Search results for "IKK"

Russia’s cultural policy abroad as a projection of the “Russian World”

2023

The policy review discusses the recent developments in Russian cultural policy. These developments incorporate Russian culture into its geo-political ambitions. Obviously, the war in Ukraine makes these developments relevant. However, this review piece also seeks to explain the place of cultural policy in the Russian political system and the scope of its geopolitical ambitions. nonPeerReviewed

Communicative memory of irregular migration: The re-circulation of news images on YouTube

2016

This article analyses user-generated YouTube cut and mix videos of irregular migration as producing communicative memory of those who have suffered at Europe’s external borders. Visual and textual analyses examine a neglected perspective on the study of media representations of migration by examining a particular practice through which people engage with news images and participate in (re)construction of collective memory in relation to irregular migration. The analysis shows that while hegemonic Eurocentric imagery prevails also in the vernacular amateur productions, re-mixing different cultural productions nevertheless complicates the representation of irregular migration and affords alte…

Critical educational praxis in university ecosystems: enablers and constraints

2018

Universities serve several important functions in society today through research, education, and community engagement, not least helping people to live meaningfully in society, and helping to create a world worth living in. A kind of practice that seems particularly important in fulfilling such responsibilities is critical educational praxis, a social-justice oriented, educational practice/praxis, with a focus on asking critical questions and creating conditions for positive change. Yet, the contemporary university is not exactly a niche for critical educational praxis. There are many practices and arrangements within higher education that make the enactment of critical educational praxis v…

Authenticity, normativity and social media

2015

Struggle and banality of belonging to Europe. Cultural Europeanization from the perspective of the Central and East European citizens

2023

The European Union (EU) has developed cultural policy initiatives that seek to promote cultural Europeanization with the purpose of constructing European identity narratives and facilitating citizens’ sense of belonging to Europe and the EU. The article focuses on the citizens’ perspective to cultural Europeanization through ethnographic research on one central action in the EU cultural policy, European Heritage Label (EHL). We analyse the interviews conducted in selected EHL sites with Central and East European (CEE) citizens who were visiting the sites as well as with cultural heritage practitioners working at three EHL sites located in CEE countries. We ask how the practitioners and the …

The meanings of differentiated instruction in the narratives of Eritrean teachers

2021

The principles of inclusive education largely accepted by governments of different countries require differentiated classroom instruction to meet the diverse needs of individual students. Despite this, teachers have differing experiences and understandings about implementing differentiated instruction (DI) and heterogeneous classrooms. This narrative study aimed at exploring the meanings of DI in the Eritrean context, where teachers are not explicitly familiar with the concept, although their teaching practices reflect some level of differentiation. The research data consisted of 17 narrative interviews with Eritrean mathematics and science teachers. The results of the narrative analysis sh…

EU heritage diplomacy : entangled external and internal cultural relations

2022

Cultural heritage is an expanding yet contested area of EU policymaking, which has recently been identified as an instrument for EU international cultural relations. In this article, drawing from critical heritage studies and recent scholarship on heritage diplomacy, we see external and internal cultural relations as blurred and deeply entangled in EU heritage policies. Empirically, we focus on the European Heritage Label (EHL), a central EU heritage policy instrument. We explore how heritage practitioners at selected EHL sites and EU heritage policymakers understand and give meanings to international cultural relations and explain the role of cultural heritage in diplomatic endeavours. Our…

“A Shameless Ideology of Shameless Women”: Positioning the Other in Social Media Discourse Surrounding a Women’s Rights Movement in Pakistan

2022

This study analyzes social media (YouTube) discourse related to Aurat March 2019, a women’s rights movement in Pakistan. Using a discourse analytical approach that draws on the premises of Positioning theory, the analysis reveals the following two major storylines from the data: “The women who stray from the path, and the men who will return them to it,” and “Islam under threat from the outside.” Social media platforms allow their users to express opinions in online spaces, often resulting in polarization and clustering of like-minded people in so-called echo-chambers. This study demonstrates how social media users actively participate in the discursive construction of the “other,” and how…

Banal Sustainability : Renewing the Cultural Norm of Not Wasting Food

2022

Recently food waste has been raised as a major sustainability problem: roughly one third of the food produced globally ends up lost or wasted. This article investigates how people attach meaning to food waste reduction, based on eight individual interviews conducted with people met at a consumer education event in Helsinki in 2017. It is shown how the traditional cultural norm of not wasting food is reproduced in discourse on thrift and frugality and renewed by research-based arguments from circular economy discourse and environmental and sustainability discourse. It is proposed that the interplay of discourses merge into what Lars Kaijser calls banal sustainability: the complicated issue o…

Embracing water, healing pine : touch-walking and transcorporeal worldings

2023

This article considers touch as an embodied worlding practice in the context of humans intentionally seeking tactile trans-species contact. In particular, it examines three co-researchers’ tactile relations with tree(s) and water which were explored by “touch-walking,” an immersive method developed for this study. The method opened possibilities for examining transcorporeal sensory matterings and affective flows between the researcher’s body, co-researchers’ bodies and more-than-human bodies. This experimental micro-research brings knowledge about how people form deeply meaningful relationships with natural bodies, making worlds by cherishing tactile contact with them. Theoretically, we “po…