New York & Boston 2017

During 15-23 November, a group of CoE researchers led by Sami Pihlström and reinforced by Sari Kivistö traveled together to the East Coast of the United States. In addition to Pihlström and Kivistö, our group of five also included Maijastina Kahlos, Ritva Palmén, and myself. The US tour included talks at Columbia and Fordham Universities in New York as well as a session in the AAR Annual Meeting in Boston.

Our first set of talks was given at Columbia University's Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life. In this event, we were joined by Panu-Matti Pöykkö, who is currently completing his doctoral studies at Harvard. Wayne Proudfoot was our kind and discerning host at Columbia, and he made us all feel very welcome indeed.

The second talk of the tour was by Sami Pihlström at the New York Pragmatist Forum. This meeting's overall topic was pragmatist philosophy of religion. After Pihlström, Angela Sager gave her presentation. The Fordham event then continued with comments between the speakers and concluded with a general discussion.

As in Columbia, the evening ended with an excellent dinner and interesting discussions. Personally, I was very happy to be able to talk about contemporary recognition theory with Judith Green who is a founding member of the NYPF.

After our gigs in New York, we took the train to Boston, and continued with a session at the AAR Annual Meeting. Two years ago in 2015, we had our first CoE session at the AAR in Atlanta. This time, we had more audience, and the discussions were also more extensive. The program of our Extended Wildcard Session can be found here.

The AAR meeting was a good opportunity not only to talk about recognition in the US, but also to meet old acquaintances and to make new ones. Among other contacts, I got to meet and talk with Editors of Oxford University Press and De Gruyter. The latter's Katarzyna Tempczyk brought with her a very nice set of flyers that had been made of the Topical Issue on Religious Recognition that I edited together with Ritva Palmén and Risto Saarinen last year.

I spent a very good morning coffee session in Boston with Christopher F. Zurn who is one of the central names in contemporary recognition theory. I invited him earlier to the Recognition: Its Theory and Practice Conference that will be organized by our Coe at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in June 2018. It was good to meet him personally on the US side of the Atlantic before the upcoming conference in Finland. We had an intensive discussion on matters related with contemporary recognition theory, and I continued my day feeling inspired, having also gotten some very useful ideas for my future work from our discussions.

While visiting Harvard, our group got to a couple of very nice bookstores. As one might expect, I brought back home some reading souvenirs by local Harvard authors.