Inari Sakki
Biographic Data
| ID | 195651 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Inari Sakki |
| GIVEN NAMES | Inari |
| FAMILY NAME | Sakki |
| SIGNATURE | SAKKI I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Helsinki |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8717-5804 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 194 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Visualising the Colonised Other: Representations of Identity and Power in Finnish Textbook Images
Colonialism persists as a cultural, economic, political and psychological process. Colonial legacies embedded in Europe's landscapes of colonial memory continue to shape how individuals and groups are perceived and positioned in present‐day intergroup relations. Schools and textbooks reproduce these legacies, making it essential to examine how they represent the colonised Other and construct power relations. This study investigates how images rel…
Lay narratives of nationhood: Time, place and emotion in the talk of populist radical right‐wing supporters in Finland
Inspired by previous research showing how populist radical right‐wing parties capitalise discussions around nation, this article examines Finnish lay citizens' understanding of nationhood in the context of rising right‐wing populism. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with voters of a populist party (N = 25) and using the photo‐elicitation method, this study explores how participants use time, place and emotions to construct their national identity. …
Negotiating Prejudice and Equality: Analysing Gender and Sexuality Discourse Among Supporters of Populist Radical Right Message in Switzerland and Finland
Research on gender, sexuality and the populist radical right has revealed the contradictory positions of such parties and politicians regarding gender issues. However, less is known about the perspective of laypeople on these matters. This study focuses on supporters of a radical right populist message and analyses how prejudice is constructed in populist gender discourse. Analysing interview material from two countries, Finland ( n = 55) and Swi…
Mobilization of shared victimhood in the radical right populist Finns Party supporters’ identity work: A narrative–discursive approach to populist support
In the 21st century, populist leaders have created and shaped narratives of threatened nations to foster a sense of shared victimhood and increase electoral appeal. However, an intriguing question has emerged: What roles do these outlined populist discourses of a threatened nation and shared victimhood play in the identity work of populist supporters? This study employs a narrative–discursive approach to analyse 25 in‐depth interviews with radica…
Social representations of European history by the European youth: A cross-country comparison
The present manuscript examines the way young Europeans represent Europe’s history. A study conducted in 11 European countries (N = 1406 students in social sciences) shows that the characters considered most important in the history of Europe are mostly men linked either to WW2, authoritarianism, or conquests and empires. Although these appear later in the rankings and despite some imbalance between countries, Europe’s history is also associated …
Lay representations of populism: Discursive negotiation of naturalized social representation
Despite the importance of naturalized representations for explaining, creating and recreating social reality, little empirical research has examined the resistance to and change in naturalized representations in talk. By approaching populism as a naturalized representation, this article examines the dialogical construction of populism in 55 Finnish lay interviews. Our analysis consists of two parts. First, we conduct a reflexive thematic analysis…
Sensory experiences and social representation – Embodied multimodality of common‐sense thinking
Discussions on the body frequently foreground in empirical studies of social representations. However, there is scarce theoretical literature within social representations theory focusing on embodied social representation. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of embodied, sensory experiences as part of social representation. More precisely, it attempts to elaborate how individual, social, bodily, and material layers work together in…
Who's to blame for failed integration of immigrants? Blame attributions as an affectively polarizing force in lay discussions of immigration in Finland
Increasing expression of antagonism toward immigrants has turned immigration into one of the most polarizing issues in many countries, among them Finland, dividing people into those who favor and those who oppose immigration. But while affective polarization of the kind exemplified by widespread responses to immigration has recently received increasing attention from political psychologists, little attention has been paid to how affective polariz…
Female Politicians as Climate Fools: Intertextual and Multimodal Constructions of Misogyny Disguised as Humor in Political Communication
The present study explores how the polarized political discussion on climate change is used to construct as a humorous misogynist message in a Finnish far‐right political campaign video from 2021. Applying a multimodal analytical approach, the study explores the ways in which humor and irony are mobilized in the video through intertextual cues and verbal, visual, and sonic means to produce a dichotomy between “us”—the rational males who oppose st…
Harsh punisher or loving mother? A critical discursive psychological analysis of Marine Le Pen’s presidential Twitter campaign
Marine Le Pen managed to mobilise a substantial share of the votes in the French 2022 presidential elections, ending up second after the winner Emmanuel Macron. This study aims to increase our understanding of the political appeal and mobilisation of women in far-right movements by exploring the identity management strategies Marine Le Pen deployed in her presidential Twitter campaign to construct her position as a female, right-wing populist pol…
