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Fashion changes societies, and is also itself shaped by multiple socio-cultural processes, including processes of globalization. At the same time, fashion scholarship is not only speaking about and seeking to understand fashion, but is also actively formulating ideas, assumptions and understandings as to what fashion can be, and where in history and in which geographical locations fashion can be found. This paper addresses the increasingly complex question of the nature of fashion in a globalized and increasingly interconnected world. Arguing for a radical, "punk," attitude toward fashion scholarship, and a concomitant rethinking of fashion, we suggest an approach that goes beyond academic and political fashions, drawing upon historical scolarship and examples. For while it is strikingly obvious that fashion is a global and globalized phenomenon, its specific character, and indeed its geographical locations and origins, remain contested. Drawing inspiration from the ancient Greek historian Polybius, and his ideas of an "ecumenical analytical" approach to studying world-wide phenomena, we reflect upon the history and current state of fashion studies in what we consider an ecumenical moment, which demands novel insights, but also holds many new opportunities for the field. ; Peer reviewed

The development of the sociology of work in Finland occurred in two phases: (1) the development of the welfare state (1945–1980s) marked by the consolidation of the sub-discipline, and (2) the rise of the competition state (late 1980s–present) when the scope of the sub-discipline was widened. Although the Finnish sociology of work has been equally influenced by positivist, reformist and critical approaches, it has maintained its fundamentally consensual nature. Critical paradigms have never assumed a central role. There is a considerable 'reformist' tendency in the SoW producing solutions to societal problems, and in many cases in the form of action-oriented research and developmental projects. This reflects the overall pragmatic nature of Finnish policy-making and close social distance between the government, labour market organizations and academia. ; Peer reviewed

490 ; Populist argumentation claims to represent 'the people' against 'the elite', appealing to emotions and reacting to a sense of crisis. By analysing a public debate in Finland in which populist arguments appropriate a culturally shared, familiar experience – that of singing Suvivirsi, the Summer Hymn – I argue that evoking familiarity is an effective way of 'doing populism'. Analysing media texts from 2002 to 2014 and a questionnaire to political candidates in 2011, and using Laurent The´venot's sociology of engagements, the article shows that appeals to the familiarity of the hymn are particularly compatible with the populist valorization of the experience of the common people. Familiarity thus constitutes a central tool in the toolkit of populism. Remembering the shared experience of singing the hymn bonds the assumed 'people' together and gives an emotional charge to populist arguments. By drawing on pragmatist political sociology and analysing politics 'in action' in everyday disputes, the paper makes a novel contribution to the scholarship of populism. ; Peer reviewed

When the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was asked what he thought were the main consequences of the French Revolution, he is alleged to have replied that it was too early to tell. The same response may be given today as to what the eventual ramifications of Brexit will be. It will take many decades for these to play out, both for the UK, for the EU and the wider world. Yet consideration of some strands of Émile Durkheim's sociology - reading these either in the manner Durkheim intended, or somewhat against the grain - allow us to look forward in time and make some plausible predictions. This essay considers what the ideas of one of the most major classical sociologists, Émile Durkheim, can illuminate about both Brexit and the entity that the United Kingdom is leaving, the European Union. I will attempt to show that the phenomena which Durkheim pointed to in terms of the emergence of pan-European social integration - in other words, what he said about Europe as a single social and cultural entity - can be used to identify some elements of Brexit, which might otherwise not be as apparent or as precisely identifiable as they would be without a Durkheimian thematization of them.

