Jouni Häkli
Biographic Data
| ID | 270762 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jouni Häkli |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jouni |
| FAMILY NAME | Häkli |
| SIGNATURE | HÄKLI J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tampere University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3033-2976 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 625 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Resisting climate apartheid: Co-creative unlearning of climate-changed geographies
Peer reviewed
Migration research in ‘play space’: Joyful encounters, empathic unsettlement and refusal in arts-based ethnography
This paper introduces joyful embodied encounters, empathic unsettlement, agentic acts of refusal and ethical and personal tensions as key dimensions of narrative ethnographic research. Grounded in a study of asylum migrants’ experiences in a Finnish city, we employed a playful, arts-based methodology within a ‘play space’ to foster relaxed, transcultural and translingual interactions. This creative framework opened new pathways for engaging with …
The European Union as a humanitarian border: The production of vulnerability in the New Pact on Migration and Asylum
This article is published under a Creative Commons CC-BY license
Embodiment and dignity: Asylum migrants’ experiences of (mis)recognised personhood in everyday encounters
This paper presents findings from a narrative ethnography that explores asylum migrants’ everyday experiences of embodied encounters, tracing concrete situations and processes in which they are either affirmed or denied recognition as persons. Empathy – understood as the capacity to understand the experiences of others – is identified as a central dynamic in the recognition of personhood. We approach this through the lens of Helmuth Plessner’s ph…
Unlearning through art: Developing decolonising and empathic pedagogies in climate mobilities education
This paper introduces arts-based participatory research combining decolonising and empathic transformative environmental pedagogies, in the context of climate mobilities education in Finland and Greece. It offers methodological contributions to existing research with emphasis on multimodal arts methods and the role of emotions. We introduce the dimension of empathic unsettlement as a vital element of the transformative unlearning-learning cycle, …
Devaluing personhood: The framing of migrants in the EU's new pact on migration and asylum
The latest EU policy initiative to regulate migration to the European Union is called the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. Compared with previous policies, the New Pact promotes and normalises multiple procedures that can have far‐reaching consequences on migrants' agency, dignity, personhood, and vulnerability. As the EU's migration and asylum policies set the parameters for the governance of forced migration and access to asylum in the Member …
Trapped in (In)visibility: Contested Intercorporeality in Undocumented migrants' Lives
The paper draws attention to contexts in which livelihood and residence opportunities to migrants without formal status are meagre, specifically Nordic countries where policies towards undocumented persons have notably tightened. In such conditions, invisibility becomes a key characteristic of life. The paper introduces a broad conception of visibility that identifies different ways of seeing and being (un)seen, as part of embodied agency that tu…
Performing a neoliberal city-regional imaginary: The case of Tampere tramway project
Sub-national statecraft and scalecraft is touted as consequential antidote to the crisis of uneven development and democratic deficit. Interrogating this supposition with reference to city-regionalization in Finland, this paper explores how a neoliberal imaginary of city-regions has been institutionalized through entanglement of discursive practices of contractual planning and materiality of tramway construction in Tampere. We argue that Finland’…
Radical Hope in asylum seeking: Political Agency Beyond Linear Temporality
Political agency of refugees and asylum seekers is usually recognised as different forms of activism, focusing on rights claiming or protesting on inferior living conditions. While these activities are vitally important in the struggle over refugee rights and policies, they are not the only ways in which asylum seekers and refugees act politically. Perhaps paradoxically, the publicly visible activities may hide from the view other forms of effect…
Outsourcing Hotspot Governance within the EU: Cultural Mediators as Humanitarian-Border Workers in Greece
Responding to the self-declared 'Mediterranean migration crisis' in 2015, the European Commission launched a Hotspot Approach to speed up the handling of incoming migrants in the 'frontline states' of Greece and Italy. A key element in this operation is the identification of those eligible for asylum, which requires effective communication across cultural and linguistic difference between the asylum system and the migrants, facilitated by officia…
What can flat ontology teach the legislator
This commentary on James Ash’s ‘Flat Ontology and Geography’ makes three points. First, it notes the prominence of different versions of flat ontology in human geography and supports Ash’s attempt to make sense of how flat ontology thinking has impacted human geographical scholarship by working through a politically contested real-world case. Second, by framing Ash’s project as a ‘reality check’, the commentary engages in a critical assessment of…
Bodies and persons: The politics of embodied encounters in asylum seeking
In this paper, we propose that there is a politics of encounters centered on the body at play in seeking asylum and refuge, and that it is critical to study how it unfolds from the point of view of both governing and agency. Building on existing work that looks at the role of embodiment in the political struggles of refugees, and leaning on Helmuth Plessner’s original thinking about social embodiment, we develop a theoretical understanding of thi…
