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Recent studies on boys and young men’s heterosexual practices point in contradictory directions. On the one hand, boys and young men seem to be placing less value on “hard”, overtly aggressive masculinity and compulsive heterosexuality, in keeping with their adoption of more egalitarian attitudes in their sexual relationships. On the other hand, the hegemonic masculine notions that associate “real” men with sexual prowess persist as well. In this article, we argue that this contradiction indicates careful (re)calibration in doing respectable heteromasculinities. We draw on a small-scale qualitative study located in Helsinki, Finland, in illuminating how cis-gendered boys and young men with less privileged backgrounds construct their heteromasculinities as respectable, which requires context-specific balancing between distancing themselves from and embracing hegemonic notions of manhood. Through this balancing, the boys and young men reconfigure not necessary the substance but the style of respectable heteromasculinity; therefore contributing to sustaining masculine hegemony by attuning it according to the claims of the “#MeToo era”.

This intervention argues for renewed engagements with post-foundational political theory (PFPT) within political geography. We feel that post-foundational political geography may be on the cusp of becoming consolidated as a distinct and expansive approach to political geographic scholarship, but we argue that reductionist and binary caricatures of its central distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ must be avoided for it to reach its full potential. To this end, we suggest that ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ need to be considered as more ‘enmeshed’ than they have often been represented. We write as four political geographers and will, each in our own ways, highlight how an ‘enmeshed’ approach to PFPT can better translate its conceptual interventions into political geographic research whilst facilitating productive encounters with the broader worlds of critical geographic inquiry. publishedVersion Peer reviewed

This article uses an ethnographic approach to study citizens’ participation in the context of participatory practices organized in the framework of cultural policy of the European Union. It focuses on one EU policy action, European Heritage Label (EHL) and one cultural heritage site that has received this label. The research data was collected through participant observation and interviews with young people who participated in the activities organized on and by the site. This article asks: what meanings the participants give to participation. By analysing the participants’ experiences of the site and their conceptions of participation, I develop the notion of ‘polyspatial agency’. The ethnography of participation introduced in the article enables recognizing diverse conceptions of participation and agencies as well as the possibilities and problems related to participation in the micro-level realities of the sites, thus deepening and diversifying the understanding of participation, EU policies and participatory governance. peerReviewed

This paper elaborates the notion of ungovernability as an irresolvable condition of living. It begins by identifying three distinct modes of ungovernability in current geographical work on Palestine: ungovernability as a failure to govern; as a rationale for governing; and as a technique of governing. To this we develop a further conceptualisation of ungovernability as a condition of living that, firstly, remains irreducible to the strategic domain of governing. Secondly, we argue, by drawing on prevalent geographical work on vulnerability and woundedness, that ungovernability constitutes an irresolvable origin of governing that, on the one hand, makes governing incapable of sustaining what it claims for itself, while on the other, names the starting point of a critical analysis of power. By placing the irresolvable ungovernability at the centre of analysis we offer, through examples drawn from our fieldwork in Palestine, an approach that does not reduce life at the outset to cycles of domination-resistance but instead approaches life and its spaces through those ways they remain irreducible to, and thus ungovernable for various forms of governing. publishedVersion Peer reviewed

Summary The turn of the twentieth century in Finland saw an increasing number of popular articles and books on health, which were published within the broader framework of ‘social hygiene’ and aimed at children, young people and their families. This article examines how young people articulated concerns about their own mental health in the context of these campaigns to improve social hygiene. Based on an extensive body of original sources consisting of medical advisory material and letters written by the young, the study reveals how young people saw themselves in this health context—especially when writing about their ‘nerves’ or ‘nervousness’. Drawing on more recent methodological investigations in the history of childhood, this study adds the much-needed perspective of the young people themselves as subjects experiencing these problems, to counterbalance the otherwise exclusively expert discourses on the subject of mental hygiene.

While many aspects of state-diaspora relations have been explored, the role that youth play in state-led diaspora outreach remains under-researched in the literature. Democratic and nondemocratic states alike, however, actively target diaspora youth for a variety of reasons. In this article, we explore how and why a non-democratic state like Turkey engages with its perceived diaspora youth by focusing on the AKP regimes’ recent engagement within its European diasporas as a case study. We argue that the AKP regime has proactively bolstered transnational youth engagement policies over the last decade with the goal of creating a loyal diaspora that will serve the regime in the long run. We show that selected diaspora youth are not only empowered, but also co-opted and mobilized by the regime to ensure continued influence in the diaspora – ultimately to incorporate them into authoritarian consolidation efforts back home and to turn them into assets that lobby host country governments.

AbstractExamination of northern Finnish postmedieval funerary attire and coffins reveals culturally constructed sensory experiences and emotions of the individuals who took care of preparing dead children for burial. Based on historical sources, the attire and coffins for small children were generally made by adolescent godparents, whereas dressing and handling of the dead bodies were left to mature women. Because of their beliefs, parents rarely took care of these duties. Archaeological funerary remains provide an avenue through which to explore the sensory experiences of social groups with strongly held religious beliefs and conceptions regarding the dead and the deceased. Common features in the burials allow the interpretation of emotional patterns and collective memories of contemporary people from three starting points: sleep and eternal life, the innocence of children, and coping mechanisms dealing with child deaths.

This study examines Nordic economic convergence from the sixteenth to twentieth century respective of the economic leaders, in effect the UK before 1914 and USA thereafter. The paper uses a novel approach of combining the analysis of both GDP and wages. The examination of real GDP per capita suggests that there was a catch-up process in play, both with the economic leaders and among the Nordic states, from the early nineteenth century onwards. However, the examination of the adjusted silver wages suggests convergence among the Nordic economies by the end of the eighteenth century. Therefore, we argue, no single Nordic Model emerged from these development patterns, even though the Nordic states today do have striking similarities. Furthermore, they diverged from the West European growth path until the twentieth century, thus they were a part of the Little Divergence at Europe’s other peripheries. The world wars and other crises delayed the full impacts of the convergence process until the latter part of the twentieth century. peerReviewed