’s someone beside you, whom you can trust when you should be in two or more places at the same time!

19) make that the people close to you know what you are dealing with, when organising the conference. even if it was really a low-maintenance conference, it causes a lot of stress as you can never know for sure whether everyone is turning up, what kind of catastrophes will occur, and so on. as in many other stressful situations you might really be a nuisance to your loved ones, friends and family. do not make any hasty decisions just before or after the conference.

20) after the conference follow up the situation, keep in touch with the people. sort out last minute bills and other things.  check the budget. try to fix a publication for the conference papers. stay active towards the people who turned up and reserve time for responses about the conference. (i know i had to take a week off myself, to try to deal with the other things that i had no time before the conference.)

21) finally, be patient, open for new challenges and ready to innovate and make big things out of small things. be sincere about your failures (in time keeping etc.) and allow these misgivings for others too. pretty normal stuff, eh?

it’s not that i would have followed all these ten points… but they were hopefully useful thoughts emerging out of the conference i just organised, on discourses about nationalism and populism at the University of Helsinki.

it was a difficult task as most of the time i wasn’t in finland - and i hardly knew that university. luckily i had the access to the university computer system even off location, and i could make calls through skype-out even from abroad.

i had no idea how many people there would be, when booking the rooms. it could well have been only the paper-givers, as it was a conference season with major european conferences taking place at the same time. in the end besides the ca. 30 papers there were upto 150 participants present. the response was overwhelmingly positive - even if there of course were a lot of things that didn’t go according to the plan. no-one would know the whole extent.

one more thing: try to sleep and do not drink a glass of orange juice with vitamin C if you wake up in the middle of the night. that killed my freshness for the second conference day… oops.

thanks to everyone who has been there for me!

‘us’ and ‘them’ conference is successfully over

The conference (The constructions of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: Discourses on Nationalism and Populism) with the visit from my old professor Ernesto Laclau went well. Thanks to all the speakers and participants.

What was praised was the interdisciplinary environment and the intellectual stimulation that it brought. Sometimes interdisciplinary events produce a situation where people speak nominally about the same things but no real discussion can be brought about - perhaps because they are stuck defending their ‘mother’ discipline. Here there was such a plurality of disciplines in a plurality of panels, including the final round table, that the disciplinary boundaries were questioned, brought down - and in some cases realised again but now with more tangible evidence. I hope the discussions will continue in one form or another. The whole point of the conference was to produce interesting constellations of views and topics - I guess that worked.

I’ll only get to work on the conference proceeding after tonight (as I’m teaching this afternoon). Last night I submitted an application at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, the research institute where I’m currently based as a Visiting Fellow. It was one of the three institutes in the University of Helsinki supporting the conference. They expect 400 applicants by this afternoon, there is space for a dozen fellows, so you can imagine how much luck on top of any good application is needed in this process.

PhD thesis reviewed online

I just came accross Seán Hanley’s blog, where there was a nice review of my PhD thesis (the manuscript is rewritten as we speak into a book) and my comments on Finnish politics here last spring. It’s actually a very nice blog, with stuff on Central Eastern Europe and beyond - mainly Czech and Slovak politics. Nice to hear from a guy who’s work I appreciate. (Seán now lectures at my former university School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL, London.) Also glad to see that there’s some point of publishing the thesis online.

I take Seán’s criticism about the updates on PolEmics… and add my apologies. For instance Finnish election updates were simply hard to handle with couple of projects and the mobile life China-Germany-etc. But I hope that my recent analysis of Finnish politics (e.g. the small analysis on ideologies of local politicians) will continuing here in a way that’s approachable to readers beyond Finland - both in terms of language, references and scope.

First, however, I must get through the start of teaching and the conference, which has received a lot of positive attention here in Finland among the colleagues and beyond. Even my friends think it sounds cool and want to come by to hear some presentations. Admittedly, I am positively surprised and am (if at all possible) ever more eager to meet everyone and hear the presentations myself - despite all the organising hassle.

translating discourse

I’ve just discovered a new possible translation of the concept of ‘discourse’ into Finnish, namely ‘arvorypäs‘. This implies the concentration of different discursive elements and values into one. It also implies limits, just like the concept of discourse itself entails them.

