Stefano Tani
Biographic Data
| ID | 697168 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stefano Tani |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stefano |
| FAMILY NAME | Tani |
| SIGNATURE | TANI S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Helsinki |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5418-8702 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 104 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Reflecting on the powers, possibilities and constraints of geography curricula in England, Finland and Sweden
National curriculum statements found within the Official Recontextualising Field (ORF) provide an insight into how geography as a school subject is conceptualized in a country’s education system. National curricula can shape teachers’ agency in curriculum making and what, how and where children and young people study and learn geography. This paper engages with the lower secondary national geography curriculum for England, Finland and Sweden. We …
A framework for curricular analysis of powerful knowledge: Comparing school biology in England, Finland and Sweden
This study investigates and compares knowledge types in national curricula embedded in the curriculum tradition (England) and the didactic tradition (Finland and Sweden). In the study, we develop and operationalize a theoretical framework based on educational purposes (academic, citizenship and humanistic purposes) and knowledge categories (substantive, disciplinary, sociocultural applications, pedagogical considerations and student-psychological…
GeoCapabilities Approach to Climate Change Education: Developing an Epistemic Model for Geographical Thinking
Multiple perspectives on geographical thinking are lacking in the teaching of climate change in school geography.This study establishes an epistemic model through a co-construction design to support geography teachers' curriculum making with respect to climate change.We developed the preliminary model with four main geographical perspectives, including natural scientific, humanistic, social scientific, and posthuman perspectives, by drawing on st…
The Social Compass Guiding the Movement of Young People in and Between Urban Spaces
The institutionalization of parkour: Blurring the Boundaries of Tight and Loose Spaces
During its twenty-year history as a globally popular lifestyle sport, parkour has undergone institutionalization, professionalization and commercialization. In this article, the analysis of these changes is based on interviews conducted with Finnish traceurs who have long experience in parkour as practitioners and coaches, with some of them having parkour as their main occupation. Earlier research with the same participants provides the backgroun…
Meaningful Encounters with the Built Environment as the Basis for Urban Environmental Education
As the majority of people in the world now live in cities, it makes sense to question the state of urban environmental education and how it could be developed going forward. In this article, we suggest a way forward based on the essays written by Finnish university students. The students reflected on their relationship with an environment that is meaningful to them. In the essays selected for this case study (n = 25), the built environment of Hel…
Exploring the gap between academic geography and school geography: Knowledge transformation of the competencies-based curriculum making in China
The gap between academic geography and school geography is of ongoing interest in geography education. To achieve a comprehensive understanding of the gap, this article describes how a framework of knowledge transformation was applied and validated in China. A total of 182 individuals involved in geography education took part in this study; these included geographers, pre- and in-service geography teachers, and geography teacher educators. Though…
More-than-human playful politics in young people's practices of dwelling with the city
This paper is a conceptual argument for more-than-human playful politics in young people’s practices of spending their free time in the city. Reworking of urban space happens in a mode of playful experimentation and emerges from human-material encounters in the city: it arises from ‘dwelling with’. This understanding grants agency to the material world and has consequences to how we conceptualize everyday politics. Spatial reworking in ‘dwelling …
Geography Education, Primary and Secondary: International Perspectives
This entry highlights and compares international patterns in geography education at primary and secondary levels, focusing especially on the United States, Europe, and Asia. The authors consider regional similarities and differences in the structure, content, and aims of geography in schools and teacher education systems. The entry concludes with a discussion of research issues and emerging frameworks for international collaboration and dialogue …
Reflected places of childhood: Applying the ideas of humanistic and cultural geographies to environmental education research
The article investigates people–environment relationships from the viewpoint of humanistic and cultural geographies and highlights the importance of subjective experiences and emotional place attachment in the construction of environmental attitudes. Some core concepts of these research fields (e.g. ‘place’, ‘insideness/outsideness’, ‘topophilia/topophobia) are defined and their meanings for environmental relations are interpreted. Empirical mate…