Distancing from the worst or facing the inescapable? Social representations and positioning of people in marginalised groups
This article draws from a social representations approach (SRA) to present a qualitative inquiry of identity construction in interaction and as part of the social context. We argue that the concept of positioning, inherent to our understanding of SRA, provides a bridge between social representations and identities. Focusing on societally marginalised groups and with illustrative interview samples gathered from two different studies in Finland, th…
Sanna, Aren't You Ashamed?’ Affective‐discursive practices in online misogynist discourse of Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin
This research examines online misogynist discourse related to the Finnish prime minister (PM) Sanna Marin's image published in Trendi magazine in October 2020. The affective‐discursive analysis of online commentaries resulted in the identification of four affective‐discursive practices: an immoral woman, incompetent woman, calculating woman and inferior woman. Misogynist discourse related to the PM Marin took the form of a moral act, drew from st…
Boosting nationalism through Covid-19 images: Multimodal construction of the failure of the ‘dear enemy’ with Covid-19 in the national press
Using a multimodal discursive approach, this study explores how the COVID-19 pandemic is constructed and used in press reportage to mobilize intergroup relations and national identities. We examine how press reporting about the development of COVID-19 in Sweden is cast as a matter of nationalism and national stereotyping in the Finnish press. The data consist of 183 images with accompanying headlines and captions published in two Finnish national…
European unification as lived memory: Shared and diverse representations in textbooks of six countries
Concerned about a lack of legitimacy, European Union (EU) institutions have increasingly engaged in memory politics to enhance European identity. Yet, memory of the EU is still closely connected to the collective identity formation of nation‐states, especially in the field of education, the focus of this study. Inspired by this dilemma, the present paper examines the representations of European unification in textbooks of six countries: Ireland, …
Visual (de)humanization: Construction of Otherness in newspaper photographs of the refugee crisis
This study examines how Otherness is constructed visually in newspaper photographs of the refugee crisis. This visual rhetoric analysis examines the form, content, and function of images and explores the rhetorical strategies deployed in visualizations of the refugee crisis in a mainstream Finnish national newspaper from 2015 to 2016. The data consisted of 1,473 images. The study identified six rhetorical strategies used for dehumanizing refugees…
Myths, the Bible, and Romanticism as ingredients of political narratives in the Finns Party election video
This research set out to examine how ancient myths, Bible stories, and romantic visual imagery were used as discursive devices in the populist communication of the 2019 Finns Party election video. This study draws from systematic functional multimodal discourse analysis and its concepts of intersemiotic texture, co-contextualization, and re-contextualization to examine how different semiotic resources work together in the video. The multimodal an…
How newspaper images position different groups of people in relation to the Covid ‐19 pandemic: A social representations approach
This study examines newspaper photographs related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland. Drawing on social representations theory and positioning theory, we explore social representations and identities related to COVID-19 in mass media using a visual rhetoric analysis. More specifically, we focus on how newspaper photographs construct subjects' positions for different age groups. The data consisted of 4,506 photographs of people published in the t…
Remembering war through images: Visual narratives of the Finnish Civil War in history textbooks from the 1920s to the 2010s
The present study focuses on memory work in school textbook illustrations of the Finnish Civil War (1918). A thematic narrative analysis shows how the content and meanings conveyed through visual narratives have developed in the past century. Besides changes in specific narrative, the interpretation of the functions of themes shows a gradual change in the schematic narrative template: the hegemonic, victor’s narrative has been gradually replaced …
Celebrating nationhood: Negotiating nationhood and history in Finland's centenary celebrations
National celebrations are one of the ways by which nations attempt to maintain connectedness with the past and strengthen national identities. Centenary celebrations, in particular, make identity questions visible and bring them to the centre of public debate and, thus, provide an opportunity to examine question such as ‘where do we come from’ and ‘where are we going’. In this research, we examine conceptions of nationhood and history in the year…
Persuasion Through Bitter Humor: Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Rhetoric in Internet Memes of Two Far-Right Groups in Finland
This study focuses on the role of Internet memes in the communication of two far-right groups in Finland. The material consists of 426 memes posted by Finland First and the Soldiers of Odin between the years 2015 and 2017 on Facebook. Multimodal discourse analysis was applied to understand the contents, forms, and rhetorical functions communicated via the Internet memes. The analysis shows that the contents of the memes revolve around six themes:…
Greedy elites and poor lambs: How young Europeans remember the great war
The present study examines current social representations associated with the origins of the Great War, a major event that has profoundly affected Europe. A survey conducted in 20 European countries (N = 1906 students in social sciences) shows a high consensus: The outbreak of the war is attributed to the warring nations’ leaders while the responsibility of the populations is minimized. Building on the concept of social representation of history …
