Danish Institute for Advanced Study

Jenny Andersson, Professor of the history of ideas at Uppsala University, PI of research programme on Neoliberalism in the Nordics and author of The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination (Oxford UP). Invited and presented by DIAS Senior Fellow Jeppe Nevers Architects of the Mixed Economy This talk reexamines three well-known figures in Sweden’s turn to neoliberalism, the economists Assar Lindbeck, Ingemar Ståhl, and Gösta Rehn. They were all social democrats. Rehn was an active social democrat and trade union economist all of his life, ending his career as a professor of labor economics in the Institute for Social Research. Lindbeck and Ståhl were also active social democrats, but Ståhl was a maverick who provoked in socialist student debates in Lund with great oratories on the equalizing effects of the price mechanism. Ståhl was eventually ejected from social democracy and became a hardcore market liberal associated with the Swedish Business Federation’s thinktank Timbro. Lindbeck remained a social democrat until the wage earner funds debate in 1975. My talk focuses on their thinking of the so-called "mixed economy" as a particular form of capitalism and argues that it served as a meeting space between the intellectual histories of social democracy and neoliberalism. The lecture takes place in the DIAS Auditorium, Fioniavej 34. Everybody is welcome and no registration is needed.

Patrick Emmenegger, Professor of Comparative Political Economy and Public Policy at University of St. Gallen. Invited and presented by DIAS Chair of Humanities, Professor Klaus Petersen, Cpop, DaWS Politics by design: How political institutions privilege some groups over others Political institutions are not neutral. Instead, political institutions such as electoral systems have important distributional consequences, leading to the systematic underrepresentation of some political groups. This talk examines how electoral systems, the unequal geographical distribution of voters, and the organization of a country into electoral districts cause representational biases that may privilege urban or rural voters, and left-wing or right-wing parties, depending on the “fine print” of the electoral institutions. Furthermore, it will be shown that these biases are often the result of deliberate political decisions, giving the designers of political institutions long-lasting advantages over their competitors. About: Patrick Emmenegger is Professor of Comparative Political Economy and Public Policy at the School of Economics and Political Science, University of St. Gallen. He is the co-editor of the Socio-Economic Review (since 2017), the chair of the PhD Program in International Affairs and Political Economy (since 2016), and serves on the Federal Commission on Vocational Education and Training of the Swiss Government (since 2016). From 2015 to 2018, he was the President of the Swiss Political Science Association. The lecture takes place in the DIAS Auditorium, Fioniavej 34. Everybody is welcome and no registration is needed. Live stream it at youtube.com/@danish-ias

Teresa Cadierno, Professor of Second Language Acquisition at SDU and DIAS Chair of Humanities Is the younger, the better? On the role of starting age and other factors in the acquisition of English by Danish primary school children In this talk, I will present a research project that was funded by DFF in which we investigated the role of starting age of learning, i.e., the so-called age factor, and a range of other (child-specific and contextual) factors in the development of L2 English by Danish primary school children. The project was motivated by an educational law in Denmark which stipulated that as of August 2014 English as a foreign language should be introduced in 1st grade instead of 3rd grade, which had been the norm since 2002. In the project, we followed the development of L2 English in terms of learning rate and short-term proficiency by two groups of children who started learning English in schools in the same year (2014): an early starter group who began in the first grade (7-8 years old) and a late starter group who began in the third grade (9-10 years old). In the lecture, I will present the design of the study, the factors that were examined and some of the project’s main findings. Read more about Teresa Cadierno here The lecture takes place in the DIAS Seminar Room, Fioniavej 34. Everybody is welcome and no registration is needed.

