Events

Symposium. Emotional Landscapes of Post-Truth: Responding to Reaction

You are warmly welcome to attend symposium organized together with the Research Group HARMAA (University of Helsinki):

Emotional Landscapes of Post-Truth: Responding to Reaction 

6–7 February 2025  

 European Humanities University, Savičiaus g. 17, room 104 

The symposium deals with the epistemic and emotional landscapes of our times – cynicism, ressentiment, righteous indignation, media bubbles, difficulties in intergroup communication and demonization of the other. We ask: what is there beyond the polarizing trends of our time? How do we shift from a reactive attitude to conscious responding and make room for solidarity and shared horizons? How might the conceptual resources of the phenomenological tradition, psychoanalysis, and critical theory help us to explore these possibilities? Looking for answers to these questions, the symposium highlights experiences of alienation, loss of ethical relationship to others, fractured bodily orientations towards a shared reality, and ambiguities in debates about freedom of expression and authenticity

Program:

Thursday 6 February 

 Chair Irina Poleshchuk 

14.00–14.10 Welcoming Words, Prof. Ryhor Miniankou  

14.10–14.30 Erika Ruonakoski (University of Jyväskylä) and Pauliina Mäkela (University of Helsinki),  HARMAA and the Problem of Post-Truth 

14.30–15.10 Erika Ruonakoski (University of Jyväskylä), Space for Resistance: Rethinking the Role of Philosophy  

15.10–15.50 Ilya Inishev (European Humanities University), Hesitation, Inflection, Viscosity: Slowed Perception and Indirect Politics  

 15.50–16.20 Coffee Break 

 Chair Tatiana Shchyttsova  

16.20–17.00 Natalia Artemenko (TU Dortmund, OSUN/TSI Fellowships at EHU 2024/2025), Phenomena of Linguistic Erosion and Loss of the Future in the Situation of Ruined Everyday Life: The Collapse of the Common World?  

 17.00–17.30 Discussion 

 

  Friday 7 February 

 Chair Jaakko Vuori 

10.00–10.40 Irina Poleshchuk (University of Helsinki / European Humanities University), Pain as a Practice of Decolonizing Consciousness: Rebuilding the Lost Agency  

10.40–11.20 Tatiana Shchyttsova (European Humanities University), Actualisation of the Postcolonial and Decolonial Approach in the Contemporary Belarusian Intellectual Milieu and the Epistemological Limits of the Narrative of the ‘In-betweenness’   

 11.20–11.50 Coffee Break 

 Chair Joonas S. Martikainen 

11.50–12.30 Volha Davydzik (Leuphana University), Ruptures, Resistance, and Emancipation: Rethinking Sociality and Power in Authoritarian Contexts (online, Zoom) 

 12.30–14.00 Lunch 

 Chair Erika Ruonakoski 

14.00–14.40 Veranika Furs (European Humanities University), Building Imaginary Worlds as a New Form of Escapism  

15.20–16.00 Jaakko Vuori (University of Helsinki), Powerless Phantasies and Working Through Ambivalence:  
A Butlerian Critique of Ressentiment  

 16.00–16.30 Coffee Break 

 Chair Ilya Inishev 

16.30–17.10 Joonas S. Martikainen (University of Helsinki), Serious Minds: Cynicism, Ressentiment, and Rifts in Democratic Solidarity 

 17.10–18.00 Discussion 

 

Unable to attend in person? Join us via Zoom:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87062294817?pwd=oOO3X8018XelKg2aMfYfTcotIPooXF.1

Back