Background
Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG) is a multidisciplinary research group specializing in the study of intersections between politics, space and agency. Between 2014 and 2019 SPARG was part of the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Research on the Relational and Territorial Politics of Bordering, Identities and Transnationalization (RELATE)
SPARG aims to generate high quality fundamental research with both academic and applied impact. Our work is organized through four research streams with flexible boundaries, allowing us to collaborate across them. We collaborate with the Research Program on the Politics of Space and the Environment (POLEIS).
SPARG’s research develops critical perspectives on political subjectivity and the situated conditions of political agency in diverse socio‑spatial contexts. Our work examines how agency emerges through everyday practices, embodied and affective encounters, and material and environmental relations shaped by historically layered power. Empirically, SPARG research has addressed youth politics, forced migration and displacement, bordering and surveillance, settler colonialism, environmental and atmospheric violence, and translocal and post‑conflict societies. We conceptualize space as lived, contested, and processual, resisting reductive binaries. Subjectivity serves as our core analytical lens, enabling analysis of how political agency is constrained, reworked, and enacted through governance, domination, resistance, dignity, and refusal.
Reseach in SPARG is organized around four interrelated research streams
Spatialities of Political Agency
This stream examines how political agency is constituted through lived, relational, and territorial spatial configurations in everyday life. Rather than treating political action as located at predefined scales, the research explores how agency emerges through the entanglement of local, translocal, and global processes. Particular attention is given to mundane, affective, and material practices through which political relations are enacted and sustained. The stream seeks to move beyond scalar and spatial dichotomies by conceptualizing political agency as processual and situated, shaped by the interplay of topological relations (connections, proximities, intensities) and topographical settings (sites, borders, territories). Recent publications explore how political agency is constituted through relational, affective, and materially embedded spatial arrangements including mundane and atmospheric forms of politics, environmental exposure, surveillance, and everyday encounters.
Governance, Citizenship, and Contested Political Participation
This stream focuses on contemporary forms of governance and their effects on political subjectivity, citizenship, and participation. Research examines how governmental practices produce spatial, juridical, and moral frames that enable some forms of political action while constraining others. Empirically, the stream engages contexts such as migration governance, post- and ongoing conflict situations, surveillance, and uneven regimes of rights and recognition. A central concern is how people politicize issues and act as political subjects under shifting and often precarious conditions of governance, and how political leverage, voice, and agency are negotiated within and against governing arrangements. Recent work foregrounds how bordering, surveillance, colonial power, and migration governance produce differentiated political subjects, while also tracing how people negotiate leverage, dignity, and resistance within and against governing frameworks.
Forced Displacement, Belonging, and the Politics of Place
This stream investigates forced displacement and humanitarian migration through the lenses of political agency, spatial belonging, and memory. Research addresses how displaced people, including asylum seekers, children and youth, undocumented migrants, and other minoritized groups, engage in political life through performative, embodied, and everyday practices. The stream foregrounds questions of place-making, attachment, loss, and endurance, as well as the conditions under which political agency becomes possible in situations marked by vulnerability, temporal uncertainty, and structural violence. It highlights displacement not only as a condition of exclusion but also as a site of political creativity and struggle. Recent publications emphasize forced displacement as a condition that reconfigures political agency, subjectivity, and place attachment, examining how displaced people engage in political life through performative, embodied, and narrative practices, place‑making, memory, and everyday politics under conditions of uncertainty and violence.
Spatial Socialization, Subjectivity, and Political Becoming
This stream explores how political subjectivities are formed through processes of spatial socialization and lived involvement in matters perceived as politically meaningful. Political subjectivity is approached as intersubjective, embodied, relational, and spatially situated, emerging through encounters with institutions, environments, others, and events. Empirical work focuses on formative moments and contexts, such as childhood and youth, displacement, environmental exposure, and everyday governance, where people become attentive to their geosocial and political positionality. The stream examines how such moments generate capacities for agency, critique, care, resistance, and responsibility. Recent publications focus on encounters through which people become politically attentive to their geosocial positionality, enabling agency, ethical engagement, care, refusal, and critique.