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Guest lecture by Bron Taylor, Professor of Religion, Nature and Environmental Ethics at The University of Florida Negative, anthropogenic climate change has been accelerating – harming humans, disrupting the climate system, eroding biodiversity, and some aver, portending an apocalyptic end of the world. Some scholars blame religions, or some of them, for promoting environmentally destructive attitudes and behaviors. Others aver that religions are beginning to, or might, come to the environmental rescue. Still others contend that indigenous traditions, or secular worldviews, or newly invented forms of religious naturalism, provide proenvironmental alternatives that, especially if they continue to gain cultural traction, could precipitate the cultural transformations necessary to avert the collapse of today’s socioecological systems (including civilization as we know it). Drawing on a comprehensive review of extant research and my research exploring contemporary nature spiritualities, I will analyze the extant data and trends and conclude by speculating on the future of religion and nature, near, medium, and long-term. About: Bron Taylor is an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar whose research and writing explores, through the lenses of the sciences and humanities, the complex relationships between religion, ecology, ethics, and the quest for sustainability. His books include Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (2010), Avatar and Nature Spirituality (2013), and Ecological Resistance Movements (1995). He is also editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005) and the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. Taylor is Professor of Religion and Nature at the University of Florida and a Fellow of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, and at the Leibniz Institut für Europäische Geschichte, Mainz, Germany. In 2017 he was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement award by the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. See also www.brontaylor.com The lecture takes place in the DIAS Auditorium, Fioniavej 34. Everybody is welcome and no registration is needed. Live stream it at youtube.com/@danish-ias The lecture is a collaboration between the Danish Institute for Advanced Study, SDU Climate Cluster, and the Environmental Humanities Network, The Study of Religion, the Department of Language, Culture, History and Communication, the Department of Business and Management.

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Guest lecture by Sara Hobolt, Sutherland Chair and Professor in the Department of Government, London School of Economics and author of “Political Entrepreneurs” The Polarizing Effect of Partisan Echo Chambers We are witnessing increasing partisan polarization across the world. It is often argued that partisan ‘echo chambers’ are one of the drivers of both policy and affective polarization. In this paper, we develop and test the argument that the political homogeneity of people’s social environment shapes polarization. Using an innovative, large-scale pre-registered ‘lab-in-the-field’ experiment, fielded in the UK, we examine how polarization is influenced by partisan group homogeneity. We recruit nationally-representative partisans and assign them to discuss a salient policy issue, either with like-minded partisans (an echo chamber) or in a mixed partisan group. This allows us to examine how group composition affects polarization. In line with our expectations, we find that partisan echo chambers increase both policy and affective polarization compared to mixed discussion groups. This has important implications for our understanding of the drivers of polarization and for how outgroup animosity might be ameliorated in the mass public. The lecture takes place in the DIAS Auditorium, Fioniavej 34. Everybody is welcome and no registration is needed. Live stream it at youtube.com/@danish-ias The lecture is a collaboration between the Danish Institute for Advanced Study and the Digital Democracy Center (DDC)

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Guest lecture by Eric Arnould, Professor Emeritus of Marketing at Aalto University Business School, founding figure of Consumer Culture Theory and globally acknowledged anthropologist of market and consumption studies Towards a Post-Capitalist Consumption Paradigm: Neo-Animist Lines of Flight Well-intentioned, reformist interventions like green consumerism or the sharing economy have taught us about the challenges in facing the ecological crisis. However, the ecological crisis worsens, and the limitations of neoliberal reformist approaches are documented. Rather than continue to feed the dominant neoliberal paradigm by exhorting or nudging consumers to consume “green,” share or abstain, I argue for a new, neo-animist inspired consumption paradigm. This paradigm reimagines the relationships between humanity and the rest of the biome. I thus reconsider the circulation of resources and their integration in neo-animist, value cocreating consumption practices in terms of gifting, reciprocal redistribution, and predatory symbiosis. We identify prefigurative examples of these practices. Neo-animist ontology can help de-fetishize consumption and relativize the role of markets in a more resilient, respectful, and resource enhancing eco-economy. I propose directions for further research based on these principles and practices to encourage research to shift toward a neo-animist consumption paradigm. The lecture takes place in the DIAS Auditorium, Fioniavej 34. Everybody is welcome and no registration is needed. Live stream it online at youtube.com/@danish-ias

Nobel Colloquium at DIAS We are looking forward to welcoming Stefan Hell, director at both the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study. In 2014 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy. He is credited with having conceived, validated and applied the first viable concept for overcoming Abbe’s diffraction-limited resolution barrier in a light-focusing fluorescence microscope. For this accomplishment he has received numerous awards, including the 2014 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Stefan Hell received his doctorate (1990) in physics from the University of Heidelberg. From 1991 to 1993 he worked at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, followed by stays as a senior researcher at the University of Turku, Finland, between 1993 and 1996, and as a visiting scientist at the University of Oxford, England, in 1994. In 1997 he was appointed to the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry (named Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences since 2022) in Göttingen as a group leader, and was promoted to director in 2002. From 2003 to 2017 he also led a research group at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). Hell holds honorary professorships in physics at the Universities of Heidelberg and Göttingen. Read more about Stefan W. Hell here and here Read more about Stefan Hell Labs here More information to come... The lecture takes place in the DIAS Auditorium, Fioniavej 34. Everybody is welcome and no registration is needed. Live stream it at youtube.com/@danish-ias

