Taina Meriluoto
Biographic Data
| ID | 97242 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Taina Meriluoto |
| GIVEN NAMES | Taina |
| FAMILY NAME | Meriluoto |
| SIGNATURE | MERILUOTO T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Helsinki |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1793-1031 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 69 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
For collective creativity, bold claims and discomfort: Generative technologies and sociological research
Layered images: Politicizing climate emergency on visual social media
This article theorizes how social media images politicize. We argue that layering —digitally assembling diverse visual elements—is a key practice of visual politicization. Beyond just a technique, we conceptualize layering as a form of remix, a cultural tool that can be used to politicize: to render issues recognizable and actionable. To show how layering works, we analyze over 500 Instagram images related to climate activism. Adopting Annette Ma…
The labour of hope: Sociological practice and the public sphere in an age of democratic in communicability
Non peer reviewed
The emotional turn and the aesthetic challenges of sociological inquiry: Writing emotions in a time of upheaval
Sociologists began to reckon seriously with emotions in the later part of the 1970s. Theoretical propositions such as emotional labour and feeling rules (Hochschild, 1979, 1983) illuminated how our feelings emerge and make meaning in a social context (Bericat, 2016). Asserting that ‘what we feel is fully as important to the outcome of social affairs as what we think or do’ (Hochschild, 1990, p. 117), sociologists of emotion further showed how emo…
Gilded scars: Constructing the proudly vulnerable political subject
Recent feminist scholarship has redefined vulnerability as the shared ontological characteristic of all (human) beings. While this move has enabled reconceptualizing vulnerability as the shared commonality of humanity, it has also brought forward a question on whether and how this resignified concept might be employable as a source of political agency. In this article, we offer a typology of three distinct ways in which political agency based on …
Engagements with participation: Pragmatic perspectives, two decades on
Bedtime for democracy? Europe's political and cultural fault lines
Evolving with care: Fostering openness and diversity at EJCPS
Editorial, issue 1/2025 of the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology
Beyond the time of monsters: Keeping cultural and political sociology alive in a fragmenting world
Editorial. Issue 2/2025 of the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology
Radical Pluralization: Mobilizing the Multiple Self in Democratic Engagements
Youth Participation and Democracy: Cultures of Doing Society
Bridging ethnography and AI: A reciprocal methodology for studying visual political action
This article proposes a methodological approach to address the analytical challenge of meaningfully studying visual politics in the current abundance of online image data. It proposes a novel methodological process of bridging ethnography and computational methods for analysing visual data in a manner that avoids mixing and blurring the boundaries of the two methods while establishing a continuous interchange between them. The methodological deve…
Making a deal with the devil? Portuguese and Finnish activists’ everyday negotiations on the value of social media
This article explores how young activists in Portugal and Finland negotiate the value of social media in their practices. Considering the near ubiquitous intertwinement of online-offline environments, and its contradictory promises for social movements, we look at these negotiations through the moral principles drawn upon to critique and justify social media practices. Based on ethnographic data from Portuguese climate activists and Finnish menta…
Beyond recognition: Identification and disidentification in visual resistance to stigma
This article theorizes visual practices of stigma resistance as a continuous play with identification and disidentification. Based on an ethnographic study of young, stigmatized activists' self-images, I argue that the oft-employed concept of recognition only partially captures visual/digital resistance to stigma. In addition to claiming recognition, I show how creating unrecognizability is a key component in subverting stigmatizing categorizatio…
Democratic Self-transformations: Identity, Performance, and the Politics of Becoming
Our selves are characterized by inner multiplicity (Elster 1986). Our raced, classed, gendered, and sexed identities are intersectional (Crenshaw 1991; Wojciechowska 2019). Depending on the context and our state of mind, we are parents, employees, dancers, slackers, victims, perpetrators, players, hosts, explorers, altruists, or egoists. We are all these things at once and consecutively. We change and grow. Our identities are never permanent but …
The Politics of Becoming: Introduction to the Symposium
Hans Asenbaum's open-access book The Politics of Becoming: Anonymity and Democracy in the Digital Age takes on some of the biggest questions in feminist and radical democratic theory. It asks, how we should understand who we are, and what implications our answer to that question has for democracy
Fame democracy? Social media and visuality-based transformation of the public sphere