Populism has often been understood as a description of political parties and politicians, who have been labelled either populist or not. This dissertation argues that it is more useful to conceive of populism in action: as something that is done rather than something that is. I propose that the populist toolkit is a collection of cultural practices, which politicians and citizens use to make sense of and do politics, by claiming that 'the people' are opposed by a corrupt elite – a powerful claim in contemporary politics, both in Finland and internationally. The concept of the populist toolkit has analytical utility, since it can separate a set of populist repertoires from others, for example that of exclusionary nationalism, and takes seriously the effect culture has on action, while avoiding cultural determinism. I study four instances in which the populist toolkit was used in Finnish politics from 2007 to 2016. As data, I use party publications, a Voting Advice Application, newspaper articles and opinion pieces, and a large set of online media data. Methodologically, I employ qualitative text analysis informed by theories of populism, cultural practices, frame analysis and Laurent Thévenot's sociology of engagements, as well as topic modeling. Article I argues that the state of the Eurozone in 2011 gave the Finns Party an opportunity to frame the situation as a crisis for Finland and to present itself as a righteous populist challenger to established parties. Article II shows that the Finns Party uses anti-feminist arguments to present itself as a populist alternative. Article III presents a theory of how populist argumentation can use familiar emotional experiences in bonding 'the people' together. Article IV tackles the populist epistemology: while populism can be critical of intellectuals and experts in general, the article shows that another populist strategy is counterknowledge, incorporating alternative knowledge authorities. This strategy is particularly employed by the populist radical right. After the monumental success of right-wing populism in Western democracies, the next big question is whether left-wing or liberal actors will take up the tools of populism, or will they rather position themselves on the side of pluralism, democratic institutions and scientific expertise. This will have to be assessed by future studies.

Nation states often end up adopting practices that are incongruent with their formal commitments to international efforts, such as mitigation of climate change. Although the necessity of a transfer towards carbon-neutral societies is widely understood, such decoupling is a challenge to transition. This study analyses the political discourse in the Finnish media from 2017 to 2018 around the European Union's Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) Regulation. The discourse embodies a contradiction, as the Finnish government sought to justify its aim to log a record amount of forest while officially pledging to climate change mitigation. The forest industry and the government launched a major lobbying campaign to influence the regulation calculations to be adopted by the European Union. Several representatives of the scientific community rose to oppose the government's plan of action by distributing scientific knowledge on the negative climate effects caused by extensive forestry; a vigorous public debate around the correct ways to use this natural resource ensued. Our analysis identifies three prevailing narratives, each portraying and resolving the contradiction in a distinct way. We argue that narratives work as tools of epistemic governance and demonstrate how policy actors selectively weave scientific knowledge into such narratives. ; publishedVersion ; Peer reviewed

A small Kurdish city located in northern Syria, Kobane, became symbolically significant when ISIS laid siege to the city between September 2014 and January 2015. This pivotal moment in the fight against ISIS threw the international spotlight on the Kurds. The Kobane Generation analyses how Kurdish diaspora communities mobilised in France after the breakout of the Syrian civil war and political unrest in Turkey and Iraq in the 2010s. Tens of thousands of people, mostly but not exclusively diaspora Kurds, demonstrated in major European capitals, expressed their solidarity with Kobane, and engaged in transnational political activism towards Kurdistan. In this book, Mari Toivanen discusses a series of critical events that led to different forms of transnational participation towards Kurdistan. The focus of this book is particularly on how diaspora mobilisations became visible among the second generation, the descendants of Kurdish migrants. The book addresses important questions, such as why second-generation members felt the need to mobilise and what kind of transnational participation this led to. How did the transnational participation and political activism of the second generation differ from that of their parents, and is such activism simply diasporic or also related to more global changes in political activism? The Kobane Generation offers important insights on the generational dynamics of political mobilisations and their significance to understanding diaspora contributions. More broadly, it sheds light on second-generation political activism beyond the diaspora context, analysing it in relation to global transformations in political subjectivities. ; Peer reviewed

Collective bargaining has been under great pressure in Finland and Europe, including demands for increased wage competitiveness and reductions in public sector spending. This article showcases how relatively gender-equal states with strong corporatist traditions, such as Finland, may align with neoliberal austerity policies that have gendered implications, even when gender equality becomes a prominent issue in a policy debate. This article analyzes the case of the Competitiveness Pact, a recent policy reform to lower labor costs initiated by the Finnish government and negotiated with labor market parties. This analysis combines affect theory and a policy-constructivist approach to analyze the positions and documents produced by the government and labor market parties during the Competitiveness Pact negotiations. We identify problem representations regarding national competitiveness and suggest that the problem representations constructed anticipatory regimes that focused on potential future threats and crises, especially those related to the public sector, which was portrayed as a source of potential crisis and a threat to the masculine export sector. The article shows how neoliberal economic and governmental policies exacerbate gender inequality in the labor market with the consent of trade unions. ; publishedVersion ; Peer reviewed