Lived citizenship: Conceptualising an Emerging Field
Lived citizenship has emerged as a key concept in citizenship studies over the last two decades. A growing number of authors have applied ideas of lived citizenship as a generative approach to recognise the embodied, relational and lived experiences of being a citizen in everyday life. However, lived citizenship currently lacks conceptual clarity and framing which weakens its analytical power and potential. In this paper we consider the theoretic…
A Missing Citizen? Issue Based Citizenship in City-Regional Planning
City regions are significant sites of economic development, policymaking, and everyday living. Yet in many countries they are weakly institutionalized and therefore lack established democratic practices. This article is based on a study exploring citizen participation in city-regional planning in Finland, where traditional participatory means have largely failed to invite and involve citizens. The analysis approaches city regions relationally, as…
Refugeeness as political subjectivity: Experiencing the humanitarian border
Building on the idea of the humanitarian border, the paper seeks to theorise its fluctuating geographies as growing from particular governmental strategies, yet shaped by social elements operating beyond the migration regime. We approach the humanitarian border topologically as a relational space experienced by refugee-subjects and constituting of regulations, techniques, tactics and (counter)practices that have emerged, and keep evolving, when p…
Care as mundane politics: Contested familial refugee lives in Finland
Refugees often find themselves in challenging positions regarding their familial relations while seeking asylum. Whereas transnational human rights agreements and institutions identify families as units of protection and sources of care with variable compositions, many immigration policies and humanitarian practices regard familial relations also problematic and interpret refugees’ rights to family life narrowly. This leaves refugees’ attempts to…
Geography, space and identity
This chapter provides an overview of the research on those aspects of spatial identities that are pertinent to the discipline of geography. It describes the recognition of several simultaneous identity discourses, which emphasize different sides of the social construction of identity as related to social spatiality. The chapter discusses the construction of places, regions and nations as centers for territorial identity. It focuses on how geograp…
The subject of citizenship - Can there be a posthuman civil society
On becoming political: The political in subjectivity
Geosocial Lives in Topological Polis: Mohamed Bouazizi as a Political Agent
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 li…
Becoming Refugee in Cairo: The Political in Performativity
This article sets out to analyze experiences related to refugeeness, or “becoming refugee.” It does so not as a technology of governmentality, but rather as the condition of possibility to political agency based on the capacities of asylum seekers to become attentive toward the figure of the refugee, to raise awareness of shared grievances and injustices and, ultimately, to mobilize individually and collectively. The study is based on an analysis…
The Beginning of Politics: Youthful Political Agency in Everyday Life
1. Children and Young People's Politics in Everyday Life Kirsi Pauliina Kallio and Jouni Hakli 2. Friendship and environmental politics in childhood Ann E. Bartos 3. Intergenerational Mapping and the Cultural Politics of Memory Katharyne Mitchell and Sarah Elwood 4. 'All the Beautiful Things': Trauma, Aesthetics and the Politics of Palestinian Childhood David Jones Marshall 5. Performing the Political through Public Space: Teenage Girls' Everyday…
Politicizing ontology
This paper is a response to a growing body of geographical literature exploring the interface between ontology and politics. We develop an understanding that does not start by building ontological bedrocks, to which the question of politics is then rooted. Ontology building, we argue, operates against the essential possibility of the political invested in ontological openness, and thus remains blind to politics inconsistent with, but also practis…
Children's rights advocacy as transnational citizenship
In this article, we develop conceptual tools for analysing the practices of children's rights organizations and professionals as transnational citizenship. To this end, we set out to trace a continuum of citizenship practices in which global and local influences and forces enmesh in ways that are difficult to grasp when treated as two separate realms. To theorize the social dynamism and spatial constitution of transnational citizenship as a local…
Children's Political Geographies
This chapter introduces children's political geographies from three perspectives. The first section discusses children's place and role in political geographical research in general, providing a brief overview of the development that led to the problematization of children's absence as participants from political geographical events, dynamics, and power relations. The second section looks into the subfields of children's and young people's geogra…
Lived citizenship: Conceptualising an Emerging Field
Lived citizenship has emerged as a key concept in citizenship studies over the last two decades. A growing number of authors have applied ideas of lived citizenship as a generative approach to recognise the embodied, relational and lived experiences of being a citizen in everyday life. However, lived citizenship currently lacks conceptual clarity and framing which weakens its analytical power and potential. In this paper we consider the theoretic…
Politicizing ontology