We argue that a shift in the underlying values that inform people's actions in the public sphere is taking place in the social media age. From ways of qualifying the public sphere as a space that prioritizes equality, mutual respect and careful deliberation, action that creates visibility, attention and followership is increasingly valued above all else. This change translates into a transformation of the public sphere that requires revisiting th…
The self in selfies-Conceptualizing the selfie-coordination of marginalized youth with sociology of engagements
This article develops a theory of selfies as reflexive practices of self-coordination. Building on pragmatist sociology of engagements, I conceptualize selfies as digital practices of coordinating with the self in formats that are recognizable for others. This framework allows approaching the self as an act of coordination, simultaneously shaped by, and equipped to subvert the cultural conditions of how we ought to be. As these conditions are inc…
Plurality in Urban Politics: Conflict and Commonality in Mouffe and Thévenot
In this article we introduce a pragmatist interpretation of agonistic pluralism and develop this into an analytical framework that is applied to the analysis of urban conflicts. In the article, we take stock of contemporary critical and radical urban scholarship, our aim being twofold. First, we substantiate Chantal Mouffe's notion of agonistic pluralism with tools from French pragmatic sociology. We suggest that, in a democracy, plurality emerge…
Snap-along ethnography: Studying visual politicization in the social media age
In this article, we argue that two significant shifts, namely, the blurring of lives offline and online and the increasing significance of the visual character of these lives, pose new challenges to social science research methods. We propose the application of snap-along ethnography to address these challenges. Snap-along ethnography is an ethnographic method with three core features: (1) participant observation conducted simultaneously offline …
The advent of the citizen expert: Democratising or pushing the boundaries of expertise
This contribution introduces Current Sociology's special subsection 'The advent of the citizen expert: Democratising or pushing the boundaries of expertise?', which deals with the increasing involvement of 'ordinary citizens' as experts into political and social debates. From an integrated perspective that transcends policy fields and societal realms, the special subsection deals with the epistemic and democratic implications of this transformati…
How to make sense of citizen expertise in participatory projects
This article proposes a pragmatist theorising of different repertoires of valuation as an analytical grid to understand how actors of participatory projects assess the value of citizen expert participation. It conducts justification analysis on interview data from 21 projects that engage citizens as lay experts in Finland to illustrate how this analytical approach helps explain the contradicting meanings assigned to the concept as well as the res…
Struggles over Expertise: Practices of Politicization and Depoliticization in Participatory Democracy
There is growing concern among democracy scholars that participatory innovations pose a depoliticizing threat to democracy. This article tackles this concern by providing a more nuanced understanding of how politicization and depoliticization take shape in participatory initiatives. Based on ethnographic research on participatory projects with marginalized people who are invited to act as experiential experts, the article examines how actors limi…
The will to not be empowered (according to your rules)’: Resistance in Finnish participatory social policy
Participation has increasingly become a means and an end for successful and ‘empowering’ social policy. Building on previous governmentality critiques of participatory initiatives, this article investigates practices of resistance in the context of Finnish participatory social policy. I adopt a Foucauldian counter-conducts approach as my lens to study critical speech as a form of resistance in initiatives that invite marginalised people as ‘exper…
Neutral experts or passionate participants? Renegotiating expertise and the right to act in Finnish participatory social policy
This article examines a case of participatory social policy in which former beneficiaries were invited as ‘experts-by-experience’ into Finnish social welfare organisations. It combines a governmentality perspective with the analytical tools of the sociology of engagements to explore as what the projects’ participants are engaged, and how the differing demands made on their ways of being are made to appear as legitimate. The article shows how diff…
Snap-along ethnography: Studying visual politicization in the social media age
In this article, we argue that two significant shifts, namely, the blurring of lives offline and online and the increasing significance of the visual character of these lives, pose new challenges to social science research methods. We propose the application of snap-along ethnography to address these challenges. Snap-along ethnography is an ethnographic method with three core features: (1) participant observation conducted simultaneously offline …
The self in selfies-Conceptualizing the selfie-coordination of marginalized youth with sociology of engagements
This article develops a theory of selfies as reflexive practices of self-coordination. Building on pragmatist sociology of engagements, I conceptualize selfies as digital practices of coordinating with the self in formats that are recognizable for others. This framework allows approaching the self as an act of coordination, simultaneously shaped by, and equipped to subvert the cultural conditions of how we ought to be. As these conditions are inc…
