Fellows' Seminar Series 2023

Sanja Bojanić
14.06.2023 | 13.00 CEST

Abstract
Why are arts intrinsic to mental health, and why may they become the critical element in the "One Health" approach? Design Thinking, Speculative or Interaction Design are all purposeful concepts coined to provide mere efficiency of existence, shape our needs and behaviours. But are creative and open-ended processes secreting more joy, i.e., dopamine? Mallarmé reminds us: A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance, and no matter how much we try to control or structure our endeavours, chance and unpredictability persist. "One Health" approach recognizes the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental well-being. This lecture invites us to consider it as a possible tool helping us regain playfulness and dare risks of unknowing in times of crisis.

Alex Putzer
21.06.2023 | 13.00 CEST

Abstract
The rights of nature are a new way to protect rivers, mountains, and ecosystems. Instead of defining nature as a resource that can be exploited and destroyed, nature becomes a subject, with a value independent of human interests. A river, for instance, is protected for its own sake, rather than its usefulness for fishing, generating electricity, or as a waterway. As of early 2023, there were over 420 legal rights of nature initiatives in over 40 countries across all continents. In this lecture, I will share my research on the movement, present selected success stories, and show some strategies on how to implement the idea within the South Tyrolean context.

Temenuga Trifonova
28.06.2023 | 13.00 CEST

Abstract
Over the last few decades film scholars have turned their attention to the social, economic and psychological effects of neoliberalism, exploring subjects such as precarious labor, downward mobility, the gendering of precarity and intersectional struggles, the Covid pandemic and precarity, individual and collective agency, the commodification of feelings, the division of neoliberal society into ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, etc. The meanings and interpretations of ‘precarity’ have also proliferated: some see precarity as giving rise to a new social class, ‘the precariat’, while others argue that precarity extends beyond the expression of an economic condition to indicate an entire ‘affective environment’ and a sense of individualised insecurity; then there are those who invite us to see precarity as a political tool rather than a socioeconomic condition from which there is no escape. This lecture will explore some of the dominant ways in which precarity and precaritization figure in contemporary European cinema.

Karoline Irschara
05.07.2023 | 13.00 CEST

Abstract
Domains in which healthcare is done rely on a variety of forms of communication. However, language is crucially involved in the unconscious perpetuation of biases, which in turn are pervasive in medicine, as evidenced by emerging knowledge constitutions in the field of gender medicine. For example, gender bias is pervasive in terms of care, access to cutting-edge medicine, and even medication. Discourse linguistic research attempts to trace connections between social factors and language use. It thus raises questions such as: Are there linguistic patterns that indicate such inequalities? Are texts about patients written differently depending on who is being treated? Such questions will be addressed in the lecture, in which some results of an interdisciplinary research project (MedCorpInn) will be presented. To answer the above questions, 5 million radiology reports of the University Hospital Innsbruck were processed as a linguistic corpus and analyzed with discourse, corpus, and gender linguistic methods.