This paper is a response to a growing body of geographical literature exploring the interface between ontology and politics. We develop an understanding that does not start by building ontological bedrocks, to which the question of politics is then rooted. Ontology building, we argue, operates against the essential possibility of the political invested in ontological openness, and thus remains blind to politics inconsistent with, but also practis…
Children and Young People's Politics in Everyday Life
This Special Issue presents a decennial follow-up to the Space and Polity 2003 Special Issue ‘Political geographies of children and young people’, edited by Chris Philo and Fiona M. Smith. The foll
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…
Are There Politics in Childhood
This paper sets out to explore children's 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 …
In the territory of knowledge: State-centred discourses and the construction of society
The concept of society is of fundamental importance in social science research. Yet there is little explicit theorization among the mainstream social sciences of how society should be conceived of geographically. The dominant tendency is to take a state-territorial definition of society for granted. While an increasing reflexivity has recently emerged regarding the relationship between social science discourses and the states' agency and projects…
Radical Hope in asylum seeking: Political Agency Beyond Linear Temporality
Political agency of refugees and asylum seekers is usually recognised as different forms of activism, focusing on rights claiming or protesting on inferior living conditions. While these activities are vitally important in the struggle over refugee rights and policies, they are not the only ways in which asylum seekers and refugees act politically. Perhaps paradoxically, the publicly visible activities may hide from the view other forms of effect…
Becoming Refugee in Cairo: The Political in Performativity
This article sets out to analyze experiences related to refugeeness, or “becoming refugee.” It does so not as a technology of governmentality, but rather as the condition of possibility to political agency based on the capacities of asylum seekers to become attentive toward the figure of the refugee, to raise awareness of shared grievances and injustices and, ultimately, to mobilize individually and collectively. The study is based on an analysis…
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 …
Tracing children's politics
Young people’s voiceless politics in the struggle over urban space
The subject of citizenship - Can there be a posthuman civil society
Intervention: Mapping is critical
Refugeeness as political subjectivity: Experiencing the humanitarian border
Building on the idea of the humanitarian border, the paper seeks to theorise its fluctuating geographies as growing from particular governmental strategies, yet shaped by social elements operating beyond the migration regime. We approach the humanitarian border topologically as a relational space experienced by refugee-subjects and constituting of regulations, techniques, tactics and (counter)practices that have emerged, and keep evolving, when p…
Bodies and persons: The politics of embodied encounters in asylum seeking
In this paper, we propose that there is a politics of encounters centered on the body at play in seeking asylum and refuge, and that it is critical to study how it unfolds from the point of view of both governing and agency. Building on existing work that looks at the role of embodiment in the political struggles of refugees, and leaning on Helmuth Plessner’s original thinking about social embodiment, we develop a theoretical understanding of thi…
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 …
Discourse in the production of political space: Decolonizing the symbolism of provinces in Finland
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 children's rights advocacy. Particular attention is paid to the drafting and the enf…
Political geography in childhood
Outsourcing Hotspot Governance within the EU: Cultural Mediators as Humanitarian-Border Workers in Greece
Responding to the self-declared 'Mediterranean migration crisis' in 2015, the European Commission launched a Hotspot Approach to speed up the handling of incoming migrants in the 'frontline states' of Greece and Italy. A key element in this operation is the identification of those eligible for asylum, which requires effective communication across cultural and linguistic difference between the asylum system and the migrants, facilitated by officia…
Devaluing personhood: The framing of migrants in the EU's new pact on migration and asylum
The latest EU policy initiative to regulate migration to the European Union is called the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. Compared with previous policies, the New Pact promotes and normalises multiple procedures that can have far‐reaching consequences on migrants' agency, dignity, personhood, and vulnerability. As the EU's migration and asylum policies set the parameters for the governance of forced migration and access to asylum in the Member …
Care as mundane politics: Contested familial refugee lives in Finland
Refugees often find themselves in challenging positions regarding their familial relations while seeking asylum. Whereas transnational human rights agreements and institutions identify families as units of protection and sources of care with variable compositions, many immigration policies and humanitarian practices regard familial relations also problematic and interpret refugees’ rights to family life narrowly. This leaves refugees’ attempts to…
A Missing Citizen? Issue Based Citizenship in City-Regional Planning