Achieving Human Potential Through Geography Education: A Capabilities Approach to Curriculum Making in Schools
This article provides the theoretical underpinnings for an innovative international collaborative project in the field of geography education named GeoCapabilities. The project attempts to respond in new ways to enduring challenges facing geography teachers in schools. These include the need to find convincing expression of geography's contribution to the education of all young people and coping with the apparent divergence of geography in educat…
Loosening/tightening spaces in the geographies of hanging out
The article is based on research conducted with young people who spend their free time hanging out in a shopping mall and its surroundings in the city centre of Helsinki, Finland. ‘Geographies of hanging out’ is understood here as an interaction between the location and young people: the space offers affordances to the young people and thus affects their ways of being. At the same time, they give new meanings to the space by hanging out and thus …
The Right to be Seen, the Right to be Shown: Ethical Issues Regarding the Geographies of Hanging Out
The article deals with the ethical questions that a researcher encountered when planning, conducting and reporting on research concerning young people’s everyday lives. The empirical data based on observations, photographs and interviews were gathered from among teenagers who were spending time, or ‘hanging out’, at a shopping mall in the centre of Helsinki, Finland. First, ethical dilemmas regarding the planning phase of the research are describ…
Parkour: Creating loose spaces
Parkour is a spectacular and highly mediatized new way of movement that challenges conceptions of acceptable or appropriate behaviour in urban public space. This article will examine the potential of parkour to “loosen” urban spatial texture by applying recent thinking on loose and tight space by Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens to data gathered through in‐depth interviews with parkour practitioners (traceurs) in two Finnish cities. When pract…
Picturing the city: Young people's representations of urban environments
Urban environments form the setting of everyday life for most Western young people. This article explores \nvisual representations of cities made by young people in a range of environments within four countries. The \nfindings inform a larger study on urban geographies within geography education. We analyse students’ \ndrawings of cities regarding physical characteristics, activities and issues. There are many commonalities \nbetween drawings fro…
Sold out!” Women's practices of resistance against prostitution related sexual harassment
How to Explain the Upheaval of Japanese Politics in the 1990s: Two Contrasting but Complementary Approaches
Generally speaking, the numerous attempts to explain the upheaval of Japanese politics in the 1990s can be classified into three groups. The first group consists of those who focus on microscopic factors such as the aspirations, tactics and strategies taken by political actors. For example, a research group led by Sasaki (1999) provides comprehensive information and various analyses about 'political reform' from 1988 to 1994. Their aim is to desc…
Whose Place is This Space? Life in the Street Prostitution Area of Helsinki, Finland
In recent years, there has been growing interest in questions of gender, sexuality and space in geography and within this field of enquiry prostitution has been acknowledged as an important subject for geographical research. This article explores street prostitution in the Finnish context, where it has only been a widely known phenomenon since the 1990s. The subjective and intersubjective images attached to the issue will be interpreted through a…
'That kind of girl in this kind of neighbourhood …' The potential and problems of street prostitution research
The researcher can never be a detached observer. In this paper Sirpa Tani explores the dynamic between researcher and research 'field', and the methodological challenges she encountered living in a neighbourhood which became the subject of her own research into street prostitution in Helsinki, Finland. The idea in traditional ethnographic fieldwork that the researcher enters the field, gathers data, and withdraws to report findings in the comfort…
Murder and Mercy in Cephalonia
I believe it because it's so perfect, said the Dead Soldier, pushing his middle finger into the hole in the center of his forehead. Then he pulled the finger out, sighed, and let his red-streaked, matted head droop against the white wall. It was a fine day, the sky and the sea a silent blue fusion, except for the intermittent roaring dot on the horizon that annoyed him a bit. But the sun was playing with his shadow on the cracked wall and, moving…
The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction
The Dismemberment of the Detective
