ÅAU Annual Minority Seminars and other events

The minority profile of Åbo Akademi University organises different events, including yearly seminars on topical issues, with a focus on the complexities involved in the production and construction of minority positions and identities.

Minority Research Profile Training: How to use your expertise to promote societal change

Do you want to learn more about ways to do science communication and mobilise your expertise to promote societal change? The ÅAU Minority Research Profile is organising a hybrid training on how to write policy briefs, as well as reports on state policies in the area of human rights implementation. The training is provided by:

Christopher Mbazira, Professor of Law and Coordinator of the Public Interest Law Clinic (PILAC) at Makerere University School of Law, Uganda, and a founding member of the Network of Public Interest Lawyers (NETPIL). Professor Mbazira will share his expertise on writing policy briefs.

Researchers Kristiina Vainio and Katarina Frostell, from the ÅAU Institute of Human Rights and working with the multidisciplinary research network of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRANET), will share insights about analysing state policies and human rights reporting.

The training is aimed at ÅAU doctoral students and new postdoctoral scholars (1-4 years from graduation) who are involved in research related to minorities broadly understood.

Please register by 5.5.2025 here!

Tuesday, May 13th

Place: Aura in the Arken/CLL building or on zoom

Programme:
10:15 -11:30 Writing Policy Briefs part 1, Prof. Christopher Mbazira
11:30-11:45 Coffee Break
11:45-12:45 Writing Policy Briefs part 2, Prof. Christopher Mbazira

12:45-14:00 Lunch break

14:00-15:30 Reporting on state policies in the area of human Rights, Ms. Kristina Vainio, Ms. Katarina Frostell

Past Minority Profile Annual Seminars

9-10 April 2025 The 10th Annual Minority Studies Profile Seminar 2025 Wellbeing in Minorities: Sustainability and Disruptions of Health in Non-dominant Groups

The seminar aimed at unpacking and exploring the complicated and multidimensional subject of well-being in minorities. It asks what constitutes and contributes to well-being or its deficiency in non-dominant, subordinated, liminal, and marginalised groups, considering their social positioning and resources available to them. The seminar takes up particular macro- and micro-level challenges, barriers, and obstacles that minorities (might) face trying to achieve and maintain their well-being. The seminar encourages critical thinking of how wellbeing deficiency is intertwined with a minority position. It builds on a broad understanding of well-being as a multidimensional phenomenon which entails physical and mental health, tightly bound to variegated social, economic and political factors. Thus, the seminar welcomes not only the perspectives and experiences of minorities but also actors and institutions playing an active role (or possibly failing in it) in the creation and maintain of wellbeing of others.

Keynotes were: Dr. Laura Kemppainen (University of Helsinki) The migration-ageing nexus: exploring the diversity of ageing experiences and well-being, Professor Hannele Harjunen (University of Jyväskylä) Gendered body norms, weight stigma and health and Dr. Elena Bogdanova (University of Helsinki) A subjectivist perspective on health and well-being research among displaced persons in Finland

11 April 2024 Many Gazes of Law: Plurality and Ordering will be organized in collaboration with Åbo Akademi University Law School. The seminar will celebrate the launch of ÅAU Law School by critically engaging with law manifesting itself in various forms and funcitions, and at various levels of social reality. The seminar will approach sources, subjects and practice of law from five perspectives: LAw as rights; Law as legal profession; Law as jurisprudence; Law as education; and Law as justice. Speakers will include: Assoc. Prof Visa A.J. Kurki (University of Helsinki), Assoc. Dean for Learning and Teaching Moshen al Attar (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Prof. Swethaa Ballakrinshnen (Univerity of California Irvin), Prof. Christopher Mbazira (Makerere University) and Postdoc. researcher Maria-Refore Legge (Uppsala University).

The seminar is followed by a PhD workshop. More information about the workshop can be found here. 

11 May 2023 Contesting the Collective Past: Exploring Testimony and Cultural Memory in Minority Research was organised in collaboration with the departments of history and philosophy at ÅAU. The seminar explored the role of testimony and cultural memory for knowledge and understanding of minority positions in the humanities and social sciences. It had a dual focus: (i) general theoretical and methodological questions for minority research and (ii) the contestation of collective pasts in relation to specific minority positions in the Nordic countries.

Keynote speakers were: Berber Bevernage (Ghent University), Wulf Kansteiner (Aarhus University), Siobhan Kattago (University of Tartu), Malin Thor Tureby (Malmö University).

6-7 April 2022 Living with the Sea was co-organised in collaboration with the ÅAU strategic profiling area The Sea. The seminar focused on coastal regions and climate change and will hereby explored water as a space: as a space of movement and life/living, as a shared and disputed space, and as a space for politics, governance and justice. It explored existing plurilegal regimes & governance, including critically in light of alternative visions and models, e.g. indigenous perspectives on human-water relations or the decentering of anthropocentric perspectives through object oriented ontologies, as well as climate justice.

Keynote speakers were: Rikke Becker Jakobbsen (Aalborg University), Kristin Ilves (University of Helsinki), Timo Koivurova (University of Lapland), Hélène Mayrand (University of Sherbrooke), Christopher Raymond (University of Helsinki), Liselotte Viaene (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid).

14-16 May 2021 Minority Experiences and European Narratives: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. The seminar was organised together with the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives (EuroStorie) at the University of Helsinki. The seminar explored the multifaceted links between minority experiences and European narratives, both in the past and in the present. It also discussed how the idea of Europe has developed with reference to minority experiences in the official narratives of the policy papers produced under the auspices of the Council of Europe and the European Union.

Keynote speakers were: Huub van Baar (University of Giessen), Manuela Boatca (University of Freiburg), and Marie-Claire Foblets (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle).

Abstracts of the talks: Minority experiences seminar all abstracts

6-8 May 2020 Curriculums for Social Justice canceled due to Covid-19 pandemic

25 April 2019 Writing In, Writing Out – Historicizing Agency, Mobility and Positionality

The annual seminar of the Åbo Akademi University minority research profile explored histories and historiographies of minority positions. It traced practices of exclusion and inclusion, agency and mobility through archives and the materialities of class, race, body, gender and religion. How, what and whose stories are being told and untold – and by whom? How can they be told otherwise? Keynote speakers were: Milinda Banerjee (LMU Munich), Mona Oraby (Amherst College), Åsa Bharathi Larsson (Uppsala University),  Daniel Blackie (University of Oulu), Miika Tervonen (Migration Institute of Finland), Gunlög Fur (Linnaeus University) Speaker Abstracts and Bios Minority Seminar 2019. The seminar was followed by a PhD workshop on April 26th.