PolTCH research
The PolTCH team has a distinct profile in political thought and conceptual history and it has thereby received world-wide attention. The team members have played a key role in the formation of History of Political Social Concepts Group (HPSCG) and of Concepta. International Research School in Conceptual History and Political Thought with its annual introductory courses and thematic workshops. In cooperation with the Academy Professorship project The Politics of Dissensus the team has also entered new forms of cooperation with networks on parliaments and parliamentary rhetoric. The team has initiated the translation of the Käsitteet liikkeessä (2003) volume on Finnish conceptual history, and a plan for a book series on European Conceptual History. All this cooperation has led to the increasingly international membership of the team.
The research of the PolTCH team concentrates on four interrelated fields. Its members are, of course, conducting empirical and methodological studies on the history of single concepts and conceptual clusters, with a particular interest in comparative analysis of concepts. The team members also conduct studies on classical, modern and contemporary political thought by using rhetoric and conceptual history as methodological tools. Furthermore, studies on the rhetorical and conceptual historical of parliament(arism), as an ideal type of dissensual politics, including the use of parliamentary debates as a privileged source for the analysis of both deliberative rhetoric and conceptual changes, have been paid specific attention to in the team. Another main topic is the comparative study of the rhetoric and narratives of the politics of the past, a field in which the team has established new forms of international cooperation. The publications and the annual Jyväskylä symposia of the team, doctoral courses on political rhetoric and other events have concentrated on these topics.
The work of the team and its international networks has contributed to a better recognition of the historical and contested character of concepts in today’s academia across dcisciplinary boundaries. The team has a profile of co-operation between political theorists and historians with different but methodologically connetcted approaches. The research and network experiences of the team have led to unexpected new lines of co-operation, for example, in the fields of interdisciplinary rhetorical analysis of parliamentary politics and that of applying conceptual historical approaches to the European Union. The team now concentrates on more specific questions regarding how, in which respects and in which forms the conceptual controversies have been conducted in different topics, in different types of concepts and textual genres. The thematisation of the political uses of controversial concepts also opens up a form of political theorizing beyond the normative vs. historical divide, as well as between theoretical and empirical studies.