This chapter concerns the roots and increasing diversification of cosmopolitan social thought and the research it inspires. It shows that cosmopolitan matters now constitute central topics for research, debate, and controversy across the social sciences. Having begun as a sense of non-national affiliation – declaring oneself to be a 'citizen of the world' rather than of any specific polity – it now encompasses a much wider range of issues. Cosmopolitanism today simultaneously refers to a scholarly field, a set of research agendas, a series of substantive phenomena, moral and ethical norms, ideals and practices, and ways of thinking, both socially and politically, as well as in more purely academic terms of analysis and research procedures. Running through all these is a common theme: the limits of nation-states and national frames of reference, and the need to think and act beyond these. This is a scholarly area directed towards developing non-Western-centric, post-universalistic, multi- and inter-disciplinary inquiry, rendering ideas of cosmopolitanism more open, flexible, and multiple, especially as regards becoming more cognisant of forms of difference and plurality in the world. The overarching intellectual tendency over time has been to cosmopolitanise cosmopolitanism itself. ; Peer reviewed

The COVID-19 pandemic has opened up futures for debate in an unprecedented manner and on an unforeseen scale. This article explores how ideas of immunity structured debates about pandemic management strategies as a means of securing a post-pandemic future during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. Building on queer theorization of temporality, the article asks how ideas of COVID-19 immunity derive their affective appeal and cultural legitimacy, and what is at stake in the imagined futures that unfold from such visions of post-pandemic immunity. The analysis focuses on two affective figures that circulated widely in public discourse in March–May 2020: the figure of the soon-immune nation and the figure of the immune individual. I unsettle these figures by contextualizing them through the histories of immunity politics around race, gender and sexuality. The analysis shows that the two figures have long affective histories entangled with nationalism, racism and discrimination. The article argues that these histories shape and curtail the kinds of post-pandemic futures that may be enacted and imagined through popular ideas of immunity. ; publishedVersion ; Peer reviewed

Scientists are developing a technique called in vitro gametogenesis or IVG to generate synthetic gametes for research and, potentially, for treating infertility. What would it mean for feminist concerns over the future of reproductive practice and biotechnological development if egg and sperm cells could be produced in laboratory conditions? In this article, I take on the question by discussing the emerging technique of IVG through the speculative feminist analysis of ambiguous reproductive futures. Feminist cultural and science studies scholars have explored the transformative effects of biomedicine on reproduction through science fiction novels and other cultural products. I theorise the speculative and visionary in biomedicine in the context of ethnographic methodology by drawing on 'thought experiments' conducted with stem cell scientists as shared acts of future-oriented contemplation. I develop the figure of SF proposed by Donna Haraway to investigate how science facts and speculative fabulation together shape futurities of reproduction. I propose including shifting frontiers in feminist thinking of the SFs in bioscience. Biomedical research aims to shift the borders between what is known and not known in reproductive biology, subsequently raising new technical, ethical and political issues in terms of stratified reproduction. The article shows that synthetic gametes are anticipated to intensify selective procreation. Simultaneously, IVG is seen to forge new biogenetic relationships and possibilities for non-normative reproduction and kin-making. Following Haraway, I argue that by 'staying with the trouble' of these biotechnological visions, feminist speculative analytics on technoscience offers a valuable tool to envision more hopeful and equal futures together with scientists. ; publishedVersion ; Peer reviewed

