The Centre for Sociology of Democracy studies democracy in modern societies. Our projects deal with democracy from different perspectives and with different methods.
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Recent News & Blog Posts
The Centre for Sociology of Democracy organises conference titled “New Social Pragmatism: Politics of Engagements, Conventions and (E)valuations” at University of Helsinki, May 8-9. 2025. More information here.
In her article Taina Meriluoto theorizes visual practices of stigma resistance as a continuous play with identification and disidentification. Based on an ethnographic study of young, stigmatized activists’ self-images, she argues that the oft-employed concept of recognition only partially captures visual/digital resistance to stigma. By showing stigma resistance as a play with becoming visible and unintelligible, the article argues for moving beyond recognition and stigma as binary concepts.
In this paper Vasileios Maltezos, Eeva Luhtakallio and Taina Meriluoto introduce a novel methodological approach to studying visual politics today. By bridging ethnographic research and supervised deep learning-based AI and pre-trained neural networks the method enables investigating how youth participate through image creation and usage, both online and offline, by outlining repertoires of visual political action.
CSD:n julkaisema Demokratian paikat on sarja, jossa puhutaan demokratiasta arkisissa ympäristöissä. Katso, mistä podia voi kuunnella!
New podcast Spaces of Democracy is out now. See where to listen to it!
In their chapter for the Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics in the Social Sciences, Taina Meriluoto and Eeva Luhtakallio discuss the specificities of ethical questions when studying a political topic, in particular social movements and activists in stigmatized or risky positions.
By discussing current youth’s democratic practices and introducing the concept of visual politicization, Eeva Luhtakallio, Taina Meriluoto and Carla Malafaia argue for a reconsideration of what we understand as political action and propose new methodological tools for analyzing it.
In their article, Carla Malafaia, Jenni Kettunen and Eeva Luhtakallio explore the function of bodies as tools of visibility in ritualised online-offline performances. By analysing performative protests, the authors shed light on the importance of paying attention to non-verbal levels of political action and argumentation.
In this editorial Carla Malafaia, Maria Fernandes-Jesus and Eeva Luhtakallio discuss the new diverse ways young generations have become mobilized to tackle the climate crisis and picture ways towards a common world and practices.
The Pepe the Frog Image-Meme in Hong Kong: Visual Recurrences and Gender Fluidity on the LIHKG Forum
Using a combination of a computational big data analysis and a qualitative analysis, Katrien Jakobs, Degel Cheung, Vasileios Maltezos and Cecilia Wong examine how activists used the Pepe the Frog image-meme to make statements about Hong Kong politics, gender and democracy during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill and Law Movement.
In her article, Carla Malafaia studies how youths manage their activism and argues that activists construct margins of resistance in their political practices by incorporating processes that interrupt adult structures while reframing educational imagination.
Organizing natures : justification and the critique in the development of organic agriculture in Finland
In his dissertation, Tomi Lehtimäki examines organic agriculture and the attempts to transform agricultural systems into more ecological and sustainable forms.
The thesis is situated into the discussion concerning the values of organic agriculture. Previous discussions, most notably those rooted in political economy, have conceptualized the development and institutionalization of organic agriculture as a process where values are gradually replaced by economic incentives. Instead of being able to bring in alternative values, such as ecology, care or fairness, organic agriculture is seen as becoming increasingly market-driven. Not only is this development seen to make organic agriculture similar to conventional production in terms of principles and values, but also in its material composition, as organic products, for example, become only slightly different from their conventional counterparts.
The approach applied in this thesis challenges this view and aims to reverse this setting. Instead of taking organic agriculture as the value-driven alternative (and examining how it either loses or maintains these values), the various analyses examine how the value(s) of organic agriculture is constructed. From this perspective, the debate concerns whether organic agriculture offers a meaningfully different alternative, through which the sustainability of food systems can be achieved. Therefore, using the pragmatic sociological approach, the development of organic agriculture is not examined only as economization, but as shaping it according to various forms of worth.
The thesis examines various conflict situations, where organic and conventional agriculture are set against each other, and where actors need to justify either alternative. The construction of these justifications is then analyzed as processes of sense-making, where actors shape organic agriculture according to different “orders of worth.” The thesis is based on four research articles, that examine the development of organic agriculture between the years 1980–2015. The data used consists of newspaper discussions, documents such as committee reports, policy papers, strategies, as well as studies on organic agriculture. Through these materials, the thesis examines how organic agriculture has been debated and how it has gradually institutionalized into a part of agricultural policy and markets.
The dissertation is available here.