The past as a means of persuasion: Visual political rhetoric in Finnish dairy product advertising
This study investigates the role of advertising and visual rhetoric in political persuasion. Analysis of Finnish dairy product video advertisements from 2010–2016 focuses on those that exploit time as the main reference framework. A better understanding of how advertising is used as a tool of political persuasion is sought by exploring the following questions: How are advertisements used in political communication? How is time used as a means of …
Managing stake and accountability in Prime Ministers' accounts of the “refugee crisis”: A longitudinal analysis
Taking a (critical) discursive psychological approach, the present study explores the identity management of the Finnish and Swedish Prime Ministers (PM) in relation to the "refugee crisis" and their countries' asylum policies. By taking a longitudinal approach and analysing the PMs' accounts of the "refugee crisis" from 1-year period, we focused on the ways rhetorical devices related to ethos, logos, and pathos were used to manage the issues of …
Past and Present Nationalist Political Rhetoric in Finland: Changes and Continuities
This article focuses on nationalist political rhetoric in two historical periods in Finland. We analysed the rhetorical changes and continuities in anticommunist newspaper articles from the past (1930s) and in anti-Islam blogs in the present (2010s). We identified two similar discourses in the political rhetoric of both eras, each discourse constructed around two different Others: the external Other, the stranger from the outside world, and the i…
Pray for the fatherland! Discursive and digital strategies at play in nationalist political blogging
Political blogs have come to constitute important channels for expressing nationalist and anti-immigration political views. The new forms that this rhetoric may take, comprising an intricate intermingling of verbal, digital, (audio-)visual, and communicative elements, present challenges for qualitative research. In this article we propose a way for analysing this “new” nationalist political discourse from a qualitative social psychological perspe…
Discursive constructions of otherness in populist radical right political blogs
This article provides a comparative study of the discursive construction and use of Otherness among anti‐immigration populist radical right politicians in Sweden and Finland. Based on rhetorical and critical discursive psychology, our analyses of discourse within nine political blogs identified three distinct representations of Otherness. These representations of a deviant group of people , of a threatening ideology and of inner enemies are highl…
Persuasion Through Bitter Humor: Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Rhetoric in Internet Memes of Two Far-Right Groups in Finland
This study focuses on the role of Internet memes in the communication of two far-right groups in Finland. The material consists of 426 memes posted by Finland First and the Soldiers of Odin between the years 2015 and 2017 on Facebook. Multimodal discourse analysis was applied to understand the contents, forms, and rhetorical functions communicated via the Internet memes. The analysis shows that the contents of the memes revolve around six themes:…
Female Politicians as Climate Fools: Intertextual and Multimodal Constructions of Misogyny Disguised as Humor in Political Communication
The present study explores how the polarized political discussion on climate change is used to construct as a humorous misogynist message in a Finnish far‐right political campaign video from 2021. Applying a multimodal analytical approach, the study explores the ways in which humor and irony are mobilized in the video through intertextual cues and verbal, visual, and sonic means to produce a dichotomy between “us”—the rational males who oppose st…
How newspaper images position different groups of people in relation to the Covid ‐19 pandemic: A social representations approach
This study examines newspaper photographs related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland. Drawing on social representations theory and positioning theory, we explore social representations and identities related to COVID-19 in mass media using a visual rhetoric analysis. More specifically, we focus on how newspaper photographs construct subjects' positions for different age groups. The data consisted of 4,506 photographs of people published in the t…
The naturalized nation: Anchoring, objectification and naturalized social representations of history
This study focuses on the connection between social representations of history and collective memory from the perspective of elementary concepts of social representations theory: anchoring, objectification and naturalization. The aims of the study are to arrive at a conceptual clarity of this connection and demonstrate how to apply basic concepts of social representations theory to the study of collective memory. The study also focuses on the nat…
Pray for the fatherland! Discursive and digital strategies at play in nationalist political blogging
Political blogs have come to constitute important channels for expressing nationalist and anti-immigration political views. The new forms that this rhetoric may take, comprising an intricate intermingling of verbal, digital, (audio-)visual, and communicative elements, present challenges for qualitative research. In this article we propose a way for analysing this “new” nationalist political discourse from a qualitative social psychological perspe…
Managing stake and accountability in Prime Ministers' accounts of the “refugee crisis”: A longitudinal analysis
