Kaarina Nikunen
Biographic Data
| ID | 227082 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kaarina Nikunen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kaarina |
| FAMILY NAME | Nikunen |
| SIGNATURE | NIKUNEN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tampere University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5747-4093 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 164 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Open challenges and future perspectives on stress-related emotions monitoring via smart wearables: A systematic literature review
Wearable technology-empowered and Internet of Things (IoT)-based sensors are becoming attractive instruments for mental health monitoring on eHealth platforms. The detection of stress-related emotions, including anxiety and depression, is a rapidly developing research area due to the overlapping symptoms of these emotions and their significant impact on mental well-being. Al- though Machine Learning (ML) and consumer-grade wearables have improved…
Emotional Atyachar (Trauma): Professional Identity Performance and Emotional Labour of Fact-checkers in India
This study explores the emotional labour incurred by Indian fact-checkers as part of maintaining their professional identity online. It demonstrates the connection between the theories of professional identity performance and emotional labour. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 fact-checkers from various fact-checking organisations in India. The findings highlight that though fact-checkers identify themselves as journalists they ha…
Understanding Journalists’ Responses to Occupational Harassment and Intimidation through the Lens of Cognitive Appraisal Theory
Journalists increasingly face work-related harassment and intimidation, yet individuals vary markedly in how they interpret and respond to such encounters. Although prior research has documented this variation, the broader scholarship has offered limited insight into the processes through which it emerges and the factors that contribute to it. This article draws on cognitive appraisal theory to examine how journalists evaluate incidents of harass…
Digital Geographies of Hope: Situated Futures in a Data-Driven World
This thematic issue advances digital geographies of hope as a lens for examining how possibilities for action, connection, and alternative futures take shape in a deeply datafied and platformized world. While critical scholarship has documented extraction, surveillance, bordering, and algorithmic injustice, the contributions foreground hope as situated, relational, and contested, emerging within crisis rather than outside of it. Drawing on utopia…
Using the Diary–Interview Method with Time-Constrained Professionals: The Case of Journalists and Harassment
This article presents a methodological reflection on the diary–interview method’s value and application when used with professionals whose schedules are both demanding and unpredictable, drawing on the authors’ insights from a study examining the harassment and intimidation of journalists. Our experiences demonstrate that combining solicited diary entries with recurring interviews can yield substantial advantages over using either method alone. D…
All of us data points”: Experiences of data welfare state from the margins
We employ the “from the margins” approach to assess how the Finnish digital welfare state stacks up against the ideals of the welfare state. Based on empirical research on the experiences of asylum seekers, unemployed persons, and older adults, our study reveals how datafication transforms the relations between the citizens and the welfare state, in which historically, data on citizens has been used for their benefit. Our findings reveal the emer…
Platformization of the Industry of Human Smuggling
Due to hardened border practices in EU, migrants and asylum seekers seeking refuge in Europe have to rely on various smuggling services shared on social media platforms and entrepreneurs who advertise services online. Our paper explores the emergence of this dark industry of mobility that operates on social media platforms. Based on interviews with migrants and refugees in Finland, the paper maps digital sites of smuggling and explore the ways in…
Contested Meanings of Hate Speech and the Post-Truth Condition on Digital Platforms
In the everyday context, the term 'hate speech' has become increasingly politicized and emotionally charged, yet these vernacular constructions of hate speech remain under-explored. Used as both a rhetorical weapon and an object of genuine concern, various understandings of hate speech circulate within interactive everyday cultures of digital media, shaped by the digitalised media environment. With the combination of computational and qualititati…
Intimate Infrastructures We Depend upon: Living with Data
This essay takes on Lauren Berlant’s mapping of intimacy as ‘connections that impact on people, and on which they depend for living’ in order to address attachments, dependencies, and vulnerabilities in datafied contexts where digital platforms operate as infrastructures of everyday life. Building on interview material, we explore such intimate attachments as ones rife with friction and inconvenience, asking how vulnerabilities emerge and become …
