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 her article, Lotta Junnilainen tackles the question of how particular places shape responses to stigmatization.
In his dissertation, Tomi Lehtimäki examines organic agriculture and the attempts to transform agricultural systems into more ecological and sustainable forms.
Koronapandemian synnyttämä kriisi on runnellut pahoin kulttuurialaa, josta on tullut maailmanlaajuisesti yksi eniten pandemiasta kärsineistä aloista. Lotta Junnilaisen tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan kulttuurialan itsensätyöllistäjien asemaa palkkatyösuhteiden ulkopuolella.
Artikkelissa esitetään Boltanskin ja Thévenot’n oikeuttamisteoriaan sekä Eeva Luhtakallion ja Tuomas Ylä-Anttilan kehittämään julkisen oikeuttamisen analyysiin (JOA)
perustuva metodi, joka havainnollistaa ja visualisoi moraalisen oikeuttamisen kategorioiden verkostoitumista.
The war in Ukraine has evoked immediate gut reactions from a distant, yet very mobilizable collective memory reserve in Finland: Russia, again. And: Are we next? We have certainly seen this one before, even though nobody wanted to see it coming this time.
Activists participating in the environmental movement Elokapina see the sharing of images and videos in social media as a tool to tell people about daily protest activities, challenge the perceptions that people have of demonstrators and reach a wider audience for their message than would be possible through physical demonstrations. However, the personal nature of social media may also give rise to feelings of inadequacy and expose activists to strong negative attention.
In his dissertation Georg Boldt identified four individual level outcomes of youth participation.
Planeetan kokoinen arki auttaa ymmärtämään, miten moninaisilla tavoilla jokapäiväinen elämä, sitä määrittävä politiikka sekä taustalla vaikuttavat ajattelutavat kytkeytyvät ympäristökriiseihin.
In their article, Carla Malafaia and Taina Meriluoto explore how young activists in Portugal and Finland negotiate the value of social media in their practices.
The war in Ukraine and its refugees have evoked a wave of compassion among Europeans, to an extent that has not been seen with people fleeing the war in Syria, for instance. An overview of social media content illustrating the war helps us understand how the visualisation of the war influences people’s perceptions and attitudes towards Ukrainians. By emphasising the Europeanness of Ukraine, the threat posed by Russia and the clear moral set-up of the war, the images bring Ukrainian fates closer and make them grievable.
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.
Abstract:
This paper examines how Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character originally created by American cartoonist Matt Furie, and currently a global digital image-meme of online activism, was adopted and adapted in Hong Kong during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill and Law Movement (反對逃犯條例修訂運動; faan deoi tou faan tiu lai sau ding wan dung) (hereafter: anti-ELAB Movement) on one of the most prevalent protest platforms, the LIHKG forum (LIHKG 論壇). We combined a computational big data analysis of the posts’ metadata and a qualitative analysis of the Hong Kong Pepe image-meme to examine how it contributed to highly emotive and contentious discussions about the future of Hong Kong. The aim is to reveal how activists on this platform framed this imported image-meme to make statements about Hong Kong politics, as well as gender and democracy. The scope of visual content on social media today creates an opportunity for cross-disciplinary collaboration and new methodological approaches that combine a scaling of large quantities of images with representative sampling and theories of online activism. Our theoretical interest aims at documenting how activists reveled in various visual cultures and adopted the image-meme within social media discourse. We are equally interested in identifying the gender representations of these figures and how they drove emotional responses and discussions during the movement’s high points. The Anti-ELAB protests and the LIHKG forum were specifically characterized by a large participation of younger women. Alongside the proposition for Hong Kong self-determination, the forum hosted discussions about the role of female activists within the struggle. Since Pepe had previously been adopted by xenophobic alt-right groups and the misogynist “manosphere,” we monitored and interpreted recurring Pepe-imagery to find out how normative-conservative, or gender-fluid and emancipatory tropes were used on the LIHKG forum.
The article is published open access and is available here.
