Samu Pehkonen

Events of the Body Politic: A Nancian Reading of Asylum-seekers’ Bodily Choreographies and Resistance

This article thinks the place of the body, agency and movement in politics through the body of the asylum-seeker. Asylum-seekers do not have ample space to politically voice their experiences, but their bodies and ways of taking agency are fluid. The Agambenian idea of exceptional space and bare life privileges the power of the sovereign, leaving little space for agency for its subjects. It leads to an impasse, as it offers no viable option of thinking the possibilities of opposing sovereign rule. We have resorted to Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy in order to read to the contrary: to sketch the potential of the body to move beyond the reach of sovereign power and to communicate itself and its relations to others. The untenability of the sovereign subject pointed to by Nancy’s ontology of bodies allows seeing the asylum-seeker’s body as expressive and moving body that reorganizes its relations to others and turns it to an active agent from which events of the body politic emerge. With its focus on crisscrossing movement of the body and between bodies, the notion of choreography assists us in envisioning that the space for political agency and community do not pre-exist, but are articulated through bodies’ movements. We argue that either purely textual analysis or focus on administrative rationality is bound to leave possible expressions of political agency aside, and thus to ignore the challenge the bodily choreographies of asylum-seekers pose to political theory. We illustrate our argument with vignettes from Fernand Melgar’s 2008 documentary film The Fortress.

Too good to be a sport? Why dog agility struggles in gaining recognition as a sport

Over the last two decades, the Finnish community of dog agility practitioners has worked diligently towards gaining recognition for agility as a sport. The process reached an important milestone in 2016 when the National Sports Council listed the Finnish Agility Association as eligible for financial support from the state. As one of the pioneer countries in this regard, Finland is of great interest, as the agility sport continues to become more popular and professionalised worldwide. Using the findings from a qualitative study of media coverage and expert interviews about attempts to gain recognition for agility as a sport, this article explores the strategies that practitioners and the Finnish Agility Association have utilised in their work. This article shows that recognition comes with the need to find a balance between elite sports, on the one hand, and sport for all on the other. Although agility may risk losing some of its particular character as a human–animal teamwork dynamic, it has the potential to contribute to the culture of sports more widely.

Choreographing the Performer–Audience Interaction

The article introduces the concept of choreography, defined as situationally enacted participation and action framework that provides sequential structure for social interaction, for studying performer–audience interaction during musical performances. Performers develop a preferred type of interaction during a repeated series of concerts. Audiences become absorbed in the choreography through participation in the concerts and the circulation of the Internet videos from earlier concerts. As the audience learns to expect certain actions from the side of the performers, improvisation is required from the performers in order for the choreography to be successful. Attention is paid to the methods the performers use to produce “watchables” and to manage the audience responses. The spatial, temporal, and gestural elements of this enacted choreography are analyzed sequentially using conversation analysis. The longitudinal data is composed of YouTube concert videos of Kings of Convenience performing a song, “I’d Rather Dance with You.”

Impromptu facts and moral panic: the Roma people and local communities

These two quotations show some of the present-day reactions to the problematic position of the Roma (or Gypsy) people, a traditionally nomadic ethnic group. While attitudes toward immigrants of different ethnic backgrounds have generally become more polarized in Europe in the wake of the “refugee influx,” the Roma hold an unfortunate record of perpetually being unwelcome everywhere. Also, in the Nordic countries, their mobile and culturally conservative way of life has made them a group with “traces of dubious origins,”3 who are not fully in synch with the prevailing Nordic public space and social order but tend to “stand out” as morally suspicious.4 The individual reactions quoted above are based on and reflect a growing collective moral panic, an emotional reaction to an issue deemed to be a threat to the sensibilities of “proper” society. The quotes also suggest that the Roma pose a challenge to society; “ordinary citizens” are losing their trust in authorities who are incapable of handling the Roma problem.