Suchergebnisse

There is growing concern among democracy scholars that participatory innovations pose a depoliticizing threat to democracy. This article tackles this concern by providing a more nuanced understanding of how politicization and depoliticization take shape in participatory initiatives. Based on ethnographic research on participatory projects with marginalized people who are invited to act as experiential experts, the article examines how actors limit and open up possibilities to participate. By focusing on struggles concerning the definition of expertise, the article identifies a threefold character of politicization as a practice within participatory innovations. It involves (1) illuminating the boundaries that define the actors' possibilities; (2) making a connection between these boundaries and specific value bases; and (3) imagining an alternative normative basis for participation.

Participation has increasingly become a means and an end for successful and 'empowering' social policy. Building on previous governmentality critiques of participatory initiatives, this article investigates practices of resistance in the context of Finnish participatory social policy. I adopt a Foucauldian counter-conducts approach as my lens to study critical speech as a form of resistance in initiatives that invite marginalised people as 'experts-by-experience' in social welfare organisations. I illustrate how practices of governing and resistance are intertwined and mutually dependent in a much subtler and more practical manner than allows the often-used analytical dichotomy between dominance and empowerment. As an example, I show how the projects' attempts to co-opt the participants' critical speech may also serve as the basis for their subversive self-making and means of 'being differently'. ; peerReviewed

Participation has increasingly become a means and an end for successful and 'empowering' social policy. Building on previous governmentality critiques of participatory initiatives, this article investigates practices of resistance in the context of Finnish participatory social policy. I adopt a Foucauldian counter-conducts approach as my lens to study critical speech as a form of resistance in initiatives that invite marginalised people as 'experts-by-experience' in social welfare organisations. I illustrate how practices of governing and resistance are intertwined and mutually dependent in a much subtler and more practical manner than allows the often-used analytical dichotomy between dominance and empowerment. As an example, I show how the projects' attempts to co-opt the participants' critical speech may also serve as the basis for their subversive self-making and means of 'being differently'.

This article examines a case of participatory social policy in which former beneficiaries were invited as 'experts-by-experience' into Finnish social welfare organisations. It combines a governmentality perspective with the analytical tools of the sociology of engagements to explore as what the projects' participants are engaged, and how the differing demands made on their ways of being are made to appear as legitimate. The article shows how different definitions of expertise are used to steer the participants' forms of engagement, and how these definitions appear valid only within a specific frame of justifying civic participation. It concludes that the participants' expertise is defined in terms of their ability to 'projectify themselves' according to the projects' specific objectives: rehabilitation, co-production, or the exercise of civic rights. The article suggests that this demand to align one's way of being with project purposes is what makes it possible to evaluate and select participants. ; peerReviewed

This article investigates the micro-level practices of subject-construction in Finnish participatory social policy. Through a governmental ethnography on projects that invite former beneficiaries to become 'experts-by-experience' in social welfare organizations, I discern the possibilities for freedom in the participants' self-construction. By making use of Michel Foucault's conceptual tools of care of the self and confession, I illustrate how, contrary to the projects' emancipatory promise of providing the service users the freedom to reconstruct themselves, the projects entail practices that curb the participants' way of 'knowing themselves'. They require the service users to reframe their raw experiences as neutral and objective knowledge, making alternative ways of knowing appear 'irrational', and hence easily discountable. I conclude that despite the user involvement initiatives' promise of incorporating different forms of knowledge, the participants are in practice required to realign their way of knowing with the dominant knowledge paradigm in order to be accepted as participants. ; peerReviewed

