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 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.
In his dissertation, Tomi Lehtimäki examines organic agriculture and the attempts to transform agricultural systems into more ecological and sustainable forms.
Bridging ethnography and AI: a reciprocal methodology for studying visual political action
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.
Abstract:
This article proposes a methodological approach to address the analytical challenge of meaningfully studying visual politics in the current abundance of online image data. It proposes a novel methodological process of bridging ethnography and computational methods for analysing visual data in a manner that avoids mixing and blurring the boundaries of the two methods while establishing a continuous interchange between them. The methodological development enables investigating how youth participate through image creation and usage, both online and offline, by outlining repertoires of visual political action. We argue that combining ethnographic research with supervised deep learning-based AI and pre-trained neural networks allows for systematically analysing large image datasets while maintaining interpretative, analytical perspectives and contextual sensitivity. Our results show that the existence of common visual features in images, the re-evaluation of the image categories and the creation of subcategories constitute key aspects for an ethnographically-informed image classification.
The article is published open access and is available here.