Datakapitalismin uhka ja lumo
Timo Harakka. 2022. Datakapitalismi kriisien maailmassa. Helsinki: Siltala. 168 s
Anticipation as Platform Power: The Temporal Structuring of Digital Everyday Life
This article explores anticipation as a temporal structure in digital platforms. It contributes to the growing research of platformisation of everyday life by focusing on temporality as a central dimension of platform power, a key mechanism tying participants by structuring intimacies, socialities, and relations that platforms enable and engender. The article shows how the temporality of foreboding, prospecting and speculating about one’s own and…
Verkkoviha väkivaltana – vihapuhetutkijoiden näkökulmia
Verkossa kiertviin loukkaaviin, halventaviin ja vkivaltaisiin ilmaisuihin, mee
Precariousness and Hope: Digital Everyday Life of the Undocumented Migrants Explored Through Collaborative Photography
The article explores the digital everyday life of recently or currently undocumented migrants in times of Covid-19 in Finland. It is based on an empirical case study on a collaborative photographic exhibition and workshop including visual images, diaries, interviews, and discussions. The analysis explores the ways in which a photography exhibition and a workshop may depict meaningful moments in digital everyday life as well as open up an understa…
Affective Practice of Soldiering: How Sharing Images Is Used to Spread Extremist and Racist Ethos on Soldiers of Odin Facebook Site
The paper explores how visual affective practice is used to spread and bolster a nationalist, extremist and racist ethos on the public Facebook page of the anti-immigrant group, Soldiers of Odin. Affective practice refers to a particular sensibility of political discourse, shaped by social formations and digital technologies—the contexts in which political groups or communities gather, discuss and act. The study shows how visual affective practic…
Shifting Formations, Formative Infrastructures: Nationalisms and Racisms in Media Circulation
This introduction to the special issue departs from elaborating on the issues explored in a project examining right-wing politics and “debates” about racism in Finland. It situates the research gathered in the collection in terms of a shared focus on the disparate networks of organised and opportunistic cultural producers that invest time and labour in the production of racialising and othering discourse and aesthetics, and on the modes and forms…
Ghosts of white methods? The challenges of Big Data research in exploring racism in digital context
The paper explores the potential and limitations of big data for researching racism on social media. Informed by critical data studies and critical race studies, the paper discusses challenges of doing big data research and the problems of the so called 'white method'. The paper introduces the following three types of approach, each with a different epistemological basis for researching racism in digital context: 1) using big data analytics to po…
Welfare State Values and Public Service Media in the Era of Datafication
Welfare states have historically been built on values of egalitarianism and universalism and through high taxation that provides free education, health care, and social security for all. Ideally, this encourages participation of all citizens and formation of inclusive public sphere. In this welfare model, the public service media are also considered some of the main institutions that serve the well-being of an entire society. That is, independent…
Introduction: Contemporary African and Black Diasporic Spaces in Europe
This special issue explores spaces where identifications with the African diaspora become articulated, (re)negotiated and, as demonstrated by many articles in this issue, established as a field of the collective agency with transformative power in European societies. The African diaspora communities and cultures in Europe are constructed not only by individuals’ engagements in Africa and its global diaspora but also through the collective agency,…
Refugee debate and networked framing in the hybrid media environment
In this article, we analyse how the debate on the ‘refugee crisis’ has been constructed in Finnish news media and social media by using big data analytics. The study applies big data with the aim of exploring the dynamics between the mainstream news media and social media and the ways in which these dynamics shape and strategically amplify different understandings of the refugee crisis. The research highlights over-emphasis of crime and threat-or…
The meanings of racism: Public discourses about racism in Finnish news media and online discussion forums
Understandings of racism are produced and circulated in contemporary networked media forms, contributing new opportunities to both extend and challenge racializing discourses, images and frameworks. This study investigated how the concept of racism is used in Finnish public debate by employing a computational text analysis technique to derive topics related to racism from a large corpus of news media content and online discussion forum comments. …
Media Solidarities: Emotions, Power and Justice in the Digital Age
