Search results for "61"
showing 10 items of 3634 documents
Care and gendered work in reception centers in Finland
2019
PurposeThis paper focuses on how gendered processes of working life are (re)constructed and are also challenged discursively in paid and volunteer care and work in reception centers. The purpose of this paper is to show how caring work with asylum seekers can both enhance the traditional gender order and challenge it through enabling men to have opportunities to care.Design/methodology/approachThe data were produced through qualitative interviews among paid workers and volunteers in reception centers, and analyzed through a discourse analysis approach.FindingsThree discourses of care and work were identified: a discourse on solidarity and care; a discourse on control and order; and a discou…
Authenticity, normativity and social media
2015
Playfulness and Freedom of Choice in Matters of Belonging
2018
Dorothea Breier 2017. The Vague Feeling of Belonging of a Transcultural Generation. An Ethnographic Study on Germans and their Descendants in Contemporary Helsinki, Finland. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. 250 pp. Diss. ISBN 978-951-51-3811-8 (paperback). ISBN 978-951-51-3812-5 (PDF).
Presidential speeches and the online politics of belonging : Affective-discursive positions toward refugees in Finland and Estonia
2019
The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ has added urgency to the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in European societies. This study explores how emotions figure in this politics of belonging by studying their discursive mobilization in Finnish and Estonian public debates on asylum seekers. Focusing on presidential speeches addressing the refugee issue, on the one hand, and their reception by online commenters on popular tabloid news sites, on the other, the comparative analysis highlights both similarities and differences in how emotional expressions are employed in these two countries with very different experiences of taking refugees. Despite employing common discursive elements in thei…
Post memory and cinematic affect in The Midwife
2017
The Second World War has proved a rich source of inspiration for fiction films worldwide. The Finnish fiction film The Midwife (Kätilö, Antti J. Jokinen, 2015) is aimed at an international audience with a story that takes place in the context of the Lapland War in Finland in 1944. The film tells of a romantic relationship between a local woman and a member of the German army, in a highly affective manner. This article argues that the film downplays elements that might have interested the national, or local, audience, and that it privileges affect over knowledge. To bring out the film’s transnational character, the article begins by analysing it in the context of national, or local, and glob…
Narrative Tools for Games : Focalization, Granularity, and the Mode of Narration in Games
2015
This article looks at three narratological concepts—focalization, granularity, and the mode of narration—and explores how these concepts apply to games. It is shown how these concepts can be used as tools for creating meaning-effects, which are understood here as cognitive responses from the player. Focalization is shown to have a hybrid form in games. This article also explores the different types of narrators and granularities in games, and how these three concepts can be used to create meaning-effects. This is done by discussing examples from several games, for example, Assassin’s Creed III, Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, and Civilization.
Narrativity and intertextuality in the making of a shared European memory
2016
The latest wave of European integration process, cultural Europeanization, includes complex processes, such as the attempts to create a shared European memory that would transcend national interpretations of the past. The cultural Europeanization can be perceived as a narrative operation: in it the EU, Europe, and Europeanness are given meanings and made sense of through narrativization. The article investigates the EU’s attempts to create a shared European memory by analyzing the exhibition narrative of the Parlamentarium, the visitors’ center of the European Parliament. The analysis indicates how the construction of an official shared European memory is operationalized through textual and…
Live free or die motionless : Walking the migrant path from Italy to France
2018
This essay and the photographs examine visual traces of irregular mobility in the border landscape between Italy and France. The ruined buildings and objects witness decades of movement of undocumented people on this old migrant path across the mountains. By taking the theoretical concept of multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009) the essay argues that the Path of Hope can be thought of as a memory site through which the issues of migration in contemporary Europe can be seen in a more sustainable light. The ruins and discarded objects link memories of different places – including different border zones – in ways that allow us to critically examine borders as a practice – rather than as exis…
Temporality in cosmopolitan solidarity : Archival activism and participatory documentary film as mediated witnessing of suffering at Europe’s borders
2019
This article develops and extends the idea of cosmopolitan solidarity to temporality through a case study of archival activism and participatory film-making. It examines mediated witnessing within the Italian online audiovisual archive Archivio delle memorie migranti, which documents and archives the experiences of contemporary migrants in Italy. The moral basis of Archivio delle memorie migranti is cosmopolitan solidarity, which is usually understood as a practice that crosses spatial and communal boundaries. However, the ethics of solidarity also bridges past, present and future generations. Through the case of Archivio delle memorie migranti, this article demonstrates the significance o…
Death and Transfiguration : The Late Kim Jong-il Aesthetic in North Korean Cultural Production
2016
This article assesses the official music scene in Pyongyang over a span of five dramatic years, surveying how changes in the field of music from 2009 to 2014 mirrored and in some cases presaged North Korean dynastic succession and political consolidation. The article draws upon a new abundance of performance data on North Korean musical groups, data which we argue is important but has largely been ignored or mischaracterized heretofore. The central crisis dealt with in the article is the decline and demise of Kim Jong-il, the architect of North Korea’s musical culture. In his final years, Kim Jong-il assented to the creation of a new leading musical group known as the Unhasu Orchestra, prom…