Saara Liinamaa
Biographic Data
| ID | 830247 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Saara Liinamaa |
| GIVEN NAMES | Saara |
| FAMILY NAME | Liinamaa |
| SIGNATURE | LIINAMAA S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Guelph, ON, Canada |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7499-2477 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
‘Living Props’: Background Actors and the Production of ‘Occupational Irrelevance’ within Film and Television Work
This article treats background acting as an archetypal case for theorising sociologically the work and workers that exist in the backdrop of a workplace. Turning to the sociology of attention and its conceptualisation of the background of everyday life, it draws on Zerubavel’s ‘social structure of irrelevance’ to understand background acting as an occupation. Based on in-depth interviews with unionised and non-unionised background actors working …
Critical Friendship in the Modern World
Friendship is a critically important aspect of our lives, but is it always an unassailably 'good thing'? This book begins with the innovative premise that friendship is inherently complex and characterized by opposing qualities: it is both pleasurable and fraught, private and public, and inclusive and exclusionary. Rather than simply celebrating friendship as universally beneficial or worrying about its decline amid rising social disconnection, L…
Talking to Artists: In-depth Interviews, Cultural Objects, and a Sociology of Art (History) Methodology
A key dilemma for researchers analyzing in-depth interviews is how to sensitively and responsibly interpret and incorporate the layers of meaning present in any one interview. References to cultural objects during interviews are moments that invite interpretive multiplicity. This article examines the presence of cultural objects within interview research as a methodological issue. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with artists and d…
Entanglements of Improvisation, Conviviality, and Conflict in Everyday Encounters in Public Space
The everyday life of public space is characterised by many kinds of convivial, conflictual, and improvisational encounters between people of diverse backgrounds and experiences. Because public spaces are, in principle at least, freely accessible to all, they are of central importance to everyday life and intrinsically interesting to social scientists. This thematic issue brings together a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives o…
Everyday Multiculturalism on Ice: Observations from Hockey-free Outdoor Urban Public Ice Rinks
Hockey-loving Canadians sometimes forget that not all ice rinks permit hockey. This article examines such ice rinks as public sites for sociable interactions between strangers across social differences. Through naturalistic and participant observation, we report on two public outdoor city hall ice rinks in Southern Ontario (Toronto and Guelph), showing how these rinks are distinctive, heterogeneous public spaces that realize aspects of “unpanicke…
Women actors, insecure work, and everyday sexism in the Canadian screen industry
Acting, especially in the screen arts industry, is a job where women are subjected to pronounced and widely accepted socio-cultural aesthetic ideals within an industry that has become renowned for its tolerance for and justifications of sexism and sexualized violence. However, there is a limited amount of scholarship that examines actors and acting from a work and employment perspective. Drawing on the literature on work insecurity and gender ine…
A Shared Everyday Ethic of Public Sociability: Outdoor Public Ice Rinks as Spaces for Encounter
Everyday life in urban public space means living amongst people unknown to one another. As part of the broader convivial turn within the study of everyday urban life (Wise & Noble, 2016), this article examines outdoor public ice rinks as spaces for encounter between strangers. With data drawn from 100 hours of naturalistic and participant observation at free and accessible outdoor public non-hockey ice rinks in two Canadian cities, we show how ‘r…
The social quarantining of migrant labour: Everyday effects of temporary foreign worker regulation in Canada
Low-wage migrant workers in wealthy nations occupy an ambiguous social and legal status that is inseparable from global economics and politics. This article adds to the growing and diverse literature on temporariness in labour and citizenship by reviewing Canada’s internationally recognised ‘model’ programme, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Specifically, we present research on a small but rapidly growing peripheral pocket of work…
The house of the unknown artist and the cosmopolitan imagination of urban memory
This article returns to a diverse body of literature that has identified urban memory as a specific category of cultural analysis. Yet, while the significance of memory to culture and the city is widely recognized, at the same time, more and more questions are surfacing around the status and meaning of the term urban. This article pursues the contemporary question of urban memory by turning to alternative urban cultural practices – specifically, …
Contemporary Art's ‘Urban Question’ and Practices of Experimentation
Artists have become exemplary urban advocates, agitators and problemsolvers, but how do we contextualize these actions alongside a contemporary moment that treats urbanization as one of our most powerful collective narratives? As the city becomes a strategic site within neoliberal policy agendas and activist interventions alike, it is timely to reconsider contemporary art's ‘urban question’ (Castells). First, this article argues that we must retu…
The social quarantining of migrant labour: Everyday effects of temporary foreign worker regulation in Canada
Low-wage migrant workers in wealthy nations occupy an ambiguous social and legal status that is inseparable from global economics and politics. This article adds to the growing and diverse literature on temporariness in labour and citizenship by reviewing Canada’s internationally recognised ‘model’ programme, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Specifically, we present research on a small but rapidly growing peripheral pocket of work…
A Shared Everyday Ethic of Public Sociability: Outdoor Public Ice Rinks as Spaces for Encounter
Everyday life in urban public space means living amongst people unknown to one another. As part of the broader convivial turn within the study of everyday urban life (Wise & Noble, 2016), this article examines outdoor public ice rinks as spaces for encounter between strangers. With data drawn from 100 hours of naturalistic and participant observation at free and accessible outdoor public non-hockey ice rinks in two Canadian cities, we show how ‘r…
Contemporary Art's ‘Urban Question’ and Practices of Experimentation
