Sara Sivonen
New Research Alert: Tolerants versus traditionalists: making sense of online conversations on the new Finnish flagship library Oodi
INVENT members Riie Heikkilä and Ossi Sirkka from the Finnish team have published a new article in the International Journal of Cultural Policy. The article builds on data scraping research conducted by INVENT and its abstract reads as follows: Public libraries play a unique role in preserving, maintaining, and distributing cultural capital freely. Currently, public libraries are said to be undergoing
New research alert: An empirical book on cultural non-participation published
A new book “Understanding Cultural Non-Participation in an Egalitarian Context” by INVENT team member Riie Heikkilä has been published in the Palgrave Studies in Cultural Studies series. The book uses qualitative data from individual interviews and focus groups collected and explores the questions of cultural non-participation in Finland. The point of departure for the book is the much-studied relationship between
INVENT research presented at a Bourdieu symposium at the University of Helsinki
The Finnish INVENT team members participated in a seminar “Back to Bourdieu(?): A Symposium” held on 12 December at the University of Helsinki. The event and presentations discussed the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu’s work on sociology, especially from the Finnish perspective. In his presentation, INVENT team member Semi Purhonen discussed the influence of Bourdieu in current cultural stratification research and
New research alert: What is cultural non-participation and has it changed significantly over the course of a decade?
It is a commonly shared view that “culture is good for you”. In cultural policy, there has long been concern about citizens that do not participate in any cultural activities, such as visiting museums or concerts. Cultural non-participation has often been treated as a problem – even though non-participation is actually very common. An explanation for the low rates of
New research alert: Upcoming article on personalization and authority in European cultural journalism
Is cultural journalism becoming more personalized and subjective? One of the key debates of contemporary cultural sociology concerns the alleged fragmentation of cultural authority. In an era of crisis of legacy media and normative authorities and, at the same time, strong individualization, who decides what can be defined as valuable culture? Quality journalism covering culture is a good place to
Upcoming article on the relationship between cultural participation and political orientation
Finnish INVENT Team members Sara Sivonen and Semi Purhonen will be publishing an article called “Politics and cultural participation: The associations of party preference and conservativeness with high and popular cultural participation in Finland” in Sosiologia later this autumn (article in Finnish). The article examines the association between politics and cultural participation in contemporary Finland from the perspective of change
New Finnish project on the impact of algorithms on the distribution of cultural capital
Finnish INVENT team member Riie Heikkilä’s research project “Redistribution of Cultural Capital in the Era of Algorithms: A Comparative Study of Finnish Libraries” received a four-year funding from the Finnish KONE Foundation and has launched in March 2021. The project focuses on the effects of algorithms and recommendation systems and takes its empirical comparative case from Finnish libraries, of which
Article on Socio-Political Polarization of Media Usage in Finland
Semi Purhonen, Adrian Leguina and Riie Heikkilä published an article in the Nordicom journal (see full Open Access version at https://www.sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2021-0029). The article uses nationally representative data from Finland from two longitudinal and comparable data sets from 2007 and 2018 and shows a stability in the social stratification of media use which organizes itself around the same axes (Internet use/non-use and legitimate media use/non-use) in both years. The article demonstrates that new
Presentation of Invent project at Tampere University
The multiplicity of the understandings of culture and why it matters for cultural policy and politics Finnish team members Semi Purhonen, Riie Heikkilä, Ossi Sirkka and Sara Sivonen gave a presentation titled “The multiplicity of the understandings of culture and why it matters for cultural policy and politics” in the Sociology Research Seminar at Tampere University 11th of May. The
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870691