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Ilkka Heiskanen, Anita Kangas ja Ritva Mitchell (toim.) (2015). Taiteen ja kulttuurin kentät. Perusrakenteet, hallinta ja lainsäädäntö. Toinen, uudistettu laitos. Tietosanoma Oy: Helsinki. 509 s.

It is a special challenge for an individual to be the hero of his/her own life in the social conditions of reflexive modernisation. Autobiographies are not only descriptions of what happened during the life course, but they also reflect individual capacity to construct cultural identities in reflexive and reflective ways. To reflect on one's own success, personal gains and losses have to be compared with the competitive capacities of other community members of the hierarchically structured society. Reflexive capacity is the demand to become a conscious self and culturally identified member of a social group. Selfidentity is reconstructed and coped with in light of meaningful others during certain transition periods in the life course. Life-political meaningfulness is checked by overcoming personal difficulties in order to manage life-challenges further. Self-respect gives the resources needed for overcoming alienating experiences, for controlling the risk of social exclusion and for mastering one's own life successfully. Narrative identification of self tends to produce life-heroes. But the problem considered relevant here starts from reflecting altruism with reflexive monitoring of the self. The question is whether heroic episodes of life can be narrated so that heroic everyday deeds are emphasised in autobiographies. Or is everyday heroism present only in precarious moments which escape ego-centrism because this kind of heroism can be placed only at the social margin, where surviving a difficult situation obliges one to turn unselfishly toward another?

It is a special challenge for an individual to be the hero of his/her own life in the social conditions of reflexive modernisation. Autobiographies are not only descriptions of what happened during the life course, but they also reflect individual capacity to construct cultural identities in reflexive and reflective ways. To reflect on one's own success, personal gains and losses have to be compared with the competitive capacities of other community members of the hierarchically structured society. Reflexive capacity is the demand to become a conscious self and culturally identified member of a social group. Selfidentity is reconstructed and coped with in light of meaningful others during certain transition periods in the life course. Life-political meaningfulness is checked by overcoming personal difficulties in order to manage life-challenges further. Self-respect gives the resources needed for overcoming alienating experiences, for controlling the risk of social exclusion and for mastering one's own life successfully. Narrative identification of self tends to produce life-heroes. But the problem considered relevant here starts from reflecting altruism with reflexive monitoring of the self. The question is whether heroic episodes of life can be narrated so that heroic everyday deeds are emphasised in autobiographies. Or is everyday heroism present only in precarious moments which escape ego-centrism because this kind of heroism can be placed only at the social margin, where surviving a difficult situation obliges one to turn unselfishly toward another?

"This book examines changes of citizenship in the light of dislocated habitations. It highlights the ways in which the membership in a local community is shifting away from national frameworks, and explores the dislocations brought about by transnational and cosmopolitan forms of belonging. Containing theoretical, methodological and political contributions, the volume takes part in the social political and cultural discussion around migration, transnationalism, multiculturalism, multiple citizenship and cosmopolitan civic activities. It presents dislocation as a covering concept and a metaphor for describing circumstances in which the conventional ways and frames of conducting social scientific analysis, social policies, or politics no longer suffice. The book shows how scientific and political projects, educational curricula and policy institutions still lean mainly on the logics of mono-cultural nation-states and citizenships, without recognizing the dislocated nature of contemporary citizenship and civil society. Offering solutions, the book proposes new ways of collecting data and conducting analyses, explains the new logics of citizenship and civic activities, and offers tools for developing civic and citizenship policies that consider the transnational reality of people's everyday lives and life histories"--Provided by publisher