Search results for "Gender Studies."
showing 10 items of 1000 documents
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…
Masculinity in flux? : Male managers navigating between work and family
2020
The article sheds light on male managers’ experience as fathers in a post-Soviet context in Lithuania. This empirical study of 12 male managers’ experiences of work-family integration (WFI), their ways of coping with negative experiences, and the role of organizations in reducing conflict and enriching WFI, reveal the emergence of a new paternal identity: fathers who perceive their role as caregivers but for whom this is still subordinate to the dominant role of the breadwinner. Relying on their wife is a man’s dominant coping strategy. Organizations are perceived as family unfriendly. The managerial implications of the need for organizational support are discussed. peerReviewed
Expressed attachment to Russia and social integration: the case of young Russian speakers in Latvia, 2004–2010
2015
ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to establish if expressed attachment to Russia, amongst surveyed Russian-speaking youths in 2004 and 2010 in Latvia, demonstrates any noteworthy correlations with factors promoting integration and feelings of belonging to Latvia. The correlation analysis shows that a sense of belonging to Russia and a sense of belonging to Latvia are not mutually exclusive. However, those Russian speakers in Latvia expressing a closer sense of belonging to Russia are also more likely to prefer an all-Russian environment, are skeptical of their rights and influence in Latvia, and are more likely to perceive discrimination in terms of citizenship status and ethnicity. These …
Being positive, being hopeful, being happy : young adults reflecting on their future in times of austerity
2020
The aim of this article is to analyse the ways in which young adults reflect on their futures. We are particularly interested in how they expect to organize their lives in conditions that seem to offer pessimistic rather than hopeful prospects. How does this happen under social conditions where the major public and individual concerns are with how young adults organize their material lives and how they earn sufficient livelihoods to become good citizens? What are the grounds for their future visions? In our analysis we use 40 interviews with young Finnish adults aged between 18 and 30. The respondents are students, as well as employed and unemployed young adults. Our findings show that the…
Women's Body Consciousness and Political Ideologies in Finnish Exercise Culture
2012
For over one hundred years, women’s gymnastics has been one of the most popular sports in the Nordic countries. Since the beginning of the 20 century, hundreds of gymnastics festivals have attracted thousands of gymnasts in Finland alone. Gymnastics has been taught weekly, monthly, and from year to year, in gymnastic clubs and at schools around the country. When teaching gymnastics according to the standards of the day, the gymnasts and their teachers considered the norms of gymnastics self-evident; in other words, as if the movements exercised and the body consciousness born out of the movements were neutral and value-free. Women’s gymnastics cannot, however, be examined separately from th…
The predominance of soccer in the sport and leisure habits of Spanish society
2014
The recent victories of its national football team in the 2010 World Cup and the 2008 and 2012 Euro Cups have situated Spain in the first place in the FIFA worldwide ranking, and provided it with widespread international recognition for both its decisive wins and the team's playing style. These victories mark the culmination of a dream long pursued by numerous players and coaches in Spanish football, but also by a Spanish society that is passionate about football. This article provides a descriptive overview of Spaniards' attachment to football, and tries to show its predominance in the sport and leisure habits of Spanish society. This task has been approached using diverse secondary source…
STTEPping in the right direction? Western classical music in an orchestral programme for disadvantaged African youth
2008
This article looks at STTEP, an outreach project currently housed at the University of Pretoria, which concentrates on the teaching of western orchestral instruments, plus background areas such as music theory, to disadvantaged children and youth from a variety of townships around Pretoria, South Africa. STTEP’s direction can well be described as ‘right’ – pupils are already surrounded by all kinds of global phenomena, and their formal music studies in western classical music are not making them forget their roots. In fact, the contrary has been found to be the case and some interesting cultural fusions are already seen – always a sign of a living culture.
Relational analysis and the ethnographic approach : constructing preschool childhood
2021
This article elaborates the relational ontology in an ethnographic study. The aim is to seek relational construction of preschool practice and how children’s positions are constructed in it. The study is based on the understanding that ethnography and relational sociology share the idea that society emerges through repeated relations. The ontological thinking of relational sociology is applied in a micro-level analysis of three episodes from a Finnish preschool. We propose that relations appear in every single ethnographical episode and that carefully analysed repetitive relations can reveal a stabilised organisational structure. The analysis shows how the position of one child is structuri…
Can ambivalence hold potential for fat activism? An analysis of conflicting discourses on fatness in the Finnish column series Jenny’s Life Change
2018
In 2017, a publicly funded, nationwide campaign called the Scale Rebellion set out to address fatness through body positivity and fat activism in Finland, with a fat woman named Jenny Lehtinen havi...