Turning experience into expertise: Technologies of the self in Finnish participatory social policy
This article investigates the micro-level practices of subject-construction in Finnish participatory social policy. Through a governmental ethnography on projects that invite former beneficiaries to become ‘experts-by-experience’ in social welfare organizations, I discern the possibilities for freedom in the participants’ self-construction. By making use of Michel Foucault’s conceptual tools of care of the self and confession, I illustrate how, c…
Making a deal with the devil? Portuguese and Finnish activists’ everyday negotiations on the value of social media
This article explores how young activists in Portugal and Finland negotiate the value of social media in their practices. Considering the near ubiquitous intertwinement of online-offline environments, and its contradictory promises for social movements, we look at these negotiations through the moral principles drawn upon to critique and justify social media practices. Based on ethnographic data from Portuguese climate activists and Finnish menta…
Neutral experts or passionate participants? Renegotiating expertise and the right to act in Finnish participatory social policy
This article examines a case of participatory social policy in which former beneficiaries were invited as ‘experts-by-experience’ into Finnish social welfare organisations. It combines a governmentality perspective with the analytical tools of the sociology of engagements to explore as what the projects’ participants are engaged, and how the differing demands made on their ways of being are made to appear as legitimate. The article shows how diff…
Fame democracy? Social media and visuality-based transformation of the public sphere
We argue that a shift in the underlying values that inform people's actions in the public sphere is taking place in the social media age. From ways of qualifying the public sphere as a space that prioritizes equality, mutual respect and careful deliberation, action that creates visibility, attention and followership is increasingly valued above all else. This change translates into a transformation of the public sphere that requires revisiting th…
How to make sense of citizen expertise in participatory projects
This article proposes a pragmatist theorising of different repertoires of valuation as an analytical grid to understand how actors of participatory projects assess the value of citizen expert participation. It conducts justification analysis on interview data from 21 projects that engage citizens as lay experts in Finland to illustrate how this analytical approach helps explain the contradicting meanings assigned to the concept as well as the res…
Struggles over Expertise: Practices of Politicization and Depoliticization in Participatory Democracy
There is growing concern among democracy scholars that participatory innovations pose a depoliticizing threat to democracy. This article tackles this concern by providing a more nuanced understanding of how politicization and depoliticization take shape in participatory initiatives. Based on ethnographic research on participatory projects with marginalized people who are invited to act as experiential experts, the article examines how actors limi…
The will to not be empowered (according to your rules)’: Resistance in Finnish participatory social policy
Participation has increasingly become a means and an end for successful and ‘empowering’ social policy. Building on previous governmentality critiques of participatory initiatives, this article investigates practices of resistance in the context of Finnish participatory social policy. I adopt a Foucauldian counter-conducts approach as my lens to study critical speech as a form of resistance in initiatives that invite marginalised people as ‘exper…
The advent of the citizen expert: Democratising or pushing the boundaries of expertise
This contribution introduces Current Sociology's special subsection 'The advent of the citizen expert: Democratising or pushing the boundaries of expertise?', which deals with the increasing involvement of 'ordinary citizens' as experts into political and social debates. From an integrated perspective that transcends policy fields and societal realms, the special subsection deals with the epistemic and democratic implications of this transformati…
Bridging ethnography and AI: A reciprocal methodology for studying visual political action
This article proposes a methodological approach to address the analytical challenge of meaningfully studying visual politics in the current abundance of online image data. It proposes a novel methodological process of bridging ethnography and computational methods for analysing visual data in a manner that avoids mixing and blurring the boundaries of the two methods while establishing a continuous interchange between them. The methodological deve…
Beyond recognition: Identification and disidentification in visual resistance to stigma
This article theorizes visual practices of stigma resistance as a continuous play with identification and disidentification. Based on an ethnographic study of young, stigmatized activists' self-images, I argue that the oft-employed concept of recognition only partially captures visual/digital resistance to stigma. In addition to claiming recognition, I show how creating unrecognizability is a key component in subverting stigmatizing categorizatio…
Democratic Self-transformations: Identity, Performance, and the Politics of Becoming