This dissertation analyses expertise-by-experience in Finnish social welfare organisations as part of the participatory practices presented as new democracy. It employs a governmental ethnographic method to investigate how a person with difficult experiences is made into 'an expert of one's own life' and how the subjectivity thus created is connected to different possibilities and rationales of participation. It asks: 1. What characterises the subjectivities created in the initiatives? 2. How (through which practices) are the participants constructed as experts? In this summary article the democratic quality of expert-making practices is interpreted through a critical democratic lens by inquiring: 3. How do the practices identified sustain or, conversely, undermine democracy? Conceptually, the research builds on a Foucauldian vocabulary by connecting processes of subjectivation with knowledge-claims as undergirding practices of governing. The data consist of ethnographic material produced in a civil society organisation, of themed interviews with experts-by-experience and practitioners from seven projects in Finnish social welfare organisations and of policy-documents delineating the concept and its related practices. The research argues that the initiatives studied primarily seek to construct collaborative and consensus-seeking participants. This is achieved by defining 'expertise' as the ability to present neutral and objective knowledge over specific issues despite one's personal experiences. Participation is constructed as a distinctly a-political activity based on objectified knowledge. Collective advocacy, emotions and opinionated inputs are deemed unfitting. This configuration of expertise as a pre-requirement for the right to participate establishes epistemic thresholds for participation, making it possible to choose participants according to the projects' predefined objectives. This is a cause for concern for democracy. Nonetheless, the research also suggests that the emphasis on expertise also renders the concept available for contestations and critique. The participants' and practitioners' attempts to destabilise the technocratic expert-construction illuminate the existing boundaries of expertise and serve to politicise the boundaries of inclusion in participatory governance. Still, the acts of resistance do not contest participatory governance's underlying premise of joint knowledge production, which reaffirms that the value of participation lies in its epistemic contributions to decision-making. ; Tutkimuksessa analysoin kokemusasiantuntijuutta suomalaisissa sosiaalialan organisaatioissa. Käsittelen ilmiötä osallistavana käytäntönä, joka esitetään osaksi uudenlaista demokratiaa. Tarkastelen, kuinka vaikeita elämänkokemuksia läpikäynyt ihminen muokataan 'oman elämänsä asiantuntijaksi', ja kuinka näin tuotettu subjektiviteetti yhdistyy erilaisiin tapoihin hahmottaa ja perutella osallistuminen. Tutkimusotteenani on hallinnallisuusetnografia, ja tutkimuskysymyksinä 1. Millaisia subjekti- viteetteja kokemusasiantuntijuushankkeissa tuotetaan? 2. Millaisten toimintatapojen avulla osallistujista tuotetaan asiantuntijoita? Yhteenvetoartikkelissa tulkitsen asiantuntijaksi tekemisen käytäntöjä kriittisen demokratiatutkimuksen näkökulmasta ja kysyn 3. Miten havaitut toimintatavat tukevat tai vastaavasti haastavat demokratiaa? Tutkimus nojaa käsitteellisesti Foucault'laiseen sanastoon, joka yhdistää subjektivisaatioprosessit hallitsemiskäytäntöjen taustalla oleviin tietokäsityksiin. Tutkimuksen aineisto koostuu järjestön kokemusasiantuntijuushankkeessa tuotetusta etnografisesta aineistosta, seitsemän hankkeen kokemusasiantuntijoiden ja työntekijöiden teemahaastatteluista sekä kokemusasiantuntijuuskäsitettä ja siihen liittyviä toimintatapoja käsittelevistä politiikkadokumenteista. Väitän, että tutkituissa hankkeissa pyritään ensisijaisesti tuottamaan kokemusasiantuntijoista konsensushakuisia yhteistyökumppaneita. Tämä saavutetaan määrittelemällä 'asiantuntijuus' kykynä tuottaa neutraalia ja puolueetonta tietoa omista henkilökohtaisista kokemuksista huolimatta. Osallistuminen hahmotellaan näin epäpoliittiseksi, objektiiviseen tietoon perustuvaksi toiminnaksi. Kollektiivinen asianajo, tunteet tai vahvat mielipiteenilmaisut esitetään epäsopivina asiantuntijan roolille. Asiantuntijuuden hahmottaminen osallistumisoikeuden edellytykseksi tuottaa episteemisiä kynnyksiä osallistumiseen, ja tekee mahdolliseksi valikoida osallistujia hankkeiden ennalta määriteltyjen tavoitteiden mukaisesti. Tämä on demokratian näkökulmasta ongelmallista. Esitän kuitenkin, että asiantuntijuuteen nojaaminen avaa myös mahdollisuuksia käsitteen haastamiselle. Osallistujien ja työntekijöiden yritykset horjuttaa teknokraattista asiantuntijakäsitystä tekevät asiantuntijuuden tämänhetkiset rajat näkyviksi, ja näin politisoivat osallistumismahdollisuuksien reunaehdot. Nämä vastarinnan käytännöt eivät kuitenkaan haasta osallistavan hallinnan perusolettamusta yhteisestä tiedontuotannosta. Tämä vahvistaa tulkintaa, että kokemusasiantuntijoiden osallistumisen arvo nähdään sen tuottamina tietosyötteinä päätöksentekoon.

There is growing concern among democracy scholars that participatory innovations pose a de-politicizing threat rather than an asset for democracy. This article tackles this concern by providing a more nuanced understanding of how politicization and de-politicization take shape in participatory initiatives. Based on ethnographic research on participatory projects with marginalized people who are invited to act as experiential experts, the article examines how actors limit and open up possibilities to participate. By focusing on struggles concerning the definition of expertise, the article identifies a threefold character of politicization as a practice within participatory innovations: 1) illuminating the boundaries that define the actors' possibilities, 2) making a connection between these boundaries and specific value-bases, and 3) imagining an alternative normative basis for participation. ; There is growing concern among democracy scholars that participatory innovations pose a depoliticizing threat to democracy. This article tackles this concern by providing a more nuanced understanding of how politicization and depoliticization take shape in participatory initiatives. Based on ethnographic research on participatory projects with marginalized people who are invited to act as experiential experts, the article examines how actors limit and open up possibilities to participate. By focusing on struggles concerning the definition of expertise, the article identifies a threefold character of politicization as a practice within participatory innovations. It involves (1) illuminating the boundaries that define the actors' possibilities; (2) making a connection between these boundaries and specific value bases; and (3) imagining an alternative normative basis for participation. ; Peer reviewed

Our selves are characterized by inner multiplicity (Elster 1986). Our raced, classed, gendered, and sexed identities are intersectional (Crenshaw 1991; Wojciechowska 2019). Depending on the context and our state of mind, we are parents, employees, dancers, slackers, victims, perpetrators, players, hosts, explorers, altruists, or egoists. We are all these things at once and consecutively. We change and grow. Our identities are never permanent but always in motion, being transformed through our performative engagements (Lloyd 2005). We are constantly becoming.

AbstractIn this article we introduce a pragmatist interpretation of agonistic pluralism and develop this into an analytical framework that is applied to the analysis of urban conflicts. In the article, we take stock of contemporary critical and radical urban scholarship, our aim being twofold. First, we substantiate Chantal Mouffe's notion of agonistic pluralism with tools from French pragmatic sociology. We suggest that, in a democracy, plurality emerges both as a plurality of conflict manifested in the variety of possible ways to identify injustices, and formulate and justify claims in public struggles, and a plurality of commonality, manifested in different logics by which a 'we' can be formed and action coordinated so as to solve issues without resorting to physical violence. Secondly, by applying the developed conceptualization of plurality to an ongoing urban conflict concerning an airport, we showcase the value of the approach for identifying and analyzing different forms and phases of actually existing political conflicts, and for recognizing their meaning for democracy.

Hans Asenbaum's open-access book The Politics of Becoming: Anonymity and Democracy in the Digital Age takes on some of the biggest questions in feminist and radical democratic theory. It asks, how we should understand who we are, and what implications our answer to that question has for democracy.