09
Nov 09Helsinki reflections
I am now on my way home from the international conference on Violence and Network Society: School Shootings and Social Violence in Contemporary Public Life hosted by the Department of Communciation at Helsinki University. All in all, this two-day cross disciplinary event about the mediation and communication of school shootings, terrorism and other forms of social violence was excellent. The first conference day was ended with a strong performance “About the Making of a Dangerous Individual” by British/Finnish artist Steve Pratt. I also got the chance to chat with Steve, and he gave me DVD of one of his performances relating to communicating controversial content through video, and we agreed that I should give him some comments on that from my research perspective. The second day of the conference was ended on a similarly thought provoking note with the screening of Estonian director Ilmar Raags movie “The Class“. Raag also took part in one of the conference panels.
For my own part, I managed to get in contact with a number of interesting people, most notably a group of visual researchers from Jacobs University Bremen headed by Professor Marion G. Müller, but I also had interesting conversations with the three prominent keynote speakers (Douglas Kellner, Barbie Zelizer, and Stewart Clegg) as well as with a number of other people that I plan to stay in contact with, for example Glenn Muschert and Kari-Andén Papadopoulos. My own presentation went really well, and there seemed to be a large interest in the methods I have used. In the sessions I attended, I particularly enjoyed the presentation on “Violence, Victims and Emotionality in Finnish Crime-Appeal Programming” by Mirka Smolej. Her interesting research is quite reminiscent of things I work on in my project on crime victims in the Swedish press.
