
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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In their article, by augmenting Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism with Thévenot’s pragmatic sociology, Veikko Eranti and Taina Meriluoto develop both an analytical framework for a more nuanced study of urban politics as sites of democracy and a detailed conceptualization of pluralism in democracy.
In their article, Eeva Luhtakallio and Taina Meriluoto argue that a fame-based logic has become dominant in the strategies of actors in many different situations concerning political action in public. By recognizing the fame-based values informing public action with a pragmatist approach, they argue that a wider variety of action can be recognized as public action and the normative foundations that inform people’s action in public can be interrogated.
In their article, Luhtakallio, Ylä-Anttila and Lounela compare the efforts of civil society organizations to influence climate change policymaking in three countries with very different traditions of democratic decision making.
In her article, Taina Meriluoto conceptualizes selfies as reflexive practices of self-coordination, and develops an analytical framework adapted from the literature of sociology of engagements for their analysis.
What are the next walls to fall in science and society? Led by this question, the brightest minds from the international scientific community submitted their groundbreaking projects for the prestigious Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year 2022.
In their article, Luhtakallio and Meriluoto argue that two significant shifts, namely, the blurring of lives offline and online and the increasing significance of the visual character of these lives, pose new challenges to social science research methods.
Julkisuuteen noussut kohu on keskittynyt pääasiassa yhden suuren ketjuravintolan toimintakulttuuriin, mutta Lotta Junnilaisen ja Lotta Haikkolan haastatteluiden perusteella ongelmat eivät koske yksittäistä pikaruokaketjua, vaan ravintola-alaa laajemminkin.
Kahdeksan kuplan Suomi kuvaa talouden murrosten silmässä elävien ihmisten kokemuksia itsestään ja yhteiskunnasta: sitä, mitä he odottavat itseltään ja toisiltaan. Se kertoo myös tahdosta ja tunteista, jotka sitovat ihmisiä yhteen. Millaista tarinaa suomalaiset kertovat itsestään, ja millaisia tunteita tarinaan liittyy? Kuulemmeko ja ymmärrämmekö toistemme tarinoita?
Linda Haapajärven, Jutta Juveniuksen ja Lotta Junnilaisen artikkeli valittiin Sosiologia-lehden toimituskauden 2020-2021 parhaan artikkelin palkinnon voittajaksi.
In her article, Lotta Junnilainen tackles the question of how particular places shape responses to stigmatization.
Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year 2022 award to Eeva Luhtakallio and ImagiDem
What are the next walls to fall in science and society? Led by this question, the brightest minds from the international scientific community submitted their groundbreaking projects for the prestigious Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year 2022.

Eeva Luhtakallio, Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki, was awarded one of the Falling Walls Global Call Winners 2022 in the Social Science and humanities category. Luhtakallio leads the Centre for Sociology of Democracy as well as the ERC funded project ”Imagi(ni)ng Democracy: Young Europeans becoming citizens by visual participation”. The Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year 2022 in Social Sciences and Humanities was selected by a distinguished Jury chaired by Björn Wittrock.
ImagiDem – Imagi(ni)ng Democracy: European youth becoming citizens by visual participation
The public sphere today is increasingly dominated by visual content. The visual dimension of political participation is the key to understanding current youth’s political action: on social media and offline in their action groups they build arguments, mobilize, and politicize through and by repertoires of visual participation. ImagiDem analyzes and conceptualizes visual participation of young Europeans to formulate an updated understanding of the public sphere and democratic practices. ImagiDem uses a radical methodological strategy: it merges ethnography with AI and supervised learning based computational tools, using the outcome to compare multiple field sites and visual big data from Finland, France, Germany and Portugal. The data is produced and processed through unique cocreation and cooperative analysis by researchers from the respective fields. ImagiDem’s theoretical ambition lies in introducing visual participation to pragmatic sociological understanding of building the common.
Read more:
“Discover this year’s Falling Walls Winners”: https://falling-walls.com/science-summit/science-summit-winners-2022/