Perhaps this way the whole study of discourses becomes more easy to grasp for a wider audience. And the misconception of discourse as speech, mere parole, can be avoided.

My course on Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Helsinki starts on Monday. Thankfully, it is in English. It may take a while still before I’ve got my and other people’s heads around discourse theory in Finnish - talking with colleagues and students in Finnish about these things helps, though.

in helsinki, at the collegium

i spent my youth in helsinki. my helsinki was that of 1990s. now, after ten years of living mainly abroad, i’m back. and of course there are a lot of culture shocks and all that kind of stuff involved. more of them in the personal blog http://palemics.wordpress.com which is designed for those who know me (whatever that means). here I should add my new institutional affiliation.

Our “Nations and their others: Finns and Hungarians since 1900″ Academy of Finland funded project has three sites. Collegium Budapest, University of Jyväskylä, and my current base Collegium Helsinki at the University of Helsinki.

For me this is a great chance to try to integrate into the Finnish academia - after all I did all my university studies abroad, while remaining in the international and interdisciplinary environment I am used to having around.

thankfully, it’s been not only me but also the city of helsinki itself has changed, become more international and multicultural over the years i have been away. many of my colleagues and friends are from abroad or have spent long periods abroad too. being used to the foreigner’s communities and idenfications (such as that of ulkosuomalainen, “outside finn”, that became one of my main points of identification five years ago), and i find it really important in trying to settle. let’s see how it’ll go…

posters - demonumentalising

It’s interesting how the exact topic under investigation develops when one does research. I had pretty good idea of how to do work on the politics of architecture, but in the end I ended up focusing on memorials and public art for my Bauhaus Kolleg final presentation. Although I’ve been interested for years on public art and politics of commemoration, it wasn’t really a planned direction. Drawing on the insights of my previous work, the Bauhaus Kolleg gave me an opportunity to carry out a project in public space: I scaled down from architecture to memorials. As the intervention on public memorials in Sibiu was very successful, and wanted to integrate the results of that in my research. The results are mainly on the earlier linked website: euflagmemorial.wordpress.com.

This doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t be interested in and holding knowledge about politics of architecture, and politics of the past in buildings and competing modernisms. One of the things that I have gained this year - or in fact few months - at the Bauhaus is a more insights into this. We all have gained some sort of an intervention, proposal, but also insights for the future. This interdisciplinary environment has opened horizons to some directions at least. Perhaps not to those we expected - but perhaps that’s only good, being able to experience something unexpected and truly new.

We can use these new skills going back to the old and the expected. Even when one wouldn’t not expect it.

The abstracts for the Us and Them conference in Helsinki are laid out in a way that I wouldn’t have done without my experience at the Bauhaus and intensive sessions over Adobe InDesign. Still, I know I’ll never become a designer - laying out simple things is fine, but there’s a great difference between those who really know how to do it and practise regularly and political theorist like me. As youcan see from the linked posters, both on the euflagmemorial page and here.

There is also some sort of a point developing that can be seen from the visuals and the EU memorial website, I hope.

us and them conference website

I should add to the links that there’s a conference website for: The Construction of “Us” and “Them”: Discourses of Populism and Nationalism, 7-8 September 2007, University of Helsinki

http://blogit.helsinki.fi/discourse

The programme with abstracts is coming soon.

a new project: EU memorial

In the absence of the relevant analysis of the Hungarian or Finnish politics, or other architectural reflections…Here’s the link to my project of a temporary, mobile, interactive EU memorial. http://euflagmemorial.wordpress.com

It made part of the interventions we made in Sibiu and Luxembourg with the Bauhaus Kolleg. Now I work further on it, as you can see from the website. Click here for the posters in Sibiu:

speculations of space in sibiu - back (the back has the descriptions of projects in English and Romanian)

There is also a slide show of the Sibiu projects online.