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 planned Masterclass on visual analysis at the University of Helsinki has been postponed.
Tapahtuma siirtyy järjestettäväksi myöhemmin.
The event has been postponed. The new date and venue will be announced later.
Countermedia are partisan media that oppose conventional media and the establishment.
Tutkija-kirjailija Lotta Junnilaisen kirjassa kuvataan kahden vuokratalolähiön arkea. Teos on tutkimus suomalaisen yhteiskunnan eriarvoistumisesta ja kaupunkien eriytymisestä. Se on kuvaus niukkuudesta, epävarmuudesta ja turhautumisesta, mutta myös yhteisöllisyydestä ja solidaarisuudesta.
In her article, published in the British Journal of Sociology in 2018, Eeva Luhtakallio argues that in order to analyse democracy as a pattern constantly processed in a given society, it is useful to look at activist groups’ agenda setting and recruitment principles, group bonds and boundaries, and how these actions direct and influence ways of creating the common. Based on an ethnographic study on bicycle activism in Helsinki, Finland, the article describes a local critical mass movement that was successful in promoting a bicycle friendly and sustainable city, yet dissolved due to lack of people involved, and the bicycle demonstrations stopped at a moment of high public interest.
Two-day seminar, Tampere University
Veikko Eranti’s article in European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 5(1-2), 2018 argues that the way the sociology of engagements is currently formulated does not sufficiently allow for analysing public participation and disputes in situations where individual interests play a crucial role in public debates. The article presents a slight reformulation of what Thévenot calls the grammar of individuals in a liberal public (sic), based on a) an understanding of how individual interests relate to the common good and general will, b) the constitution of legitimate actors within polities, and c) the separation between the levels of generality and publicity. This reformulation might be called the grammar of individual interests, clarifying and simplifying earlier terminology.
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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.