DIAS Guest lecture by Rens Bod, Professor of Digital Humanities and History of Humanities, University of Amsterdam Invited and presented by DIAS Chair of Humanities Anders Engberg-Pedersen The Human Quest for Patterns and Principles: Toward a Global History of Humanities and Science About: Rens Bod is professor of Digital Humanities and History of Humanities, director of the Center for Digital Humanities and director of the Vossius Center for the History of Humanities and Sciences. He investigates the humanities from both computational and historical perspectives. He currently serves as president of the Society for the History of the Humanities, and is a member of Royal Dutch Society of Sciences and Humanities (“Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen”) and of the Society for the Dutch Letters (“Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde”). He is also the founder of WOinActie, an action group that aims at achieving appropriate funding for Dutch universities. Bod is the author of the first historical overview of the humanities from Antiquity to the present: A New History of the Humanities (translated from the Dutch "De Vergeten Wetenschappen"). The book has appeared in 7 translations, and was voted as best science book of 2011 by Kennislink and as one of the 25 books on science you "must have read" by NRC Handelsblad. The book has been reviewed by over 45 journals and newspapers and is acclaimed as "an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking ... the first ever history of its kind" (Times Literary Supplement) and "Bod takes the humanities back to their rightful place in the family tree of science." Recently, Rens Bod has also published a monograph on the general history of knowledge disciplines, entitled Een Wereld Vol Patronen: De Geschiedenis van Kennis ("A World of Patterns: The History of Knowledge"), which explores the search for patterns and underlying principles in 20 disciplines from 5 continents across the sciences, social sciences and the humanities. The book will soon appear in English. Bod's computational work covers natural language processing, computational musicology, digital aesthetics and computational literary studies. In the field of digital humanities, he coordinates several public-private partnerships in the humanities. He is one of the main architects of the Data-Oriented Parsing model, a general machine learning technique that creates rule-like behavior without rules, and which has been applied to language, music, vision and reasoning. He was a recipient of an advanced research fellowship (UK), a personal academy fellowship (KNAW), a personal VIDI fellowship and a personal VICI fellowship (1.25 MEuro, NWO). His historical work focuses on the comparative history of knowledge-making disciplines from a world-wide perspective. He is a founding editor of the journal History of Humanities and the initiator of the conference series The Making of the Humanities. His books include Beyond Grammar (1998), Probabilistic Linguistics (2003), Data-Oriented Parsing (2003) and De Vergeten Wetenschappen (The Forgotten Sciences) (2010), and he co-edited three volumes on the comparative history of the humanities, The Making of the Humanities I, II and III (2010, 2012, 2014). His recent monographs are A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present (OUP, 2013) and A World of Patterns: The History of Knowledge (Prometheus, 2019). The lecture takes place in the DIAS Auditorium, Fioniavej 34. Everybody is welcome and no registration is needed. Live stream it at youtube.com/@danish-ias

Guest lecture by Emeritus Mathematician Kevin Devlin, Stanford University Using mathematics to try to understand information – a story from the early days of the World Wide Web With the growth of the Internet in the 1980s (the Web was launched in 1991, Google was still ten years in the future), researchers were trying to come to grips with the concept of “information”. Though the term “information technology” had been introduced back in 1958, there was no agreed definition of “information", and no formal theories to guide development of those new technologies. In 1987, I was invited to join a large, multi-disciplinary research group at Stanford University that was created in 1983 to try to develop a mathematically-grounded theory of information. (Perhaps something akin to physics, which provides a mathematically-grounded basis for engineering, or chemistry and biology that support health care and medicine.) The project provides a good illustration of the way mathematics can be developed and used to understand, and act in, a changing world. The lecture takes place in the DIAS Auditorium, Fioniavej 34. Everybody is welcome and no registration is needed. Live stream it at youtube.com/@danish-ias

Invited and presented by DIAS Senior Fellow Pieter Vanhuysse More information to come.

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Invited and presented by DIAS Fellow Lasse Aaskoven. More information to come.