University of Newcastle Professor gives opening keynote at prestigious international conference
On 5 March 2015, University of Newcastle (UON) Sociologist Professor Lisa Adkins gave the opening keynote address to the annual conference of the Westermarck Society, the Finnish Sociological Association, held at the University of Helsinki before a record seven hundred delegates.
The Westermarck Society, founded in 1940, is for the advancement for sociology in Finland. This was the first occasion in which part of the Westermarck Society conference proceedings were conducted in English. "This is a direct result", Professor Adkins said, "of the increasing push to internationalise the Finnish academic scene."
Professor Lisa Adkins giving keynote address at the annual conference of the Westermarck Society, the Finnish Sociological Association.
Professor Adkins' keynote addressed the changing nature of debt in society. She is currently in Finland taking up her role as an Academy of Finland Distinguished Professor. This involves running a €1 million research project on the changing economy-society relation. She is focusing in particular on issues of work and unemployment which also features in her Labouring Futures research program at UON.
While at the Westermarck Society conference, Professor Adkins also provided the lead presentation at the Winter School for the Finnish national doctoral training program in Social Research: SOVAKO at the University of Tampere. The program provides centralized training and supervision arrangements for graduate students in the social sciences with the aim of integrating training on a national scale.
"Australian universities could really benefit from developing this type of intensive doctoral training," Professor Adkins observed. "Students benefit enormously from developing their ideas in discipline specific workshop settings."
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