Taking a (critical) discursive psychological approach, the present study explores the identity management of the Finnish and Swedish Prime Ministers (PM) in relation to the "refugee crisis" and their countries' asylum policies. By taking a longitudinal approach and analysing the PMs' accounts of the "refugee crisis" from 1-year period, we focused on the ways rhetorical devices related to ethos, logos, and pathos were used to manage the issues of …
Celebrating nationhood: Negotiating nationhood and history in Finland's centenary celebrations
National celebrations are one of the ways by which nations attempt to maintain connectedness with the past and strengthen national identities. Centenary celebrations, in particular, make identity questions visible and bring them to the centre of public debate and, thus, provide an opportunity to examine question such as ‘where do we come from’ and ‘where are we going’. In this research, we examine conceptions of nationhood and history in the year…
A century of victimhood: Antecedents and current impacts of perceived suffering in World War I across Europe
The present study addresses antecedents and consequences of collective victimhood in the context of World War I (WWI) across 15 European nations ( N = 2423 social science students). Using multilevel analysis, we find evidence that collective victimhood is still present a hundred years after the onset of the war and can be predicted by WWI‐related objective indicators of victimization at national and family levels. This suggests that collective vi…
You who are an immigrant – why are you in the Sweden Democrats?’
Individuals with an immigrant or other ethnic minority background have begun to find their political home in the populist radical right and anti-immigration party, the Sweden Democrats. This study delves into this paradoxical matter by exploring how these politicians discursively account for their ethnic minority belonging in relation to their anti-immigration political affiliation. The critical discursive psychological analysis of blog entries b…
Visualized Collective Memories: Social Representations of History in Images Found in Finnish History Textbooks
This study focuses on visual collective memory, a topic that has long been neglected in the social sciences and particularly in social psychological research on social representations of history. It explores the contents and meanings of images in the construction of Finnish national history. Through examination of official history writing, a better understanding is sought of how collective memory is constructed as part of history politics. The da…
Harsh punisher or loving mother? A critical discursive psychological analysis of Marine Le Pen’s presidential Twitter campaign
Marine Le Pen managed to mobilise a substantial share of the votes in the French 2022 presidential elections, ending up second after the winner Emmanuel Macron. This study aims to increase our understanding of the political appeal and mobilisation of women in far-right movements by exploring the identity management strategies Marine Le Pen deployed in her presidential Twitter campaign to construct her position as a female, right-wing populist pol…
The past as a means of persuasion: Visual political rhetoric in Finnish dairy product advertising
This study investigates the role of advertising and visual rhetoric in political persuasion. Analysis of Finnish dairy product video advertisements from 2010–2016 focuses on those that exploit time as the main reference framework. A better understanding of how advertising is used as a tool of political persuasion is sought by exploring the following questions: How are advertisements used in political communication? How is time used as a means of …
Raising European citizens: Constructing European identities in French and English textbooks
Schools play a pivotal role in the formation of identities and in the political socialization of youth. This study explores the social representations of European integration in French and English school textbooks and shows how the social representations are discursively used to construct national and European identities. By analysing the history and civics textbooks of major educational publishers, this study aims to demonstrate how European int…
Mobilization of shared victimhood in the radical right populist Finns Party supporters’ identity work: A narrative–discursive approach to populist support
In the 21st century, populist leaders have created and shaped narratives of threatened nations to foster a sense of shared victimhood and increase electoral appeal. However, an intriguing question has emerged: What roles do these outlined populist discourses of a threatened nation and shared victimhood play in the identity work of populist supporters? This study employs a narrative–discursive approach to analyse 25 in‐depth interviews with radica…
Sensory experiences and social representation – Embodied multimodality of common‐sense thinking
Discussions on the body frequently foreground in empirical studies of social representations. However, there is scarce theoretical literature within social representations theory focusing on embodied social representation. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of embodied, sensory experiences as part of social representation. More precisely, it attempts to elaborate how individual, social, bodily, and material layers work together in…
Who's to blame for failed integration of immigrants? Blame attributions as an affectively polarizing force in lay discussions of immigration in Finland
Increasing expression of antagonism toward immigrants has turned immigration into one of the most polarizing issues in many countries, among them Finland, dividing people into those who favor and those who oppose immigration. But while affective polarization of the kind exemplified by widespread responses to immigration has recently received increasing attention from political psychologists, little attention has been paid to how affective polariz…
Sanna, Aren't You Ashamed?’ Affective‐discursive practices in online misogynist discourse of Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin
