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
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.
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.
Visual bodies, ritualised performances: an offline-online analysis of Extinction Rebellion’s protests in Finland and Portugal
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.
Abstract:
Protests are, and have always been, fundamentally visual and embodied phenomena. However, the unprecedented quest for visibility instigated by social media brings about novel intricacies for contemporary political action. This article explores the function of bodies as tools of visibility in performative protests that develop throughout immediate and mediated levels of visuality. Through a methodological strategy combining snap-along ethnography and coordinated comparative fieldwork, we analyse two Extinction Rebellion protests – in Finland and Portugal – as they move from the street to the internet. We argue that, more than mere bodily public disruptions using the online sphere for representational purposes, these are ritualised forms of protest that, through the offline-online conjunction, construct the bodies as sites of imagination: in the streets, bodies work as enactors of ritualised performances; on social media, bodies become tools of visual dissonance and cultural prefiguration. Using the concept of ritual as an analytical lens facilitates an understanding of how international protest repertoires are locally embodied and how bodies are visually re-signified, including the recreation of the spectators-protestors’ dialectic to evoke imagined worlds. By shedding light on how bodies are visually transformed through ritualised offline-online performances, this article contributes to understanding how radical climate movements articulate political claims that appear to break away from conventional modes of argumentation.
The article is published open access and is available here.
