October workshop: special guest

Photo: Tiina Jutila / Yle

At our October 10 workshop meeting, we’ll have a special treat:

Iida Turpeinen, one of Finland’s leading thinkers and practitioners in the transdisciplinary space between science and literature, will join us to discuss a section of the forthcoming English translation of her 2023 natural-history book Beasts of the Sea (Fin. Elolliset), which won the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize and was nominated for Finland’s most prestigious literary award, the Finlandia Prize.

We’ll study Iida’s text and she’ll take us behind the scenes into her science-writing process and her current dissertation research on the interplay of science and creative writing—a perfect match for our mission at NeuWrite Nordic.

From a conversation with Iida Turpeinen published in Yle:

"The catastrophe of nature is much discussed, but it is almost always treated as an economic or scientific-technical problem, whereas I think it is as much a cultural issue. A study of the history of ideas could help us understand a lot."

Turpeinen regrets that humanists aren’t involved enough in the social debate. In the media, it is the hard sciences and economics that come to the fore. She admits that humanists are also to blame. They don't always know how to make their expertise sufficiently visible, even though there are many interesting debates within the field on a wide range of topics.

In Finland, in particular, there is a strong predominance of engineering thinking. According to Turpeinen, people want to see things as clear problems with clear solutions. "[Like cutting wood,] just slice it and stack it. That's it. But we don't talk about why the problem exists."

It is the history of ideas or the humanities that could help us to see the causes of problems. "Especially in this day and age, we need humanists to explain how we got here and why. It would ease people's anxiety in the face of a world situation that is incomprehensible."

(Machine translation)