Researcher Tuuli Hirvilammi discusses the significance of interdisciplinary interaction in studying wicked problems and systemically finding solutions to them. She discusses combining welfare research and environmental research as an example. How can we better understand the effects of nature and serious environmental issues on people’s wellbeing?

Professor Emeritus Tom Arnkil discusses his experiences with teaching dialogue in Japan. Dialogue seems to have a tendency to generate new types of inspiration and relationships between people, even from a very different type of culture at the other side of the world.

Researcher and developer Eila Isotalus and philosopher Marja-Liisa Kakkuri-Knuuttila discuss leadership in a multicultural work community. One of the challenges of a multicultural work community is that the members of the community do not know each other’s culturally bound meanings. “Negotiating reality” is a method for learning to better understand one’s own and each other’s meanings in everyday situations.

Aretai’s CEO Marko Kangas discusses the relationship between dialogical leadership and power. How can we combine dialogicality and power? When does a leader need to allow space for free conversation and when must they tighten the reigns?

The workshop brings together philosophers, artists, social scientists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, consults and psychotherapists, interested in studying the role of imagination in human communality. More specifically the aim is to discuss the possibilities of dialogical encounters and their dependency on our capacities of imagination, central to all human cooperation and culture — educational, political and scientific.

The workshop draws inspiration and information from Professor Nussbaum’s philosophy, most importantly from her works Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice and Not for Profit, and it aims at establishing a new form of scholarly exchange between philosophy, visual arts, and the human sciences.

The workshop is organized together with the University of Jyväskylä.