Automation has permeated workplaces and threatens labour in the production process. Concurrently, European governments have expanded workfare which imposes stringent conditions and sanctions on unemployed workers after the onset of austerity. We explore how automation risk affects workfare support. Recent research finds that most routine workers 'survive' in their routine jobs. Despite avoiding unemployment, routine workers may face the threat of status decline as automation erodes the value of routine work. They may respond by differentiating themselves from lower-ranked social groups such as unemployed workers. Such boundary drawing may manifest views that the unemployed are less deserving of welfare. We thus posit that routine workers may support workfare to assuage their fears of status decline. We further explore if worsening economic hardship, proxied as rising unemployment rates over time, increases their support for workfare. We conducted pooled and multilevel analyses using data from the European Social Survey. We find that routine workers significantly support workfare. We also find that routine workers support workfare when economic hardship worsens, but oppose it when conditions ameliorate. Findings suggest that status threat is an important channel by which automation risk may affect workfare support, but its impact depends on social context, hence yielding country-differences. Worsening economic hardship may exacerbate routine workers' status decline fears, and intensify their harsh views against unemployed workers. Automation risk may thus have a greater impact on workfare support under such conditions. Policymakers can use these findings to assess how workfare may be publicly received and under various economic conditions. ; Peer reviewed

This article discussses discursive transformations in the performance of the government and the 'hashtag landscape', studying Twitter discussions and the female-led government of one of the youngest Prime Ministers in the world, Sanna Marin of Finland. Among countries in Europe, Finland has been, in the period of analysis of March 2020 to January 2021, one of the least affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Our datasets from both Twitter discussions and the government's press conferences in 2020 reveal which were the emerging topics of the pandemic year in Finland and how they were discussed. We observe a move from consensual governmental political control to control in the hands of the authorities and Ministers responsible, performing a different basis for the pandemic. On the 'hashtag landscape', face masks continually emerge as an object of debate. They become not only a point of trust and distrust that the government cannot ignore. In terms of comparative governance, this article also notes how the emergency powers legislation shifted control to the government from regional authorities and municipalities in spring 2020, and by that autumn those powers were returned to regional and local bodies. We recognize several themes that were contested, and the discursive field's transformations and interplay with the authorities. The article develops an original approach to reading thematical data longitudinally for both social media discussions and government performance, a key contribution of this article to the state of the art is a novel methodological framework that combines rhetoric-performative discourse theory with interpretive instrumentalism: topic modelling with qualitative research. By analyzing control during the Covid-19 situation, we address the challenges of social media research and illustrate the need for a dialogical approach with the research materials. Understanding the performance of elected officials in controlling a crisis and interconnected debates among the hashtag publics or on the hashtag landscapes may be key to perceiving contemporary politics, where discursive shifts in performance and contestation are important objects of study. ; Peer reviewed

The article examines a reform of internal immigration policing in Finland. It discusses the public debate on ethnic profiling and the legal reform process of regulating immigration law enforcement by the Finnish government from 2013 to 2015 through an analysis of official documents and media coverage. The reform included elements of both criminalisation of migration and human rights protections. The Finnish government added a ban on ethnic profiling in the Aliens Act. At the same time, it gave the police and the border guard more powers to conduct identity checks on foreign citizens. The paper argues that regulation and practices of immigration policing are affected by power positions of different national actors and the nature of public debate. The presence of ethnic minorities and representatives of civil society during the policy process and public discussions on ethnic and racial profiling in Finland was negligible. Both immigration policing and immigration law enforcement policy-making risk repeating formally equal patterns that are, in practice, biased. ; Peer reviewed

Dietary guidelines are a key policy instrument in guiding the way people eat in many countries. Traditionally, the guidelines focus on the public health aspects of diets. During the last decade, sustainability has increasingly been incorporated into dietary guidelines, emphasizing that sustainable diet benefits both health and the environment. This article analyses the integration of sustainability into dietary guidelines in Finland. The analysis is situated within the ontological turn in social theory, understanding food as ontologically multiple. We employ Annemarie Mol's concept of ontonorms in analyzing the Finnish dietary guidelines. Currently, in Finland, there seems to be a situation of institutional ambiguity regarding where and by whom sustainable food policy is being made and what does it constitute. We claim that the ontological multiplicity of food is partly constituted by, and at the same time constitutive of, the institutional ambiguity, and as a result, the guidelines do not yet provide clear guidance for sustainable food practices. As the guidelines fail to coordinate the multiplicity, they increase the normative burden on consumers to make responsible choices. In the latest Finnish guidelines targeted for children, however, steps are taken towards a more inclusive, caring understanding of sustainable dietary guidance. ; Peer reviewed