Once a refugee: Selfie activism, visualized citizenship and the space of appearance
This article examines the social media campaign “Once I was a refugee” by former refugees as a response to the increasingly hostile political climate in Finland against refugees. With selfie activism, the campaign expanded the “space of appearance” and introduced new voice and visuality to the public debate. The case depicts politics of claiming citizenship and social value through self-presentation to counter views of refugees as economic burden…
Placing Fan Cultures: Xenites in the Transnational Spaces of Fandom
Dynamics of space and place and the process of deterritorialization have become central topics in media research due to new technological developments, increased media mobility and transnationalism. The recent transformations caused by mobility and advancements in media technology indicate a separation of space and place, meaning that social relations are not necessarily formed face to face. Rather, they are increasingly established across vast d…
Media in Motion: Cultural Complexity and Migration in the Nordic Region
‘We hid porn magazines in the nearby woods’: Memory-work and pornography consumption in Finland
This article presents the key findings of a Finnish memory-work project conducted in 2012 on consumer experiences and associations related to pornography. The memory-work material points to a high degree of reflexivity in definitions of pornographic preference as well as to drastic shifts in the ubiquity of pornography from the pre-1990s ‘age of scarcity’ to the current ‘age of plenty.’ At the same time, contributors' narratives of childhood expe…
Losing my profession: Age, experience and expertise in the changing newsrooms
The article examines how the crisis in journalism was experienced in the Finnish newsrooms in the spring of 2010. Based on interviews conducted in six newsrooms, this article highlights changes in journalistic practices, and the ways in which these changes have affected professional identity and journalistic expertise, in particular, in terms of age. The change does not affect everyone in a similar way. Its implications are experienced differentl…
Media Solidarities: Emotions, Power and Justice in the Digital Age
The ethics of hospitality in changing journalism: A response to the rise of the anti-immigrant movement in Finnish media publicity
This article examines the role of the media in the rise of nationalist populism in Finland. The interplay between social media and mainstream media has facilitated the emergence of anti-immigrant agendas into the public debate, which has strengthened nationalist populist politics, despite mainstream journalism following professional ethics of balanced reporting. The article concludes that the traditional journalistic framework of agenda setting i…
Media in Motion: Cultural Complexity and Migration in the Nordic Region
Refugee debate and networked framing in the hybrid media environment
In this article, we analyse how the debate on the ‘refugee crisis’ has been constructed in Finnish news media and social media by using big data analytics. The study applies big data with the aim of exploring the dynamics between the mainstream news media and social media and the ways in which these dynamics shape and strategically amplify different understandings of the refugee crisis. The research highlights over-emphasis of crime and threat-or…
Once a refugee: Selfie activism, visualized citizenship and the space of appearance
This article examines the social media campaign “Once I was a refugee” by former refugees as a response to the increasingly hostile political climate in Finland against refugees. With selfie activism, the campaign expanded the “space of appearance” and introduced new voice and visuality to the public debate. The case depicts politics of claiming citizenship and social value through self-presentation to counter views of refugees as economic burden…
The Intermedial Practises of Fandom
The article 1 discusses formations of fan cultures in terms of intermediality. It examines the construction and consumption of media in three different Finnish fan groups: the fans of Xena: The Warrior Princess (XWP), fans of Ally McBeal and the fans of Finnish TV-host Marco Bjurström. The construction of intermedial relations of each fan group interestingly reveals the institutional and technological spaces of shaping the pleasures of media. The…
Affective Practice of Soldiering: How Sharing Images Is Used to Spread Extremist and Racist Ethos on Soldiers of Odin Facebook Site
The paper explores how visual affective practice is used to spread and bolster a nationalist, extremist and racist ethos on the public Facebook page of the anti-immigrant group, Soldiers of Odin. Affective practice refers to a particular sensibility of political discourse, shaped by social formations and digital technologies—the contexts in which political groups or communities gather, discuss and act. The study shows how visual affective practic…
Hopes of hospitality: Media, refugee crisis and the politics of a place
