Eraesaari, Risto | Finland

Professor, Department of Social Policy, University of Helsinki

Earlier positions: Fellow (Academy of Finland), Professor (University of Jyväskylä). Visiting fellow at Manchester University; Queensland University of Technology, Brisabne; Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh; Goldsmith's College, London; University of Britsih Colombia, Vancouver; Copenhagen Business School Library.

Project at IAS-STS: Key Concepts

Currently working with some specific "key concepts" (also sometimes called guiding or conducting concepts). They are "contingency", "context", "erosion" and "orientation", and they will function as the regulative ideas of my study. In each case the concept is understood as words in their different sites and locations. This is furthermore interpreted historically (conceptual history), diagnostically (Zeitdiagnose), dynamically (modernity) and theoretically (Gesellschaftstheorie). The key concepts, their overlapping with other concepts as well as their internal antinomies and paradoxies make a new kind of system of coordinates for my study called "Orientation Crisis". The above mentioned conceptual framework brings the necessary distance for a critical analysis and interpretation of conventionally available conceptual framework.
 

Selected Publications

"The Welfare State and Self-Understanding of Social Policy" (1984)

"Post-Conventional Community" (1993)

"The Tragedy of the Welfare State" (1995)

"Evaluation and Expertise" (1999).
Recent chapters in anthologies on "Concept of Contingency", "Open-context expertise", "Concept of Risk", "Conceptual History", "Life Politics", "Historical School of Economics", "Individualization".