”Archipelago of knowledge in the sea of information”

Lectures of first Aboagora are now available at Aboagora's Blog.

Aboagora is a symposium that promotes dialogue between the arts, humanities and sciences, establishes new kinds of discussion forums for artists and academics and makes this collaboration available for the benefit of a larger audience. Aboagora, which refers to both Turku (in Latin Aboa), and agora, is an open forum for thinking and aims at challenging and breaking boundaries between arts and the scholarly world.

Aboagora is a joint effort by the Turku Music Festival, the Department of Cultural History at the University of Turku and the Donner Institute for Research in Religious and Cultural History, Åbo Akademi University. Aboagora started in Turku during the European Capital of Culture year 2011, with the theme “Rethinking Enlightenment”. After its inaugural year, Aboagora will continue under new thematic strands as a permanent forum for reassessing and challenging the relations between arts and sciences.

Aboagora 2011 was supported by the Kone Foundation, Stiftelsen för Åbo Akademi, Svenska Kulturfonden and the Turku 2011 Foundation.

ABOAGORA 14.-16.8.2012: THE POWER OF THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR

The theme for 2012 focuses on a process that is fundamental to Western culture, that of separation between sacral and secular culture. This opens a fruitful perspective on the dialogue between the arts and the academia, since the concept of the secular is vigorously debated in both fields. In 2012 Aboagora seeks to turn critical attention to such questions as the role of religion in contemporary society, teaching of morality and ethics in a secular education system, the return of mysticism and spirituality to public discussion and the so-called post-secular.