Our selves are characterized by inner multiplicity (Elster 1986). Our raced, classed, gendered, and sexed identities are intersectional (Crenshaw 1991; Wojciechowska 2019). Depending on the context and our state of mind, we are parents, employees, dancers, slackers, victims, perpetrators, players, hosts, explorers, altruists, or egoists. We are all these things at once and consecutively. We change and grow. Our identities are never permanent but …
Plurality in Urban Politics: Conflict and Commonality in Mouffe and Thévenot
In this article we introduce a pragmatist interpretation of agonistic pluralism and develop this into an analytical framework that is applied to the analysis of urban conflicts. In the article, we take stock of contemporary critical and radical urban scholarship, our aim being twofold. First, we substantiate Chantal Mouffe's notion of agonistic pluralism with tools from French pragmatic sociology. We suggest that, in a democracy, plurality emerge…
Turning experience into expertise: Technologies of the self in Finnish participatory social policy
This article investigates the micro-level practices of subject-construction in Finnish participatory social policy. Through a governmental ethnography on projects that invite former beneficiaries to become ‘experts-by-experience’ in social welfare organizations, I discern the possibilities for freedom in the participants’ self-construction. By making use of Michel Foucault’s conceptual tools of care of the self and confession, I illustrate how, c…
Neutral experts or passionate participants? Renegotiating expertise and the right to act in Finnish participatory social policy
This article examines a case of participatory social policy in which former beneficiaries were invited as ‘experts-by-experience’ into Finnish social welfare organisations. It combines a governmentality perspective with the analytical tools of the sociology of engagements to explore as what the projects’ participants are engaged, and how the differing demands made on their ways of being are made to appear as legitimate. The article shows how diff…
The will to not be empowered (according to your rules)’: Resistance in Finnish participatory social policy
Participation has increasingly become a means and an end for successful and ‘empowering’ social policy. Building on previous governmentality critiques of participatory initiatives, this article investigates practices of resistance in the context of Finnish participatory social policy. I adopt a Foucauldian counter-conducts approach as my lens to study critical speech as a form of resistance in initiatives that invite marginalised people as ‘exper…
Struggles over Expertise: Practices of Politicization and Depoliticization in Participatory Democracy
There is growing concern among democracy scholars that participatory innovations pose a depoliticizing threat to democracy. This article tackles this concern by providing a more nuanced understanding of how politicization and depoliticization take shape in participatory initiatives. Based on ethnographic research on participatory projects with marginalized people who are invited to act as experiential experts, the article examines how actors limi…
Snap-along ethnography: Studying visual politicization in the social media age
In this article, we argue that two significant shifts, namely, the blurring of lives offline and online and the increasing significance of the visual character of these lives, pose new challenges to social science research methods. We propose the application of snap-along ethnography to address these challenges. Snap-along ethnography is an ethnographic method with three core features: (1) participant observation conducted simultaneously offline …
The advent of the citizen expert: Democratising or pushing the boundaries of expertise
This contribution introduces Current Sociology's special subsection 'The advent of the citizen expert: Democratising or pushing the boundaries of expertise?', which deals with the increasing involvement of 'ordinary citizens' as experts into political and social debates. From an integrated perspective that transcends policy fields and societal realms, the special subsection deals with the epistemic and democratic implications of this transformati…
How to make sense of citizen expertise in participatory projects
This article proposes a pragmatist theorising of different repertoires of valuation as an analytical grid to understand how actors of participatory projects assess the value of citizen expert participation. It conducts justification analysis on interview data from 21 projects that engage citizens as lay experts in Finland to illustrate how this analytical approach helps explain the contradicting meanings assigned to the concept as well as the res…
Democratic Self-transformations: Identity, Performance, and the Politics of Becoming
Our selves are characterized by inner multiplicity (Elster 1986). Our raced, classed, gendered, and sexed identities are intersectional (Crenshaw 1991; Wojciechowska 2019). Depending on the context and our state of mind, we are parents, employees, dancers, slackers, victims, perpetrators, players, hosts, explorers, altruists, or egoists. We are all these things at once and consecutively. We change and grow. Our identities are never permanent but …
The Politics of Becoming: Introduction to the Symposium
Hans Asenbaum's open-access book The Politics of Becoming: Anonymity and Democracy in the Digital Age takes on some of the biggest questions in feminist and radical democratic theory. It asks, how we should understand who we are, and what implications our answer to that question has for democracy
Fame democracy? Social media and visuality-based transformation of the public sphere