The article investigates the relevance of geographical imagination in refugee politics in the Mediterranean coast. It is based on empirical research conducted in Calabria, southern Italy, in a small village that in 1997 decided to host over 300 refugees that shipwrecked on its coast. By welcoming refugees the village, Badolato, appropriated politics of hospitality to gain new cultural and economic value for the village that was suffering from hig…
The meanings of racism: Public discourses about racism in Finnish news media and online discussion forums
Understandings of racism are produced and circulated in contemporary networked media forms, contributing new opportunities to both extend and challenge racializing discourses, images and frameworks. This study investigated how the concept of racism is used in Finnish public debate by employing a computational text analysis technique to derive topics related to racism from a large corpus of news media content and online discussion forum comments. …
Shifting Formations, Formative Infrastructures: Nationalisms and Racisms in Media Circulation
This introduction to the special issue departs from elaborating on the issues explored in a project examining right-wing politics and “debates” about racism in Finland. It situates the research gathered in the collection in terms of a shared focus on the disparate networks of organised and opportunistic cultural producers that invest time and labour in the production of racialising and othering discourse and aesthetics, and on the modes and forms…
Ghosts of white methods? The challenges of Big Data research in exploring racism in digital context
The paper explores the potential and limitations of big data for researching racism on social media. Informed by critical data studies and critical race studies, the paper discusses challenges of doing big data research and the problems of the so called 'white method'. The paper introduces the following three types of approach, each with a different epistemological basis for researching racism in digital context: 1) using big data analytics to po…
Media, passion and humanitarian reality television
The article explores affective economy in a humanitarian reality television. It shows the ways in which reality television is increasingly occupied with ‘doing good’ by investigating Australian originated series Go Back to Where You Came From. The international format has been sold to nine countries and produced in co-operation with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. By bringing together theorizations of affective economy and post-hum…
Welfare State Values and Public Service Media in the Era of Datafication
Welfare states have historically been built on values of egalitarianism and universalism and through high taxation that provides free education, health care, and social security for all. Ideally, this encourages participation of all citizens and formation of inclusive public sphere. In this welfare model, the public service media are also considered some of the main institutions that serve the well-being of an entire society. That is, independent…
The Humanitarian Makeover
We examine how the makeover paradigm is mobilized in contemporary humanitarian communications—a practice we call “humanitarian makeover.” We demonstrate its operation in the Finnish television programme Arman and the Children of Cameroon and Plan's 2013 International Day of the Girl event. The analysis shows how helping distant others is configured within a makeover and self-transformation narrative, providing a stage for performance of an “ethic…
Difference in Reality: Ethnic Minorities and the Boundaries of the Nation in Reality TV in Finland
Reality TV has provided a new platform for ethnic minority performers in various European countries. This article explores the implications of such visibility by focusing on two Finnish reality TV shows: Talent and Big Brother. It is suggested that reality TV shows operate as a site where the definitions of the ordinary and the nation are being circulated, contested, and, at times, stretched. The article demonstrates the ways in which global form…
Anticipation as Platform Power: The Temporal Structuring of Digital Everyday Life
This article explores anticipation as a temporal structure in digital platforms. It contributes to the growing research of platformisation of everyday life by focusing on temporality as a central dimension of platform power, a key mechanism tying participants by structuring intimacies, socialities, and relations that platforms enable and engender. The article shows how the temporality of foreboding, prospecting and speculating about one’s own and…
The Intermedial Practises of Fandom
The article 1 discusses formations of fan cultures in terms of intermediality. It examines the construction and consumption of media in three different Finnish fan groups: the fans of Xena: The Warrior Princess (XWP), fans of Ally McBeal and the fans of Finnish TV-host Marco Bjurström. The construction of intermedial relations of each fan group interestingly reveals the institutional and technological spaces of shaping the pleasures of media. The…
In Between the Accented and the Mainstream: Cutting across Boundaries in Kniven i Hjärtat
The article discusses the Swedish fictional television drama Kniven i Hjärtat (KIH) as an accented drama depicting diasporic experience in contemporary Sweden. It is inspired by an ethnographic audience research conducted by the author among migrant teenagers. KIH, produced by Swedish public broadcasting company SVT (2004) is a mixture of realist drama and youth musical depicting life in Swedish multicultural suburb. It is argued that while KIH s…