A notable aspect of contemporary fiction is the increasing importance acquired by the detective as a literary figure. From World War II up to today he has transcended a narrow role played in a narrow genre to become the symbol for man's existential quest and puzzlement in the face of mystery. If science fiction is the expression of our hopes and fears concerning the future of our technological society, the detective and a new form of literary det…
More-than-human playful politics in young people's practices of dwelling with the city
This paper is a conceptual argument for more-than-human playful politics in young people’s practices of spending their free time in the city. Reworking of urban space happens in a mode of playful experimentation and emerges from human-material encounters in the city: it arises from ‘dwelling with’. This understanding grants agency to the material world and has consequences to how we conceptualize everyday politics. Spatial reworking in ‘dwelling …
Loosening/tightening spaces in the geographies of hanging out
The article is based on research conducted with young people who spend their free time hanging out in a shopping mall and its surroundings in the city centre of Helsinki, Finland. ‘Geographies of hanging out’ is understood here as an interaction between the location and young people: the space offers affordances to the young people and thus affects their ways of being. At the same time, they give new meanings to the space by hanging out and thus …
Picturing the city: Young people's representations of urban environments
Urban environments form the setting of everyday life for most Western young people. This article explores \nvisual representations of cities made by young people in a range of environments within four countries. The \nfindings inform a larger study on urban geographies within geography education. We analyse students’ \ndrawings of cities regarding physical characteristics, activities and issues. There are many commonalities \nbetween drawings fro…
Parkour: Creating loose spaces
Parkour is a spectacular and highly mediatized new way of movement that challenges conceptions of acceptable or appropriate behaviour in urban public space. This article will examine the potential of parkour to “loosen” urban spatial texture by applying recent thinking on loose and tight space by Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens to data gathered through in‐depth interviews with parkour practitioners (traceurs) in two Finnish cities. When pract…
Sold out!” Women's practices of resistance against prostitution related sexual harassment
Whose Place is This Space? Life in the Street Prostitution Area of Helsinki, Finland
In recent years, there has been growing interest in questions of gender, sexuality and space in geography and within this field of enquiry prostitution has been acknowledged as an important subject for geographical research. This article explores street prostitution in the Finnish context, where it has only been a widely known phenomenon since the 1990s. The subjective and intersubjective images attached to the issue will be interpreted through a…
Achieving Human Potential Through Geography Education: A Capabilities Approach to Curriculum Making in Schools
This article provides the theoretical underpinnings for an innovative international collaborative project in the field of geography education named GeoCapabilities. The project attempts to respond in new ways to enduring challenges facing geography teachers in schools. These include the need to find convincing expression of geography's contribution to the education of all young people and coping with the apparent divergence of geography in educat…
Reflected places of childhood: Applying the ideas of humanistic and cultural geographies to environmental education research
The article investigates people–environment relationships from the viewpoint of humanistic and cultural geographies and highlights the importance of subjective experiences and emotional place attachment in the construction of environmental attitudes. Some core concepts of these research fields (e.g. ‘place’, ‘insideness/outsideness’, ‘topophilia/topophobia) are defined and their meanings for environmental relations are interpreted. Empirical mate…
The institutionalization of parkour: Blurring the Boundaries of Tight and Loose Spaces
During its twenty-year history as a globally popular lifestyle sport, parkour has undergone institutionalization, professionalization and commercialization. In this article, the analysis of these changes is based on interviews conducted with Finnish traceurs who have long experience in parkour as practitioners and coaches, with some of them having parkour as their main occupation. Earlier research with the same participants provides the backgroun…
The Right to be Seen, the Right to be Shown: Ethical Issues Regarding the Geographies of Hanging Out
The article deals with the ethical questions that a researcher encountered when planning, conducting and reporting on research concerning young people’s everyday lives. The empirical data based on observations, photographs and interviews were gathered from among teenagers who were spending time, or ‘hanging out’, at a shopping mall in the centre of Helsinki, Finland. First, ethical dilemmas regarding the planning phase of the research are describ…
The Dismemberment of the Detective