This research examines online misogynist discourse related to the Finnish prime minister (PM) Sanna Marin's image published in Trendi magazine in October 2020. The affective‐discursive analysis of online commentaries resulted in the identification of four affective‐discursive practices: an immoral woman, incompetent woman, calculating woman and inferior woman. Misogynist discourse related to the PM Marin took the form of a moral act, drew from st…
Greedy elites and poor lambs: How young Europeans remember the great war
The present study examines current social representations associated with the origins of the Great War, a major event that has profoundly affected Europe. A survey conducted in 20 European countries (N = 1906 students in social sciences) shows a high consensus: The outbreak of the war is attributed to the warring nations’ leaders while the responsibility of the populations is minimized. Building on the concept of social representation of history …
Past and Present Nationalist Political Rhetoric in Finland: Changes and Continuities
This article focuses on nationalist political rhetoric in two historical periods in Finland. We analysed the rhetorical changes and continuities in anticommunist newspaper articles from the past (1930s) and in anti-Islam blogs in the present (2010s). We identified two similar discourses in the political rhetoric of both eras, each discourse constructed around two different Others: the external Other, the stranger from the outside world, and the i…
Social representations of European integration as narrated by school textbooks in five European nations
Distancing from the worst or facing the inescapable? Social representations and positioning of people in marginalised groups
This article draws from a social representations approach (SRA) to present a qualitative inquiry of identity construction in interaction and as part of the social context. We argue that the concept of positioning, inherent to our understanding of SRA, provides a bridge between social representations and identities. Focusing on societally marginalised groups and with illustrative interview samples gathered from two different studies in Finland, th…
Myths, the Bible, and Romanticism as ingredients of political narratives in the Finns Party election video
This research set out to examine how ancient myths, Bible stories, and romantic visual imagery were used as discursive devices in the populist communication of the 2019 Finns Party election video. This study draws from systematic functional multimodal discourse analysis and its concepts of intersemiotic texture, co-contextualization, and re-contextualization to examine how different semiotic resources work together in the video. The multimodal an…
Remembering war through images: Visual narratives of the Finnish Civil War in history textbooks from the 1920s to the 2010s
The present study focuses on memory work in school textbook illustrations of the Finnish Civil War (1918). A thematic narrative analysis shows how the content and meanings conveyed through visual narratives have developed in the past century. Besides changes in specific narrative, the interpretation of the functions of themes shows a gradual change in the schematic narrative template: the hegemonic, victor’s narrative has been gradually replaced …
Lay narratives of nationhood: Time, place and emotion in the talk of populist radical right‐wing supporters in Finland
Inspired by previous research showing how populist radical right‐wing parties capitalise discussions around nation, this article examines Finnish lay citizens' understanding of nationhood in the context of rising right‐wing populism. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with voters of a populist party (N = 25) and using the photo‐elicitation method, this study explores how participants use time, place and emotions to construct their national identity. …
Women's human rights violations: Cameroonian students' perceptions
Cameroonian university students ( N = 666) assessed whether certain different societal positions that the law grants to women and men (the husband chooses the marital home, the husband wields parental power, a married woman cannot freely engage in trade, the husband administers his wife's personal property) and certain cultural practices (female genital mutilation, parents arranging their children's marriage) were seen as violations of women's hu…
Social representations of European integration as narrated by school textbooks in five European nations
Raising European citizens: Constructing European identities in French and English textbooks
Schools play a pivotal role in the formation of identities and in the political socialization of youth. This study explores the social representations of European integration in French and English school textbooks and shows how the social representations are discursively used to construct national and European identities. By analysing the history and civics textbooks of major educational publishers, this study aims to demonstrate how European int…
The naturalized nation: Anchoring, objectification and naturalized social representations of history
This study focuses on the connection between social representations of history and collective memory from the perspective of elementary concepts of social representations theory: anchoring, objectification and naturalization. The aims of the study are to arrive at a conceptual clarity of this connection and demonstrate how to apply basic concepts of social representations theory to the study of collective memory. The study also focuses on the nat…
Visualized Collective Memories: Social Representations of History in Images Found in Finnish History Textbooks
This study focuses on visual collective memory, a topic that has long been neglected in the social sciences and particularly in social psychological research on social representations of history. It explores the contents and meanings of images in the construction of Finnish national history. Through examination of official history writing, a better understanding is sought of how collective memory is constructed as part of history politics. The da…
You who are an immigrant – why are you in the Sweden Democrats?’