City regions are significant sites of economic development, policymaking, and everyday living. Yet in many countries they are weakly institutionalized and therefore lack established democratic practices. This article is based on a study exploring citizen participation in city-regional planning in Finland, where traditional participatory means have largely failed to invite and involve citizens. The analysis approaches city regions relationally, as…
Geosocial Lives in Topological Polis: Mohamed Bouazizi as a Political Agent
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 li…
To discipline or not to discipline, is that the question
Culture and politics of nature in the city: "The case of Berlin's “green wedge"∗
1996). Culture and politics of nature in the city: The case of Berlin's “green wedge' Capitalism Nature Socialism: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 125-138
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 see…
Discourse in the production of political space: Decolonizing the symbolism of provinces in Finland
The politics of belonging: Complexities of identity in the catalan borderlands
The rise of the European nation–state system profoundly influenced the map of linguistic and cultural minorities. Catalonia in northeastern Spain is no exception. The consolidation of the Spanish and French kingdoms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries left Catalan speakers without political and cultural sovereignty. Furthermore, in the Treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659, the Catalan homeland els Països Catalans was divided by the Franco–Sp…
The Politics of Belonging: Complexities of Identity in the Catalan Borderlands
Cultural conflict and political accommodation at european borderlands
(2001). Cultural conflict and political accommodation at european borderlands. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography: Vol. 83, No. 3, pp. 107-110
Cultural Conflict and Political Accommodation at European Borderlands
In the territory of knowledge: State-centred discourses and the construction of society
The concept of society is of fundamental importance in social science research. Yet there is little explicit theorization among the mainstream social sciences of how society should be conceived of geographically. The dominant tendency is to take a state-territorial definition of society for granted. While an increasing reflexivity has recently emerged regarding the relationship between social science discourses and the states' agency and projects…
To discipline or not to discipline, is that the question
Biometric identities
Re-Bordering Spaces
Borders and boundaries are everywhere.Individuals and human communities define and structure the social world by making distinctions between groups, spaces, times, objects and meanings.We encounter borders constantly in our everyday lives, and know how to respect or transgress them by intuition, experience or reasoning.Broadly speaking, borders and boundaries represent an immense area of research including almost everything that pertains to human…
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 …
Intervention: Mapping is critical
Political geography in childhood
Are There Politics in Childhood
This paper sets out to explore children's 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 …
Young people’s voiceless politics in the struggle over urban space
Tracing children's politics
Children and Young People's Politics in Everyday Life
This Special Issue presents a decennial follow-up to the Space and Polity 2003 Special Issue ‘Political geographies of children and young people’, edited by Chris Philo and Fiona M. Smith. The foll
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…
State Space - Outlining a Field Theoretical Approach
The state space concept is part of attempts to dismantle the 'territorial trap' and the concomitant dichotomy between national 'inside' and international 'outside'. This paper contributes to this scholarship by proposing the concept of transnational field as a tool for a nuanced understanding of the intermingling of the national and the global. The paper argues that the formative logic of globalization is not simply the growth of economic interco…
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 children's rights advocacy. Particular attention is paid to the drafting and the enf…
Children's Political Geographies
This chapter introduces children's political geographies from three perspectives. The first section discusses children's place and role in political geographical research in general, providing a brief overview of the development that led to the problematization of children's absence as participants from political geographical events, dynamics, and power relations. The second section looks into the subfields of children's and young people's geogra…
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 …
The Beginning of Politics: Youthful Political Agency in Everyday Life
1. Children and Young People's Politics in Everyday Life Kirsi Pauliina Kallio and Jouni Hakli 2. Friendship and environmental politics in childhood Ann E. Bartos 3. Intergenerational Mapping and the Cultural Politics of Memory Katharyne Mitchell and Sarah Elwood 4. 'All the Beautiful Things': Trauma, Aesthetics and the Politics of Palestinian Childhood David Jones Marshall 5. Performing the Political through Public Space: Teenage Girls' Everyday…
Politicizing ontology
This paper is a response to a growing body of geographical literature exploring the interface between ontology and politics. We develop an understanding that does not start by building ontological bedrocks, to which the question of politics is then rooted. Ontology building, we argue, operates against the essential possibility of the political invested in ontological openness, and thus remains blind to politics inconsistent with, but also practis…
Political science (39 works) · Sociology (38 works) · Law (36 works) · Politics (34 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Social science (18 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (13 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Gender Studies (12 works)