A notable aspect of contemporary fiction is the increasing importance acquired by the detective as a literary figure. From World War II up to today he has transcended a narrow role played in a narrow genre to become the symbol for man's existential quest and puzzlement in the face of mystery. If science fiction is the expression of our hopes and fears concerning the future of our technological society, the detective and a new form of literary det…
The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction
Murder and Mercy in Cephalonia
I believe it because it's so perfect, said the Dead Soldier, pushing his middle finger into the hole in the center of his forehead. Then he pulled the finger out, sighed, and let his red-streaked, matted head droop against the white wall. It was a fine day, the sky and the sea a silent blue fusion, except for the intermittent roaring dot on the horizon that annoyed him a bit. But the sun was playing with his shadow on the cracked wall and, moving…
'That kind of girl in this kind of neighbourhood …' The potential and problems of street prostitution research
The researcher can never be a detached observer. In this paper Sirpa Tani explores the dynamic between researcher and research 'field', and the methodological challenges she encountered living in a neighbourhood which became the subject of her own research into street prostitution in Helsinki, Finland. The idea in traditional ethnographic fieldwork that the researcher enters the field, gathers data, and withdraws to report findings in the comfort…
How to Explain the Upheaval of Japanese Politics in the 1990s: Two Contrasting but Complementary Approaches
Generally speaking, the numerous attempts to explain the upheaval of Japanese politics in the 1990s can be classified into three groups. The first group consists of those who focus on microscopic factors such as the aspirations, tactics and strategies taken by political actors. For example, a research group led by Sasaki (1999) provides comprehensive information and various analyses about 'political reform' from 1988 to 1994. Their aim is to desc…
Whose Place is This Space? Life in the Street Prostitution Area of Helsinki, Finland
In recent years, there has been growing interest in questions of gender, sexuality and space in geography and within this field of enquiry prostitution has been acknowledged as an important subject for geographical research. This article explores street prostitution in the Finnish context, where it has only been a widely known phenomenon since the 1990s. The subjective and intersubjective images attached to the issue will be interpreted through a…
Sold out!” Women's practices of resistance against prostitution related sexual harassment
Picturing the city: Young people's representations of urban environments
Urban environments form the setting of everyday life for most Western young people. This article explores \nvisual representations of cities made by young people in a range of environments within four countries. The \nfindings inform a larger study on urban geographies within geography education. We analyse students’ \ndrawings of cities regarding physical characteristics, activities and issues. There are many commonalities \nbetween drawings fro…
Parkour: Creating loose spaces
Parkour is a spectacular and highly mediatized new way of movement that challenges conceptions of acceptable or appropriate behaviour in urban public space. This article will examine the potential of parkour to “loosen” urban spatial texture by applying recent thinking on loose and tight space by Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens to data gathered through in‐depth interviews with parkour practitioners (traceurs) in two Finnish cities. When pract…
The Right to be Seen, the Right to be Shown: Ethical Issues Regarding the Geographies of Hanging Out
The article deals with the ethical questions that a researcher encountered when planning, conducting and reporting on research concerning young people’s everyday lives. The empirical data based on observations, photographs and interviews were gathered from among teenagers who were spending time, or ‘hanging out’, at a shopping mall in the centre of Helsinki, Finland. First, ethical dilemmas regarding the planning phase of the research are describ…
Achieving Human Potential Through Geography Education: A Capabilities Approach to Curriculum Making in Schools
This article provides the theoretical underpinnings for an innovative international collaborative project in the field of geography education named GeoCapabilities. The project attempts to respond in new ways to enduring challenges facing geography teachers in schools. These include the need to find convincing expression of geography's contribution to the education of all young people and coping with the apparent divergence of geography in educat…
Loosening/tightening spaces in the geographies of hanging out
The article is based on research conducted with young people who spend their free time hanging out in a shopping mall and its surroundings in the city centre of Helsinki, Finland. ‘Geographies of hanging out’ is understood here as an interaction between the location and young people: the space offers affordances to the young people and thus affects their ways of being. At the same time, they give new meanings to the space by hanging out and thus …