We argue that a shift in the underlying values that inform people's actions in the public sphere is taking place in the social media age. From ways of qualifying the public sphere as a space that prioritizes equality, mutual respect and careful deliberation, action that creates visibility, attention and followership is increasingly valued above all else. This change translates into a transformation of the public sphere that requires revisiting th…
The self in selfies-Conceptualizing the selfie-coordination of marginalized youth with sociology of engagements
This article develops a theory of selfies as reflexive practices of self-coordination. Building on pragmatist sociology of engagements, I conceptualize selfies as digital practices of coordinating with the self in formats that are recognizable for others. This framework allows approaching the self as an act of coordination, simultaneously shaped by, and equipped to subvert the cultural conditions of how we ought to be. As these conditions are inc…
Plurality in Urban Politics: Conflict and Commonality in Mouffe and Thévenot
In this article we introduce a pragmatist interpretation of agonistic pluralism and develop this into an analytical framework that is applied to the analysis of urban conflicts. In the article, we take stock of contemporary critical and radical urban scholarship, our aim being twofold. First, we substantiate Chantal Mouffe's notion of agonistic pluralism with tools from French pragmatic sociology. We suggest that, in a democracy, plurality emerge…
Youth Participation and Democracy: Cultures of Doing Society
Bridging ethnography and AI: A reciprocal methodology for studying visual political action
This article proposes a methodological approach to address the analytical challenge of meaningfully studying visual politics in the current abundance of online image data. It proposes a novel methodological process of bridging ethnography and computational methods for analysing visual data in a manner that avoids mixing and blurring the boundaries of the two methods while establishing a continuous interchange between them. The methodological deve…
Making a deal with the devil? Portuguese and Finnish activists’ everyday negotiations on the value of social media
This article explores how young activists in Portugal and Finland negotiate the value of social media in their practices. Considering the near ubiquitous intertwinement of online-offline environments, and its contradictory promises for social movements, we look at these negotiations through the moral principles drawn upon to critique and justify social media practices. Based on ethnographic data from Portuguese climate activists and Finnish menta…
Beyond recognition: Identification and disidentification in visual resistance to stigma
This article theorizes visual practices of stigma resistance as a continuous play with identification and disidentification. Based on an ethnographic study of young, stigmatized activists' self-images, I argue that the oft-employed concept of recognition only partially captures visual/digital resistance to stigma. In addition to claiming recognition, I show how creating unrecognizability is a key component in subverting stigmatizing categorizatio…
Bedtime for democracy? Europe's political and cultural fault lines
Evolving with care: Fostering openness and diversity at EJCPS
Editorial, issue 1/2025 of the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology
Beyond the time of monsters: Keeping cultural and political sociology alive in a fragmenting world
Editorial. Issue 2/2025 of the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology
Radical Pluralization: Mobilizing the Multiple Self in Democratic Engagements
For collective creativity, bold claims and discomfort: Generative technologies and sociological research
Layered images: Politicizing climate emergency on visual social media
This article theorizes how social media images politicize. We argue that layering —digitally assembling diverse visual elements—is a key practice of visual politicization. Beyond just a technique, we conceptualize layering as a form of remix, a cultural tool that can be used to politicize: to render issues recognizable and actionable. To show how layering works, we analyze over 500 Instagram images related to climate activism. Adopting Annette Ma…
The labour of hope: Sociological practice and the public sphere in an age of democratic in communicability
Non peer reviewed
The emotional turn and the aesthetic challenges of sociological inquiry: Writing emotions in a time of upheaval
Sociologists began to reckon seriously with emotions in the later part of the 1970s. Theoretical propositions such as emotional labour and feeling rules (Hochschild, 1979, 1983) illuminated how our feelings emerge and make meaning in a social context (Bericat, 2016). Asserting that ‘what we feel is fully as important to the outcome of social affairs as what we think or do’ (Hochschild, 1990, p. 117), sociologists of emotion further showed how emo…
Gilded scars: Constructing the proudly vulnerable political subject
Recent feminist scholarship has redefined vulnerability as the shared ontological characteristic of all (human) beings. While this move has enabled reconceptualizing vulnerability as the shared commonality of humanity, it has also brought forward a question on whether and how this resignified concept might be employable as a source of political agency. In this article, we offer a typology of three distinct ways in which political agency based on …
Political science (17 works) · Politics (17 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Law (10 works) · Democracy (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Public relations (7 works) · Ethnography (6 works) · Media studies (6 works)