The (Re-)Making of a Discipline: Digital Transformation and Internationalization in and beyond Uralic Studies

Uralic (Finno-Ugric) studies are a small field, with a small number of scholars covering a wide thematic range, meaning no single department can cover all aspects of our discipline. To give studen...

Building on the community of COPIUS, this project aimed to create a transdisciplinary network exceeding traditional disciplinary boundaries and utilizing digital tools. It was aimed to achieve that through online and hybrid teaching events, strengthening information exchange. The overarching theme was (Uralic) language history, appealing across disciplines due to its connection to speaker community history. Thus, prehistory scholars (e.g. archeologists, geneticists) and those studying genealogically unrelated languages (e.g. Indo-European, Turkic) historically in contact with Uralic languages, are attracted. While no single event was relevant for all disciplines, each was suitable for at least one, designed for broad accessibility. Planned events fell into 3 categories: 1) Winter schools: annual hybrid events with courses and workshops, continuing a tradition since 2013. 2) Language e-learning: courses on less accessible key-languages for diachronic contact studies. 3) Thematic e-learning: courses on key aspects of language history. Both e-learning types were recorded (with student consent and anonymity options) and published online for sustained accessibility to the international scholarly community.

Our broad strategic partnership allowed us to entrust leading experts, both within our discipline or beyond its boundaries, with organizing teaching events and creating outputs. For every topic, the leading expert was associated with our existing consortium. Our objectives were all built on experiences and competencies already held by members of this consortium. Routines for organizing Winter schools were well-established, as they have been a continuing tradition since 2013. The e-learning courses we promised also fell within the core competencies of the scholars we entrusted with them. During the pandemic, academics around the world had to acquire competencies in digital teaching; we in our cooperation partnership aimed to apply them to an international scale: we let scholars teach their courses to an international transdisciplinary audience, that transcended the classic constraints of individual departments at individual universities. We recorded the e-learning courses and made them available online afterwards, to create sustainable outputs and increasing the impact and staying power of these teaching events, while only causing minimal extra effort for the teachers in charge.