Farewell to Media Studies as a Science: An Analysis and Critique of Media Studies, Human Sciences and their Methodology

Ihmistieteissä on jatkunut jo pitkään kahden tiedenäkemyksen vastakkainasettelu. Dikotomiat positivismi–hermeneutiikka ja kvantitatiivinen–kvalitatiivinen ovat tuon vastakkainasettelun muunnelmia. Niiden ydinajatukset ovat säilyneet samoina, vaikka ne aika ajoin esiintyvät ikään kuin uusina. Tämän työn keskeinen kanta on se, että hermeneuttinen ja kvalitatiivinen tutkimusote sekä niiden uudemmat muunnelmat kuten postmodernismi ja sosiaalinen konstruktionismi ovat tieteenfilosofisesti ja käytännöllisesti kestämättömiä. Kysymys ei ole niinkään siitä, mikä on ”ainut ja oikea” kanta, vaan siitä mikä toimii paremmin ja mikä on paremmin perusteltu. Tarkoituksena on tarkastella, miten mediatutkimus sopii tähän kuvaan. Tämä tapahtuu vertailemalla mediatutkimusta suhteessa muihin ihmistieteisiin sekä niissä harjoitettuun tieteenfilosofiseen argumentaatioon. Tällainen laaja tarkastelu on sikäli oikeutettua, että mediatutkimuksen metodologia ei ole ainutlaatuinen eikä se ole syntynyt itsestään itseään varten. Se on päinvastoin läpikyllästetty niin ihmistieteiden kuin yleisen tieteenfilosofian ja tieteen käytännöillä. Mediatutkimuksen tarkastelussa on siis välttämättä otettava huomioon laajempi kokonaisuus. Mediatutkimuksen analyysi perustuu tässä tutkimuksessa kahteen osaan: mediatutkimuksesta alana otettuihin esimerkkeihin ja Vaasan yliopiston mediatutkimuksesta tehtyjen pro gradu -töiden tarkasteluun. Osittain on siis kyse case-tutkimuksesta, jossa Vaasan yliopisto on tarkasteltu tapaus. Testattavana hypoteesina on oletus, että pro gradu -töiden tieteellinen taso ja arvosana korreloivat keskenään. Vaikka eroja löytyi siinä, miten esimerkiksi eri ajatuksia kehiteltiin ja käsiteltiin, ei tieteellisen argumentaation, tieteellisten periaatteiden, toisin sanoen tieteellisyyden sinänsä tasolla eroa pystytty havaitsemaan. Lisäksi pro gradu -työt eivät yleisesti ottaen täyttäneet tieteellisyyden vaatimuksia, vaikka arvosanan perusteella olisi syytä olettaa toisin. Jos yhtäältä pro gradu -työt eivät täyttäneet ”perinteisen” (positivistisen, kvantitatiivisen) tiedenäkemyksen kriteerejä, ne toisaalta vastasivat hermeneuttis–kvalitatiivisen jne. ihmistiedesuuntauksen ihanteita.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Essays & Commentaries I

Essays and commentaries on theoretical physics, history of science, philosophy of science, language and science, teaching, and learning techniques.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148318/1/EssaysI.pdfDescription of EssaysI.pdf : Main documen

Academic integrity : a call to research and action

Originally published in French:L'urgence de l'intégrité académique, Éditions EMS, Management & société, Caen, 2021 (ISBN 978-2-37687-472-0).The urgency of doing complements the urgency of knowing. Urgency here is not the inconsequential injunction of irrational immediacy. It arises in various contexts for good reasons, when there is a threat to the human existence and harms to others. Today, our knowledge based civilization is at risk both by new production models of knowledge and by the shamelessness of knowledge delinquents, exposing the greatest number to important risks. Swiftly, the editors respond to the diagnostic by setting up a reference tool for academic integrity. Across multiple dialogues between the twenty-five chapters and five major themes, the ethical response shapes pragmatic horizons for action, on a range of disciplinary competencies: from science to international diplomacy. An interdisciplinary work indispensable for teachers, students and university researchers and administrators

Radio evolution: conference proceedings

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Human Minds and Animal Stories

The power of stories to raise our concern for animals has been postulated throughout history by countless scholars, activists, and writers, including such greats as Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy. This is the first book to investigate that power and explain the psychological and cultural mechanisms behind it. It does so by presenting the results of an experimental project that involved thousands of participants, texts representing various genres and national literatures, and the cooperation of an internationally-acclaimed bestselling author. Combining psychological research with insights from animal studies, ecocriticism and other fields in the environmental humanities, the book not only provides evidence that animal stories can make us care for other species, but also shows that their effects are more complex and fascinating than we have ever thought. In this way, the book makes a groundbreaking contribution to the study of relations between literature and the nonhuman world as well as to the study of how literature changes our minds and society. "As witnessed by novels like Black Beauty and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a good story can move public opinion on contentious social issues. In Human Minds and Animal Stories a team of specialists in psychology, biology, and literature tells how they discovered the power of narratives to shift our views about the treatment of other species. Beautifully written and based on dozens of experiments with thousands of subjects, this book will appeal to animal advocates, researchers, and general readers looking for a compelling real-life detective story." - Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat : Why It’s So Hard To Think Straight About Animal

Fictive institutions: contemporary British literature and the arbiters of value.

My thesis assesses the relationship between contemporary British literature and institutions. Literary culture is currently rife with anxieties that some institutions, such as prizes, exert too much influence over authors, while others, such as literary criticism, are losing their cultural power. As authors are increasingly caught up in complex, ambivalent relationships with institutions, I examine how recent British novels, short stories and ‘creative-critical’ texts thematise these engagements. My thesis mobilises Derrida’s term ‘fictive institution’, which marks the fact that institutions are self-authorising; they are grounded in fictitious or invented origins. Institutions, then, share with literary texts a certain fictionality. My project considers how Rachel Cusk, Olivia Laing, Gordon Burn, Alan Hollinghurst, and—most prominently—Ali Smith, have used the instituting or inventive power of fiction to reflect on the fictionality of institutions. Each chapter assesses how a different institution—academic criticism, public criticism, the book award and publishing—reproduces aesthetic discourses and values which my corpus of literary texts shows to be grounded in an institutional fiction. In making this argument, my thesis marries three disparate strands of contemporary criticism: literary sociology, aesthetic theory and deconstruction. This approach repositions Derrida—a figure maligned by postcritique and the aesthetic turn—as an important and surprisingly timely thinker of the literary. Situating my readings in terms of a resurgent critical discourse on the value of the novel, my project traces how a wide range of twenty-first-century writing mounts a defence of literature by asserting fiction’s power to ‘speak back’ to institutions. While contemporary culture seems to suffer more and more from what David Shields calls ‘reality hunger’, and the rise of autofiction seems to augur the outmodedness of fiction, this thesis ultimately suggests that it is precisely as a fictional medium that literature retains its cultural power