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SPARG

Space and Political Agency Research Group

People

SPARG researchers

Jouni Häkli

Professor (Team leader of SPARG)
  • Tampere University
  • Faculty of Management and Business
  • I direct the University of Tampere part of the RELATE Centre of Excellence. My research lies at the intersection of political geography and global and transnational sociology, with focus on the study of political subjectivity, political agency, forced migration and transnationalization. I am particularly interested in the political agency of people in vulnerable positions. I have also studied discourses and practices of territoriality, borders and national identities, urban planning and civic participation, and the methodology of human geography.
  • jouni.hakli@tuni.fi
  • +358401973664
  • LinkedIn
  • ResearchGate

Mikko Joronen

Academy Research Fellow, Academy of Finland (Docent in Political Geography )

Inka Kaakinen

Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Resarcher (on leave)

Kirsi Pauliina Kallio

Professor (fixed term)
  • Tampere University
  • Faculty of Management and Business
  • As professor of regional studies, I provide teaching and supervision in the Politics of the Environment and Regions study program, which is part of the administrative studies Master’s Degree. In research, I have developed an interdisciplinary scholarly profile, falling loosely under the umbrella of critical political geography. My current research focuses on refugeeness and humanitarian borders, and lived citizenship in the city-regional context. My previous research is largely related to political geographies of childhood and youth, as I have explored the development of political agency (spatial and political socialization and subject formation), how people enact politics during the early years of life (mundane politics), and how children and young people are understood as political persons (child and youth policy, youthful citizenship, children’s rights).
  • kirsipauliina.kallio@tuni.fi
  • +358401904025
  • ResearchGate

Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto

University Lecturer

James Riding

Postdoctoral Researcher
  • I am a cultural geographer interested in finding new ways to creatively and critically narrate geographies of place, region, and landscape through oral history, ethnographic exploration and performative interventions in a variety of spaces. In my research, I employ a range of methodological approaches and fieldwork techniques to describe regions, places and landscapes, and their inhabitants, drawing from performance studies, memory studies, and heritage studies, as well as poetry and literature. Much of the grounded fieldwork I have undertaken is located in estranged and difficult spaces such as former conflict zones and seeks to understand post-conflict societies through the writing of places and people, from the trenches of northern France to the once besieged city of Sarajevo. My recent publications deal with questions of trauma, memory, and nostalgia in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina, exploring the post-socialist ethno-nationalist politics of the state, cultural heritage and memorial sites, spaces of activism and resistance, and the everyday spaces of the post-conflict city.
  • james.riding@tuni.fi
  • +447921573656
  • ORCID: 0000-0002-7632-5819
  • Twitter
  • ResearchGate

Derek Ruez

Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher
  • Tampere University
  • Faculty of Management and Business
  • I work at the intersections of political, urban, and queer geography. My Ph.D. research examined the politics of sexuality and race in the experiences of racialized queer migrants living in Sydney, Australia, and I am currently researching the possibilities and limits of emerging invocations of compassion in urban politics, planning, and governance. I also work on conceptual questions and problems around difference, politics, and encounter in a plural and uneven world. Across all my research is a persisting concern to bring analytics emphasizing plurality and multiplicity together with those focused on unevenness and systematic critique in new ways.
  • derek.ruez@tuni.fi
  • +358504377006
  • Twitter
  • ResearchGate

Isabel Meier

Postdoctoral researcher
  • Tampere University
  • Faculty of Management and Business
  • I am a political sociologist whose research interests are broadly centred around migration, asylum, bordering, urban life, community, with a particular focus on collaborative ethnographic methods. I hold a PhD from the University of East London, where I was a recipient of the Excellence Scholarship. Drawing on my own experience as activist, my PhD thesis brought together scholarship on activism, bordering and asylum, and affect and emotion to explore how asylum seekers negotiate political possibilities and affective bordering practices. My post-doctoral research explores further how bordering is unfolding in the 21st century and how people most affected by these practices keep finding spaces of political possibility, and through collaborative ways can report their everyday realities.
  • isabel.meier@tuni.fi
  • ResearchGate

SPARG Doctoral Researchers

Tuomas Lammi

Doctoral Student

Sami Lind

Doctoral Student
  • Tampere University
  • Faculty of Management and Business
  • Unemployment, everyday life and experience of place: The everyday spatiality of academic unemployed
  • sami.lind@uta.fi

Eeva Rinne

University Instructor (Doctoral Student)
  • Tampere University
  • Faculty of Management and Business
  • Multicultural world view as communicated by Finnish teaching materials and experienced by pupils
  • eeva.rinne@tuni.fi
  • +358503186047

Miliza Ryöti

Doctoral Student
  • Tampere University
  • Faculty of Management and Business
  • Mapping social segregation: From indicators and visual rhetoric to policy making
  • miliza.ryoti@tuni.fi

Former SPARG researchers (affiliates)

Pia Bäcklund

University Lecturer

Robert Imre

University Researcher

Sara Koopman

Assistant Professor

Riikka Korkiamäki

Associate Professor

Zsuzsa Millei

Associate Professor

Elisa Pascucci

Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher

Pauliina Raento

Secretary General
  • Suomen tiedekustantajien liitto ry

Olli Ruokolainen

Senior Researcher
  • Center for Cultural Policy Research (CUPORE)

Elina Stenvall

Development Planner
  • Sos-Lapsikylä