Media in Motion: Cultural Comlexity and Migration in the Nordic Region
Difference in Reality: Ethnic Minorities and the Boundaries of the Nation in Reality TV in Finland
Reality TV has provided a new platform for ethnic minority performers in various European countries. This article explores the implications of such visibility by focusing on two Finnish reality TV shows: Talent and Big Brother. It is suggested that reality TV shows operate as a site where the definitions of the ordinary and the nation are being circulated, contested, and, at times, stretched. The article demonstrates the ways in which global form…
The ethics of hospitality in changing journalism: A response to the rise of the anti-immigrant movement in Finnish media publicity
This article examines the role of the media in the rise of nationalist populism in Finland. The interplay between social media and mainstream media has facilitated the emergence of anti-immigrant agendas into the public debate, which has strengthened nationalist populist politics, despite mainstream journalism following professional ethics of balanced reporting. The article concludes that the traditional journalistic framework of agenda setting i…
Losing my profession: Age, experience and expertise in the changing newsrooms
The article examines how the crisis in journalism was experienced in the Finnish newsrooms in the spring of 2010. Based on interviews conducted in six newsrooms, this article highlights changes in journalistic practices, and the ways in which these changes have affected professional identity and journalistic expertise, in particular, in terms of age. The change does not affect everyone in a similar way. Its implications are experienced differentl…
Hopes of hospitality: Media, refugee crisis and the politics of a place
The article investigates the relevance of geographical imagination in refugee politics in the Mediterranean coast. It is based on empirical research conducted in Calabria, southern Italy, in a small village that in 1997 decided to host over 300 refugees that shipwrecked on its coast. By welcoming refugees the village, Badolato, appropriated politics of hospitality to gain new cultural and economic value for the village that was suffering from hig…
‘We hid porn magazines in the nearby woods’: Memory-work and pornography consumption in Finland
This article presents the key findings of a Finnish memory-work project conducted in 2012 on consumer experiences and associations related to pornography. The memory-work material points to a high degree of reflexivity in definitions of pornographic preference as well as to drastic shifts in the ubiquity of pornography from the pre-1990s ‘age of scarcity’ to the current ‘age of plenty.’ At the same time, contributors' narratives of childhood expe…
The Humanitarian Makeover
We examine how the makeover paradigm is mobilized in contemporary humanitarian communications—a practice we call “humanitarian makeover.” We demonstrate its operation in the Finnish television programme Arman and the Children of Cameroon and Plan's 2013 International Day of the Girl event. The analysis shows how helping distant others is configured within a makeover and self-transformation narrative, providing a stage for performance of an “ethic…
Media, passion and humanitarian reality television
The article explores affective economy in a humanitarian reality television. It shows the ways in which reality television is increasingly occupied with ‘doing good’ by investigating Australian originated series Go Back to Where You Came From. The international format has been sold to nine countries and produced in co-operation with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. By bringing together theorizations of affective economy and post-hum…
Placing Fan Cultures: Xenites in the Transnational Spaces of Fandom
Dynamics of space and place and the process of deterritorialization have become central topics in media research due to new technological developments, increased media mobility and transnationalism. The recent transformations caused by mobility and advancements in media technology indicate a separation of space and place, meaning that social relations are not necessarily formed face to face. Rather, they are increasingly established across vast d…
Media in Motion: Cultural Complexity and Migration in the Nordic Region
Once a refugee: Selfie activism, visualized citizenship and the space of appearance
This article examines the social media campaign “Once I was a refugee” by former refugees as a response to the increasingly hostile political climate in Finland against refugees. With selfie activism, the campaign expanded the “space of appearance” and introduced new voice and visuality to the public debate. The case depicts politics of claiming citizenship and social value through self-presentation to counter views of refugees as economic burden…
Introduction: Contemporary African and Black Diasporic Spaces in Europe