Individuals with an immigrant or other ethnic minority background have begun to find their political home in the populist radical right and anti-immigration party, the Sweden Democrats. This study delves into this paradoxical matter by exploring how these politicians discursively account for their ethnic minority belonging in relation to their anti-immigration political affiliation. The critical discursive psychological analysis of blog entries b…
Discursive constructions of otherness in populist radical right political blogs
This article provides a comparative study of the discursive construction and use of Otherness among anti‐immigration populist radical right politicians in Sweden and Finland. Based on rhetorical and critical discursive psychology, our analyses of discourse within nine political blogs identified three distinct representations of Otherness. These representations of a deviant group of people , of a threatening ideology and of inner enemies are highl…
Pray for the fatherland! Discursive and digital strategies at play in nationalist political blogging
Political blogs have come to constitute important channels for expressing nationalist and anti-immigration political views. The new forms that this rhetoric may take, comprising an intricate intermingling of verbal, digital, (audio-)visual, and communicative elements, present challenges for qualitative research. In this article we propose a way for analysing this “new” nationalist political discourse from a qualitative social psychological perspe…
A century of victimhood: Antecedents and current impacts of perceived suffering in World War I across Europe
In the article “A century of victimhood: Antecedents and current impacts of perceived suffering in World War I across Europe” (DOI: 100.1002/ejsp.2232) (Bouchat et al.,), published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, 47: 195:208, the affiliations for Silvia Mari, Nebojša Petrovic and Alice Krenn were provided incorrectly. The complete authors' affiliation list is shown below. Pierre Bouchat, Laurent Licata Research Center for Social and…
A century of victimhood: Antecedents and current impacts of perceived suffering in World War I across Europe
The present study addresses antecedents and consequences of collective victimhood in the context of World War I (WWI) across 15 European nations ( N = 2423 social science students). Using multilevel analysis, we find evidence that collective victimhood is still present a hundred years after the onset of the war and can be predicted by WWI‐related objective indicators of victimization at national and family levels. This suggests that collective vi…
Managing stake and accountability in Prime Ministers' accounts of the “refugee crisis”: A longitudinal analysis
Taking a (critical) discursive psychological approach, the present study explores the identity management of the Finnish and Swedish Prime Ministers (PM) in relation to the "refugee crisis" and their countries' asylum policies. By taking a longitudinal approach and analysing the PMs' accounts of the "refugee crisis" from 1-year period, we focused on the ways rhetorical devices related to ethos, logos, and pathos were used to manage the issues of …
Past and Present Nationalist Political Rhetoric in Finland: Changes and Continuities
This article focuses on nationalist political rhetoric in two historical periods in Finland. We analysed the rhetorical changes and continuities in anticommunist newspaper articles from the past (1930s) and in anti-Islam blogs in the present (2010s). We identified two similar discourses in the political rhetoric of both eras, each discourse constructed around two different Others: the external Other, the stranger from the outside world, and the i…
Greedy elites and poor lambs: How young Europeans remember the great war
The present study examines current social representations associated with the origins of the Great War, a major event that has profoundly affected Europe. A survey conducted in 20 European countries (N = 1906 students in social sciences) shows a high consensus: The outbreak of the war is attributed to the warring nations’ leaders while the responsibility of the populations is minimized. Building on the concept of social representation of history …
The past as a means of persuasion: Visual political rhetoric in Finnish dairy product advertising
This study investigates the role of advertising and visual rhetoric in political persuasion. Analysis of Finnish dairy product video advertisements from 2010–2016 focuses on those that exploit time as the main reference framework. A better understanding of how advertising is used as a tool of political persuasion is sought by exploring the following questions: How are advertisements used in political communication? How is time used as a means of …
Remembering war through images: Visual narratives of the Finnish Civil War in history textbooks from the 1920s to the 2010s
The present study focuses on memory work in school textbook illustrations of the Finnish Civil War (1918). A thematic narrative analysis shows how the content and meanings conveyed through visual narratives have developed in the past century. Besides changes in specific narrative, the interpretation of the functions of themes shows a gradual change in the schematic narrative template: the hegemonic, victor’s narrative has been gradually replaced …
Celebrating nationhood: Negotiating nationhood and history in Finland's centenary celebrations
