About CSD
The Centre for Sociology of Democracy (CSD) investigates democracy in contemporary societies.
The projects within the centre address this topic from different perspectives, deploying a variety of methodological approaches, while sharing the common framework of pragmatist theorizing of the social.
Key topics
- The everyday, mundane practices in which democracy takes place, evolves, and becomes defined at different levels of governance and public debate.
- The intertwinement of political participation and the polarization processes in civil societies due to increasing, intersecting inequalities and marginalization.
- The online and offline engagements shaping political agency and introducing novel forms of publicizing concerns and arguing for them in particular in the domain of visual participation.
- The processes emerging from citizenship practices shaping the understanding of “political cultures”, and in particular the engagement in political (and proto- anti- and de-political) activities of young people.
The centre conducts sociological research that addresses the large-scale wicked problems that societies – and the whole of humanity outright – are facing, including economic, social, environmental, and political inequality, as well as interlinked threats to democracy and equity-based governance.
Projects
- Imagi(ni)ng Democracy (IMAGIDEM) – European youth becoming citizens by visual participation
- Bare Activism (PALJAS) – Politics of authenticity and exposure in the margins
- Young Citizens in the Age of Polarization
- Totaalidemokratia
- Moral Polarization
- Politicizing environmental emergency in Russia and Finland
- Rogues or Revolutionaries
- Demokratiatekijät
- Hyvä elämä hyvillä asuinalueilla
Our team
The centre’s core consists of a methodologically diverse, interdisciplinary group of researchers, most of whom have closely worked together for nearly a decade.
Together, they form a unit of excellence, studying in a cross-secting fashion the dimensions, levels, and aspects of social life and societal structures that form the elements of democracy. This collective effort outreaches radically the capacities of any single researcher both in terms of volume and in terms of expertise from ethnographic research to visual sociology, to historical research, to statistics, to computational social sciences, and to AI technologies. A growing number of doctoral candidates, visiting fellows from abroad, and master’s students constantly join the group for varying periods of time.