Reflected places of childhood: Applying the ideas of humanistic and cultural geographies to environmental education research
The article investigates people–environment relationships from the viewpoint of humanistic and cultural geographies and highlights the importance of subjective experiences and emotional place attachment in the construction of environmental attitudes. Some core concepts of these research fields (e.g. ‘place’, ‘insideness/outsideness’, ‘topophilia/topophobia) are defined and their meanings for environmental relations are interpreted. Empirical mate…
Geography Education, Primary and Secondary: International Perspectives
This entry highlights and compares international patterns in geography education at primary and secondary levels, focusing especially on the United States, Europe, and Asia. The authors consider regional similarities and differences in the structure, content, and aims of geography in schools and teacher education systems. The entry concludes with a discussion of research issues and emerging frameworks for international collaboration and dialogue …
More-than-human playful politics in young people's practices of dwelling with the city
This paper is a conceptual argument for more-than-human playful politics in young people’s practices of spending their free time in the city. Reworking of urban space happens in a mode of playful experimentation and emerges from human-material encounters in the city: it arises from ‘dwelling with’. This understanding grants agency to the material world and has consequences to how we conceptualize everyday politics. Spatial reworking in ‘dwelling …
Meaningful Encounters with the Built Environment as the Basis for Urban Environmental Education
As the majority of people in the world now live in cities, it makes sense to question the state of urban environmental education and how it could be developed going forward. In this article, we suggest a way forward based on the essays written by Finnish university students. The students reflected on their relationship with an environment that is meaningful to them. In the essays selected for this case study (n = 25), the built environment of Hel…
Exploring the gap between academic geography and school geography: Knowledge transformation of the competencies-based curriculum making in China
The gap between academic geography and school geography is of ongoing interest in geography education. To achieve a comprehensive understanding of the gap, this article describes how a framework of knowledge transformation was applied and validated in China. A total of 182 individuals involved in geography education took part in this study; these included geographers, pre- and in-service geography teachers, and geography teacher educators. Though…
GeoCapabilities Approach to Climate Change Education: Developing an Epistemic Model for Geographical Thinking
Multiple perspectives on geographical thinking are lacking in the teaching of climate change in school geography.This study establishes an epistemic model through a co-construction design to support geography teachers' curriculum making with respect to climate change.We developed the preliminary model with four main geographical perspectives, including natural scientific, humanistic, social scientific, and posthuman perspectives, by drawing on st…
The Social Compass Guiding the Movement of Young People in and Between Urban Spaces
The institutionalization of parkour: Blurring the Boundaries of Tight and Loose Spaces
During its twenty-year history as a globally popular lifestyle sport, parkour has undergone institutionalization, professionalization and commercialization. In this article, the analysis of these changes is based on interviews conducted with Finnish traceurs who have long experience in parkour as practitioners and coaches, with some of them having parkour as their main occupation. Earlier research with the same participants provides the backgroun…
Reflecting on the powers, possibilities and constraints of geography curricula in England, Finland and Sweden
National curriculum statements found within the Official Recontextualising Field (ORF) provide an insight into how geography as a school subject is conceptualized in a country’s education system. National curricula can shape teachers’ agency in curriculum making and what, how and where children and young people study and learn geography. This paper engages with the lower secondary national geography curriculum for England, Finland and Sweden. We …
A framework for curricular analysis of powerful knowledge: Comparing school biology in England, Finland and Sweden
This study investigates and compares knowledge types in national curricula embedded in the curriculum tradition (England) and the didactic tradition (Finland and Sweden). In the study, we develop and operationalize a theoretical framework based on educational purposes (academic, citizenship and humanistic purposes) and knowledge categories (substantive, disciplinary, sociocultural applications, pedagogical considerations and student-psychological…
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (13 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Social science (8 works) · Geography (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Geography Education and Pedagogy (6 works) · Pedagogy (6 works)