Jouni Häkli

Are There Politics in Childhood

This paper sets out to explore childrens worlds as potential fields of political action. Children are approached as competent political agents whose mundane lives are permeated by politics in which they have their own positions and roles. The paper discusses how children can be found to act politically in their everyday lives and, to some extent, also practice their own political geographies. The main objective is to propose a theoretical basis for recognising the political aspects of childrens agency and studying political geographies embedded in childrens lived worlds.

EDITORIAL: CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE'S POLITICS IN EVERYDAY LIFE

Author(s): Kallio Kirsi Pauliina, Hakli Jouni Title: Editorial: Children and Young Peoples Politics in Everyday Life Year: 2013 Journal Title: Space and Polity Vol and number: 17 : 1 Pages: 1-16 Discipline: Social and economic geography School /Other Unit: School of Management Item Type: Journal Article Language: en DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.780710 URN: URN:NBN:fi:uta-201305031092

Discourse in the production of political space : decolonizing the symbolism of provinces in Finland

Abstract Recent work in ‘critical geopolitics’ has opened new important ways of understanding the discursive constitution of world order and the epistemic underpinnings of international statecraft. Much of this research has focused on the textual practices and strategies of actively writing the global space in a multiplicity of discursive settings. In this article I explore ‘geopolitical imagination’ within a national rather than international context. In an approach tentatively titled ‘the political geography of knowledge’ I wish to capture the effective history and geography of a particular geopolitical discourse, one promoting the idea of a natural subdivision of the Finnish states territorial space. A reform of regional administration in Finland exemplifies a state-centred discourse based on the savoir of regions as spontaneous organic entities. I seek to demonstrate that the historical preconditions for the reform emerged together with the increasing governmentality in Europe from the 18th century onward. I elaborate upon four aspects in the process: the history of territoriality and its relation to the changing role of knowledge in state government; the role of mapping and survey in visualizing Finland and producing infrastructures for the reform discourse; the invention of ‘region’ as a field of knowledge inherent to and consistent with the liberalizing states politico-administrative practices; and finally, the role of state committees in objectifying and universalizing the division of Finland into provinces. The article concludes with a contemporary critique of the institutional production of space in Finland, i.e. a history of the present.

Subject, action and polis Theorizing political agency

In this paper, we develop tools for understanding political agency and political events as they unfold contextually in everyday life. We discuss alternative understandings of the subject so as to grasp the scope of the subject’s autonomy as the ground for political subjectivity. We conceive of political agency in terms of subjectivity related to subject positions offered in the flux of everyday life. To bring together political subject and action, we conceptualize the topological settings of political agency in terms of polis. To illustrate the analytical potential of our approach, we analyse a sequence in a movie by Ingmar Bergman.

Regions, networks and fluidity in the Finnish nation-state

In this article, the author applies the topological conception of space to the building of the Finnish nation-state. The process is approached from the vantage point of the unconformable, yet related spatial types of regions, networks and fluids. An understanding of the Finnish identity as an ever-changing and contradictory field of core narratives and meanings, and as an international accomplishment, helps avoiding the ‘territorial trap’ (world seen exclusively in terms of nation-state territories) as well as the ‘teleological trap’ (endpoint taken as explanation of the historical trajectory leading to state formation) in the analysis of the history of the Finnish nation-state.

Lived citizenship as the locus of political agency in participatory policy

Participatory policies seeking to foster active citizenship continue to be dominated by a territorial imagination. Yet, the world where people identify and perform as citizens is spatially multifarious. This article engages with the tension between territorially grounded perceptions and relational modes of practicing political agency. Studying empirically the Finnish child and youth policies, we address jointly the participatory obligations that municipalities strive to fulfill, and the spatial attachments that children and young people establish in their lived worlds. To this end, we introduce the concept of lived citizenship as an interface where the territorially-bound public administration and the plurality of spatial attachments characteristic to transnational living may meet. We conclude by proposing a re-grounding of lived citizenship in both topological and topographical terms as an improvement in theoretical understanding of mundane political agency and as a step towards more proficient participatory policies.

The Global as a Field: Children's Rights Advocacy as a Transnational Practice

Research on transnationalism has called into question the much criticized but persistent dichotomy between the nation-state space as an ‘inside’, and the global realm as its constitutive ‘outside’. This paper contributes to the emerging scholarship on transnational elites working at the intersection of the national and the global by assessing practices related to childrens rights advocacy. Particular attention is paid to the drafting and the enforcement of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child since the 1980s. On the basis of a Bourdieuan theorization of social fields we argue that some aspects of childrens rights advocacy can be understood as reflecting the dynamism of the transnational field of childrens rights. In somewhat broader terms the paper proposes that the formative logic of elite-driven globalization is a social and political dynamism related to the rules of competition and collaboration that structure inclusions, exclusions, and awards in transnational fields.

Cross-border regionalisation in the 'New Europe' : theoretical reflection with two illustrative examples

Regionalisation has recently become a catchword both in political practice and academic discourse. Even if the idea of the ‘Europe of the Regions’ is no longer uncritically accepted, regional imagination still frequently informs the analysis of the European political order. This article seeks to chart alternative ways of understanding political change in Europe. It first outlines the current understanding of the role of regions in Europe, and seeks to put contemporary ideas into historical perspective. The article then examines the standard way of analysing regionalism, the ‘top‐down, bottom‐up’ metaphor. By looking at the scales of politics from a social constructionist perspective the article shows that this widely‐used metaphor does not adequately capture much of the political history of region building, nor is it able to identify the relations of power involved in regionalisation in the era of expanding trans‐boundary linkages and networks across state borders. By illustrating cross‐border regionalisa...

Residents, customers or citizens? Tracing the idea of youthful participation in the context of administrative reforms in Finnish public administration

In parallel with developing participatory policies, public administration in Finland and elsewhere has undergone constitutive administrative reform. By analysing policy documents and civil servants’ experiences, we ask how meta-level administrative steering modes manifest themselves in the motives and goals set for participation and what kinds of political agencies they allow for children and young people who play a pivotal role in the future shape of democracy. We conclude that coexisting different steering modes produce different practical solutions that define the content of “citizenship” in different ways. What is essential is the reflectivity concerning whether one or another steering mode dominates participation policy, and with what consequences.

Geosocial Lives in Topological Polis: Mohamed Bouazizi as a Political Agent

ABSTRACT Geopolitical events and developments can hardly be detached from the mundane lives where people confront politicised and politicising matters, share meaningful experiences, build attitudes, and take action. To contribute to understanding how large-scale geopolitics connect with the everyday, this article draws attention to political subjectivity as the condition of possibility of political agency and polis as the geosocial context of political life as experienced, conceived, and practised. Empirically, the paper engages with the tragic end of Mohamed Bouazizi’s life and scrutinises his role in the events and developments generally known as the Arab Spring. Our analysis contests both the dominant interpretation that postulates political import to his acts, and the alternative account that underscores his apolitical stance. Instead, we propose that the international politicisation of Mohamed Bouazizi’s agency unfolded as an accomplishment of many individual and collective actors, including Bouazizi himself in his struggle to cope with emergent aspects of his everyday life.