Equality, Gender and Science
Seminaari Tieteiden talossa, Kirkkokatu 6, Helsinki
Seminar in The House of Sciences and Letters 22.11.2012
“Olen siirtynyt osapäivätyöhön eläkevuosien lähestyessä ja haluan kiittää ystäviä, yhteistyökumppaneita ja muita samojen kysymysten ääressä työskenteleviä. Minulla on ollut etuoikeus tehdä työtä tärkeiden asioiden parissa mielenkiintoisten ihmisten kanssa. En tiedä mitä parempaa voisin kiitokseksi antaa, kuin seminaarin, jossa pitkäaikaiset yhteistyökumppanini eri puolilta maailmaa pohtivat työmme tärkeimpiä teemoja. Tervetuloa!” - Tytti Solantaus
9.45 Welcome. Chair Marjatta Bardy, Research Professor, National Institute for Health and Welfare
10-11 Developing models for early childhood service provision in resource poor communities – lessons from South Africa. Professor Andrew Dawes, University of Cape Town.
11-12 Psychosocial interventions among war-affected children: mental health and human rights considerations. Professor Raija-Leena Punamäki, Department of Psy-chology, University of Tampere
Lunch 12-13
13-14 Taking It Like a Woman - Gender, Knowledge and Institutional Culture. Professor Ann Oakley, Institute of Education, University of London
Coffee 14.00-14.30
14.30-15.30 Science is not just organized commonsense
Professor, Sir Michael Rutter, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London
In response to the day Tytti Solantaus
15.45- 18.00 Free discussion with refreshments
Osallistuminen, Participation 50€
Brief biographies of the lecturers (in order of presentations)
Andrew Dawes is an Associate Professor Emeritus in the Psychology Department at the University of Cape Town, and an Associate Fellow in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford. He was formerly a Research Director in the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa and is a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science.He is currently a Chief Research Scientist at the University of Cape Town and is Research Manager for the Ilifa Labantwana National Early Childhood Development initiative.
As an applied developmental and clinical psychologist, Andrew Dawes has extensive experience in the field of child social policy research. For many years the focus of his work has been on the psychological impact of abuse, poverty and violence on the development of South African children. In addition to several books he has produced in excess of 250 journal articles, book chapters, major research reports and conference papers. He has been a visiting lecturer at a number of universities abroad. From 2007 – 2011 he was a member of the Advisory Board of the UBS Optimus Foundation. The Board is responsible for scientific oversight of child abuse and neglect prevalence and surveillance studies.
Andrew Dawes has consulted to international agencies, national and provincial gov-ernment on policies andinterventions to improve child protection. His recent research includes the development of a rights-based indicator system for monitoring the situation of children in South Africa (includingchild maltreatment). He is currently contracted to assist the Western Cape De-partment of Social Development with the development of a Child Protection Strategy. He has re-cently completed implementation and impact evaluations of centre, home, and community-based interventions designed to improve early childhood outcomes in the years 0-4 in four of South Afri-ca’s provinces.
Raija-Leena Punamäki is a psychologist and professor in University of Tampere, Finland. Her research focuses on child and adolescent development and mental health in traumatic conditions, especially in war and military violence. The research topics include symbolic processes (dreaming, fantasy and playing), family dynamics and attachment. The main aim is to translate the knowledge of adolescent emotional, symbolic, social and cognitive development into evidence- and theory-based treatments for young trauma survivors. In the field of war trauma, she works in close coop-eration with Palestinian and Kurdish colleagues, in research, professional training and interventions. In the Nordic and Finnish context, she studies social, emotional, psychophysiological impacts of ICT (Information and communication technology) on adolescent development, and predictors of suicide, drug abuse and school violence among adolescents. She is an active member of the Finnish Psychologist for Social Responsibility, and the Board Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, of the Research on Family Relations, of the National Doctoral Program, and of the Nordic Network for Research on Refugee Children.
Ann Oakley is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the Institute of Education, University of London, where she founded the Social Science Research Unit in 1990. This presentation draws on her fifty years’ experience of working in universities, and discusses themes concerned with the division of labour by gender in the production and use of research knowledge. It highlights, as case-studies, her early work on childbirth and motherhood, and her later work on applying in the social science field robust experimental research designs and systematic reviews. These case-studies illuminate changes and constancies over time in the position of women within the culture of academic institutions. The central questions are: who defines the nature and purposes of research-based knowledge, who produces such knowledge, and how do the wider (institutional and broader social) politics of gender intersect with what we know and who knows what?
Ann Oakley has worked on more than 70 research projects across health care, gen-der and family studies and public policy, and has published extensively in all these fields. Her most recent books are A Critical Woman (2011), a biography of the foremost British social scientist and policy advocate, Barbara Wootton, and Fracture (2007), an account of embodiment and identity. A partial autobiography, Taking it Like a Woman (1984), was widely acclaimed as setting out some of parameters of contemporary women’s personal and professional dilemmas.
Michael Rutter is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. He became the first professor of child psychiatry in the UK in 1972, retiring from the chair in 1998. He set up the Medical Research Council (MRC) Child Psychiatry Research Unit in 1984 and the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre in 1994, being Honorary Director of both until 1998. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987, was a founding Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, being clinical Vice-President from 2004 to 2009, and founding Fellow of Academia Europea. His research interests span a wide field but he is particularly interested in the interplay between nature and nurture, the use of ‘natural experiments’ to test hypotheses on environmental mediation, and the associations between normal and abnormal development over the lifespan. He has published over 500 scientific papers and written or edited well over 40 books. His talk will touch on these various themes as part of an argument that science is not just organised commonsense.