This special issue explores spaces where identifications with the African diaspora become articulated, (re)negotiated and, as demonstrated by many articles in this issue, established as a field of the collective agency with transformative power in European societies. The African diaspora communities and cultures in Europe are constructed not only by individuals’ engagements in Africa and its global diaspora but also through the collective agency,…
Refugee debate and networked framing in the hybrid media environment
In this article, we analyse how the debate on the ‘refugee crisis’ has been constructed in Finnish news media and social media by using big data analytics. The study applies big data with the aim of exploring the dynamics between the mainstream news media and social media and the ways in which these dynamics shape and strategically amplify different understandings of the refugee crisis. The research highlights over-emphasis of crime and threat-or…
The meanings of racism: Public discourses about racism in Finnish news media and online discussion forums
Understandings of racism are produced and circulated in contemporary networked media forms, contributing new opportunities to both extend and challenge racializing discourses, images and frameworks. This study investigated how the concept of racism is used in Finnish public debate by employing a computational text analysis technique to derive topics related to racism from a large corpus of news media content and online discussion forum comments. …
Media Solidarities: Emotions, Power and Justice in the Digital Age
Welfare State Values and Public Service Media in the Era of Datafication
Welfare states have historically been built on values of egalitarianism and universalism and through high taxation that provides free education, health care, and social security for all. Ideally, this encourages participation of all citizens and formation of inclusive public sphere. In this welfare model, the public service media are also considered some of the main institutions that serve the well-being of an entire society. That is, independent…
Affective Practice of Soldiering: How Sharing Images Is Used to Spread Extremist and Racist Ethos on Soldiers of Odin Facebook Site
The paper explores how visual affective practice is used to spread and bolster a nationalist, extremist and racist ethos on the public Facebook page of the anti-immigrant group, Soldiers of Odin. Affective practice refers to a particular sensibility of political discourse, shaped by social formations and digital technologies—the contexts in which political groups or communities gather, discuss and act. The study shows how visual affective practic…
Shifting Formations, Formative Infrastructures: Nationalisms and Racisms in Media Circulation
This introduction to the special issue departs from elaborating on the issues explored in a project examining right-wing politics and “debates” about racism in Finland. It situates the research gathered in the collection in terms of a shared focus on the disparate networks of organised and opportunistic cultural producers that invest time and labour in the production of racialising and othering discourse and aesthetics, and on the modes and forms…
Ghosts of white methods? The challenges of Big Data research in exploring racism in digital context
The paper explores the potential and limitations of big data for researching racism on social media. Informed by critical data studies and critical race studies, the paper discusses challenges of doing big data research and the problems of the so called 'white method'. The paper introduces the following three types of approach, each with a different epistemological basis for researching racism in digital context: 1) using big data analytics to po…
Verkkoviha väkivaltana – vihapuhetutkijoiden näkökulmia
Verkossa kiertviin loukkaaviin, halventaviin ja vkivaltaisiin ilmaisuihin, mee
Precariousness and Hope: Digital Everyday Life of the Undocumented Migrants Explored Through Collaborative Photography
The article explores the digital everyday life of recently or currently undocumented migrants in times of Covid-19 in Finland. It is based on an empirical case study on a collaborative photographic exhibition and workshop including visual images, diaries, interviews, and discussions. The analysis explores the ways in which a photography exhibition and a workshop may depict meaningful moments in digital everyday life as well as open up an understa…
Intimate Infrastructures We Depend upon: Living with Data
This essay takes on Lauren Berlant’s mapping of intimacy as ‘connections that impact on people, and on which they depend for living’ in order to address attachments, dependencies, and vulnerabilities in datafied contexts where digital platforms operate as infrastructures of everyday life. Building on interview material, we explore such intimate attachments as ones rife with friction and inconvenience, asking how vulnerabilities emerge and become …
Datakapitalismin uhka ja lumo
Timo Harakka. 2022. Datakapitalismi kriisien maailmassa. Helsinki: Siltala. 168 s
Sociology (21 works) · Political science (18 works) · Media studies (16 works) · Law (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Media Studies and Communication (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Art (8 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works)