National celebrations are one of the ways by which nations attempt to maintain connectedness with the past and strengthen national identities. Centenary celebrations, in particular, make identity questions visible and bring them to the centre of public debate and, thus, provide an opportunity to examine question such as ‘where do we come from’ and ‘where are we going’. In this research, we examine conceptions of nationhood and history in the year…
Persuasion Through Bitter Humor: Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Rhetoric in Internet Memes of Two Far-Right Groups in Finland
This study focuses on the role of Internet memes in the communication of two far-right groups in Finland. The material consists of 426 memes posted by Finland First and the Soldiers of Odin between the years 2015 and 2017 on Facebook. Multimodal discourse analysis was applied to understand the contents, forms, and rhetorical functions communicated via the Internet memes. The analysis shows that the contents of the memes revolve around six themes:…
Boosting nationalism through Covid-19 images: Multimodal construction of the failure of the ‘dear enemy’ with Covid-19 in the national press
Using a multimodal discursive approach, this study explores how the COVID-19 pandemic is constructed and used in press reportage to mobilize intergroup relations and national identities. We examine how press reporting about the development of COVID-19 in Sweden is cast as a matter of nationalism and national stereotyping in the Finnish press. The data consist of 183 images with accompanying headlines and captions published in two Finnish national…
European unification as lived memory: Shared and diverse representations in textbooks of six countries
Concerned about a lack of legitimacy, European Union (EU) institutions have increasingly engaged in memory politics to enhance European identity. Yet, memory of the EU is still closely connected to the collective identity formation of nation‐states, especially in the field of education, the focus of this study. Inspired by this dilemma, the present paper examines the representations of European unification in textbooks of six countries: Ireland, …
Visual (de)humanization: Construction of Otherness in newspaper photographs of the refugee crisis
This study examines how Otherness is constructed visually in newspaper photographs of the refugee crisis. This visual rhetoric analysis examines the form, content, and function of images and explores the rhetorical strategies deployed in visualizations of the refugee crisis in a mainstream Finnish national newspaper from 2015 to 2016. The data consisted of 1,473 images. The study identified six rhetorical strategies used for dehumanizing refugees…
Myths, the Bible, and Romanticism as ingredients of political narratives in the Finns Party election video
This research set out to examine how ancient myths, Bible stories, and romantic visual imagery were used as discursive devices in the populist communication of the 2019 Finns Party election video. This study draws from systematic functional multimodal discourse analysis and its concepts of intersemiotic texture, co-contextualization, and re-contextualization to examine how different semiotic resources work together in the video. The multimodal an…
How newspaper images position different groups of people in relation to the Covid ‐19 pandemic: A social representations approach
This study examines newspaper photographs related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland. Drawing on social representations theory and positioning theory, we explore social representations and identities related to COVID-19 in mass media using a visual rhetoric analysis. More specifically, we focus on how newspaper photographs construct subjects' positions for different age groups. The data consisted of 4,506 photographs of people published in the t…
Distancing from the worst or facing the inescapable? Social representations and positioning of people in marginalised groups
This article draws from a social representations approach (SRA) to present a qualitative inquiry of identity construction in interaction and as part of the social context. We argue that the concept of positioning, inherent to our understanding of SRA, provides a bridge between social representations and identities. Focusing on societally marginalised groups and with illustrative interview samples gathered from two different studies in Finland, th…
Sanna, Aren't You Ashamed?’ Affective‐discursive practices in online misogynist discourse of Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin
This research examines online misogynist discourse related to the Finnish prime minister (PM) Sanna Marin's image published in Trendi magazine in October 2020. The affective‐discursive analysis of online commentaries resulted in the identification of four affective‐discursive practices: an immoral woman, incompetent woman, calculating woman and inferior woman. Misogynist discourse related to the PM Marin took the form of a moral act, drew from st…
Social representations of European history by the European youth: A cross-country comparison
The present manuscript examines the way young Europeans represent Europe’s history. A study conducted in 11 European countries (N = 1406 students in social sciences) shows that the characters considered most important in the history of Europe are mostly men linked either to WW2, authoritarianism, or conquests and empires. Although these appear later in the rankings and despite some imbalance between countries, Europe’s history is also associated …
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