On the second and last day of the conference – immediately following the Nordic roundtable on Asian studies – the PhD workshop started. The workshop and the assignments given to the PhD students were inspired by the so-called Berkeley Model which is designed to enhance the outcome of PhD training courses. Before the events in Turku the PhDs had been divided into sub-groups according to their topic: history, social aspects, politics, development issues and Southeast Asia! This made for small groups with only four or five participants. In preparation for the workshop they were provided with an extensive list of readings and had to write to smaller papers: firstly, a paper in which they related their own research to the problems addressed in the workshop literature; secondly, a paper in which they could EITHER comment on one of the papers written by the other PhDs and provide suggestions on how to improve it OR imagine that they were an editor who should write an introduction to the volume in which the papers from their respective group should be published. Apart from some confusion about the scope of the assignments it is my general impression that they were well received even though I am also aware that similar activities in the future must be better communicated, explained and further developed.

Picking the brains of keynote speakers
At their first meeting with the keynote speakers the PhDs presented their projects for the other members in the group. From that point and onwards it was more or less a regular seminar setup in which the participants in the group and the keynote speaker questioned and discussed each of the papers. This exercise continued all afternoon and continued the next morning and lasted until late afternoon where the intensive sessions ended. I know that each group chose different approaches and therefore it would be too much of a report to outline them here. However, generally speaking, it is my feeling that discussions were pretty lively and in most cases helpful for the participants. Especially I believe that it was useful to have a chance to ‘pick the brains’ of the keynotes even though some found it challenging and even provocative that it was not always easy to agree on theoretical and methodological issues. Furthermore, it is my impression that there was use for more senior scholars from different disciplines to facilitate a more nuanced debate in each cluster.

Final day
Thursday 9 November was the last day of the events in Turku. Acknowledging that it had already been a long week we only had scheduled activities in the morning and left the afternoon open for leisure activities.

The morning programme constituted of four presentations: search techniques, publishing, conflict studies in St. Petersburg, and contact to the media.

The first two and the last were regular presentations that related to the life and activity of a full time researcher and were as such interesting and informative. I found it especially encouraging that there were quite a lot of questions during and after each session which might not have been expected after such a long week.

The third presentation was given by Vladimir Kolotov from the University of St. Petersburg. Unfortunately, I did not hear much of this presentation, but later was made aware that it was quit interesting and provoked some new thoughts on the defeat of the US army in Vietnam and also presented some rather convincing ideas into why things are not really going the US way today in neither Iraq nor Afghanistan. Anyhow, after Vladimir’s presentation I approached him and his colleague Anton Alexeev to ask if they would be interested in hosting a PhD course on Asian security next year which was something we had discussed previously at NIAS. They were very interested and therefore, if all goes well, we will be able to invite Nordic PhD students to St. Petersburg next summer. More on this in future updates.

So, this was it for the Turku conference and PhD workshop. We now have some very important evaluation work to do which among other things include going through the evaluation schemes filled in by the PhDs. Overall, it was a good and productive stay in Turku for sure. Nevertheless, we face some challenges in order to make the next conference/workshop even more appealing and useful. This I am convinced we can do and we have precisely 18 month to do it – the next conference/workshop on theoretical and methodological issues in the study of Asian is scheduled for spring 2008. Hope to see you then!

So before the blog-updates from the events in Turku is concluded I just want to congratulate the Turku team for a job well done! Also, to all the participants: thank you for coming and participating in the discussions!

Thanks for reading! // martin

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