Artists have become exemplary urban advocates, agitators and problemsolvers, but how do we contextualize these actions alongside a contemporary moment that treats urbanization as one of our most powerful collective narratives? As the city becomes a strategic site within neoliberal policy agendas and activist interventions alike, it is timely to reconsider contemporary art's ‘urban question’ (Castells). First, this article argues that we must retu…
Everyday Multiculturalism on Ice: Observations from Hockey-free Outdoor Urban Public Ice Rinks
Hockey-loving Canadians sometimes forget that not all ice rinks permit hockey. This article examines such ice rinks as public sites for sociable interactions between strangers across social differences. Through naturalistic and participant observation, we report on two public outdoor city hall ice rinks in Southern Ontario (Toronto and Guelph), showing how these rinks are distinctive, heterogeneous public spaces that realize aspects of “unpanicke…
Women actors, insecure work, and everyday sexism in the Canadian screen industry
Acting, especially in the screen arts industry, is a job where women are subjected to pronounced and widely accepted socio-cultural aesthetic ideals within an industry that has become renowned for its tolerance for and justifications of sexism and sexualized violence. However, there is a limited amount of scholarship that examines actors and acting from a work and employment perspective. Drawing on the literature on work insecurity and gender ine…
Contemporary Art's ‘Urban Question’ and Practices of Experimentation
Artists have become exemplary urban advocates, agitators and problemsolvers, but how do we contextualize these actions alongside a contemporary moment that treats urbanization as one of our most powerful collective narratives? As the city becomes a strategic site within neoliberal policy agendas and activist interventions alike, it is timely to reconsider contemporary art's ‘urban question’ (Castells). First, this article argues that we must retu…
The house of the unknown artist and the cosmopolitan imagination of urban memory
This article returns to a diverse body of literature that has identified urban memory as a specific category of cultural analysis. Yet, while the significance of memory to culture and the city is widely recognized, at the same time, more and more questions are surfacing around the status and meaning of the term urban. This article pursues the contemporary question of urban memory by turning to alternative urban cultural practices – specifically, …
The social quarantining of migrant labour: Everyday effects of temporary foreign worker regulation in Canada
Low-wage migrant workers in wealthy nations occupy an ambiguous social and legal status that is inseparable from global economics and politics. This article adds to the growing and diverse literature on temporariness in labour and citizenship by reviewing Canada’s internationally recognised ‘model’ programme, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Specifically, we present research on a small but rapidly growing peripheral pocket of work…
Women actors, insecure work, and everyday sexism in the Canadian screen industry
Acting, especially in the screen arts industry, is a job where women are subjected to pronounced and widely accepted socio-cultural aesthetic ideals within an industry that has become renowned for its tolerance for and justifications of sexism and sexualized violence. However, there is a limited amount of scholarship that examines actors and acting from a work and employment perspective. Drawing on the literature on work insecurity and gender ine…
A Shared Everyday Ethic of Public Sociability: Outdoor Public Ice Rinks as Spaces for Encounter
Everyday life in urban public space means living amongst people unknown to one another. As part of the broader convivial turn within the study of everyday urban life (Wise & Noble, 2016), this article examines outdoor public ice rinks as spaces for encounter between strangers. With data drawn from 100 hours of naturalistic and participant observation at free and accessible outdoor public non-hockey ice rinks in two Canadian cities, we show how ‘r…
Everyday Multiculturalism on Ice: Observations from Hockey-free Outdoor Urban Public Ice Rinks
Hockey-loving Canadians sometimes forget that not all ice rinks permit hockey. This article examines such ice rinks as public sites for sociable interactions between strangers across social differences. Through naturalistic and participant observation, we report on two public outdoor city hall ice rinks in Southern Ontario (Toronto and Guelph), showing how these rinks are distinctive, heterogeneous public spaces that realize aspects of “unpanicke…
Entanglements of Improvisation, Conviviality, and Conflict in Everyday Encounters in Public Space
The everyday life of public space is characterised by many kinds of convivial, conflictual, and improvisational encounters between people of diverse backgrounds and experiences. Because public spaces are, in principle at least, freely accessible to all, they are of central importance to everyday life and intrinsically interesting to social scientists. This thematic issue brings together a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives o…
Talking to Artists: In-depth Interviews, Cultural Objects, and a Sociology of Art (History) Methodology
A key dilemma for researchers analyzing in-depth interviews is how to sensitively and responsibly interpret and incorporate the layers of meaning present in any one interview. References to cultural objects during interviews are moments that invite interpretive multiplicity. This article examines the presence of cultural objects within interview research as a methodological issue. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with artists and d…
‘Living Props’: Background Actors and the Production of ‘Occupational Irrelevance’ within Film and Television Work
This article treats background acting as an archetypal case for theorising sociologically the work and workers that exist in the backdrop of a workplace. Turning to the sociology of attention and its conceptualisation of the background of everyday life, it draws on Zerubavel’s ‘social structure of irrelevance’ to understand background acting as an occupation. Based on in-depth interviews with unionised and non-unionised background actors working …
Critical Friendship in the Modern World
Friendship is a critically important aspect of our lives, but is it always an unassailably 'good thing'? This book begins with the innovative premise that friendship is inherently complex and characterized by opposing qualities: it is both pleasurable and fraught, private and public, and inclusive and exclusionary. Rather than simply celebrating friendship as universally beneficial or worrying about its decline amid rising social disconnection, L…
Sociology (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (4 works) · Social science (4 works) · Visual arts (4 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · Media studies (3 works) · Ambivalence (2 works)