Zines beyond a means: crafting new research process - commentary to Valli

In this commentary I engage with Chiara Valli's creative zine-making in Bushwick, NYC. In keeping with the spirit of zines, this piece offers a series of (not always connected!) reactions, questions, feelings which address the key question raised by Chiara: how can research become more inclusive? Chiara provides a wonderful reflection in her commentary and I conclude by engaging on the questions of consent that she got me thinking about.

The framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the Fridays for Future Movement in Finland – commentary to Huttunen and Albrecht

This is a commentary to the article “The framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the Fridays for Future Movement in Finland” by Janette Huttunen and Eerika Albrecht. In the piece I reflect on the analysis and results of this interesting research, focusing in particular on adult’s depoliticization of children's protest and the potential collective social and political impact of the Fridays for Future movement for youth.

Participatory dissemination: bridging in-depth interviews, participation, and creative visual methods through Interview-Based Zine-Making (IBZM)

In this article, I make the case for an underexplored research practice – participatory dissemination – and reflectively introduce a new research method, IBZM (Interview-Based Zine-Making), which I developed in my fieldwork research on the gentrifying neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn, in New York City. Participatory dissemination is a practice that engages research participants in the interpretation of preliminary research findings, and through art-based methods, leads to the coproduction of visual outputs and research communication for diversified audiences, especially those beyond solely academic readers. Participatory dissemination has received little attention within academic debates thus far. The paper addresses this gap in the literature by outlining the rationale and potential for incorporating participatory processes within research dissemination, even where so-called traditional (non- or less-participatory) research methods are used. IBZM follows the technique of zine-making (that is, the practice of cutting, rearranging, and creatively pasting printed materials in a new pamphlet), but instead of using media texts and pictures as raw materials, IBZM works with transcribed texts from researcher-conducted interviews. The aim is to let the research participants (zine-makers) engage with the perspectives of the interviewees and find assonances, disagreements, and connections with their own thoughts. The output is a collectively produced zine to be further disseminated. IBZM offers a means of combining traditional detached research methods, such as interviews, with participatory and creative/visual research methods. As such, participatory dissemination can be helpful in bridging literatures and debates on participatory and traditional research methods, providing new avenues for researchers working primarily with the latter to incorporate participatory elements into their research process and outputs.

A comprehensive spatial model for historical travel effort - a case study in Finland

Contributing to multidisciplinary studies of human population history, this paper presents an analysis chain to comprehensively model the historical travel environment in Finland, based on a study of spatial patterns of overall accessibility within the country. We created a spatial historical travel environment model over the whole country using high-quality terrain and landscape spatial data, combined with information from historical sources that characterize the landscape in terms of travel effort given the environmental and human-related factors current up until the late 19th century. Spatial analyses of historical travel effort based on the travel environment model indicate travel speeds for different parts of the country, ranging from 0.6 to 5.3 km/h. This is nearly a tenfold range, potentially highly significant for studies relying on historical travel effort and contacts between population groups in Finland. The results show that the overall travel effort in southern Finland is significantly smaller than in the north: almost all areas in southern Finland have average travel speeds above 3 km/h, whereas the average travel speeds below 2.5 km/h are typical in the north. A more detailed study using random 100 km transects highlights the variability of the least-cost routes in different landscapes and between different source data combinations in each cost surface. The paper identifies great potential in combining the existing spatial data archives with archaeological, linguistic, and genetic data in a GIS analysis, to study the travel effort and its impact on the observed spatial patterns of languages, genetic traits, and archaeological findings.

The framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the Fridays for Future Movement in Finland

The Fridays for Future (FFF) movement is a major climate movement on a global scale, calling for systemic change and demanding politicians act on their responsibilities. In this paper, we present and analyze original findings from a case study on the FFF movement in Finland, at a watershed moment for young climate activism. We explore the representations of young people’s environmental citizenship within the framings of the FFF movement, using an environ-mental citizenship framework analysis of the Finnish news media and Twitter discussions. We identified three frames within the media debate on the school strikes: the sustainable lifestyle frame, which focuses on the individual aspects of environmental citizenship, the active youth frame, which focuses on justifications of youth participation in politics, and the school attendance frame, which is concerned about the young people’s strike action. Our results explore the many aspects of environmental citizenship that young people express in the FFF movement. We reflect on the dominance of adult voices in the framing of this historic movement of young people for action on climate change. Our analysis contributes to a step change in the study of this important global movement, which is shaping the emergence of young people as active citizens in Finland and around the world. We argue that the FFF movement is shaping young people’s perceptions of active citizenship, and we advocate a youth-centred focus on the collective action and justice demands of young people.

Changing thoughts, changing future – commentary to Huttunen and Albrecht

In response to Huttunen and Albrecht’s article in this issue of Fennia we want to focus our commentary on the two key-findings regarding the media representation of environmental citizenship in the Finnish Fridays for Future (FFF) movement: individualised lifestyle choices and a dominant adult voice. This commentary dovetails into the authors’ critical reflection on the insufficiency of individual action alone in addressing environmental issues and the potential risks of a dominant adult voice for youth agency. By doing so, we will also touch on broader ideas of change within the FFF and climate change framing and aspects of (intergenerational) climate justice.

Societal impact through lingual plurality

Recent tendency towards internationalization of academic publishing has reinforced the dominant role of English language in scholarly debates and discussions. The monolinguistic development has led to several drawbacks: it risks to sustain global inequalities in knowledge production, limits the access of non-native English speakers to international publishing, and disengages place-specific knowledge from national and local contexts, not only in scholarly communities but also among decision-makers and within the civil society. In response, Fennia seeks ways towards multicultural publishing, including lingual plurality. The journal has a long history in multilingual publishing yet, in its present form – following international standards of journal publishing, with modest resources – its content is solely in English. The editorial briefly introduces this linguistic development, since 1889, and presents ideas for further activities. Fennia’s current multilingual strategy emphasizes the popularization of the peer reviewed content in different languages, which is implemented through collaboration with the online popular science forum Versus. This serves two ends in broadening the audience, beyond the academy and the primarily English-speaking world. The collaboration of Fennia and Versus has already yielded multilingual popular science articles accessible in the contexts that the research concerns and in the societies where the authors work. Based on positive experiences and feedback, we are eager to continue similar efforts promoting linguistic plurality. As achieving these aims requires notable extra effort – from authors, editors, and the publisher – we call for support and commitment from the funding agencies and academic institutions that we rely on, along with the scholarly community whose voluntary work forms the basis of all activities in Fennia.

An ‘inconvenient truth’? The problem of recognition of the political message – commentary to Huttunen and Albrecht

This commentary reflects on Huttunen and Albrecht’s exploration of the representations of young people’s environmental citizenship within the framing of the Fridays for Future (FFF) movement in the Finnish news media and on Twitter. In particular, it problematises the issue of the recognition of young people’s agency by their adult contemporaries, at a watershed moment for global environmental activism. It argues that although young people actively bring the climate change in the forefront of political discussion aiming to shape how environmental responsibility is being understood, the success of the movement will largely depend on the acknowledgement of their political message by its intended recipients; namely their adult contemporaries and politicians.

Communicating back: reflections on IBZM as participatory dissemination – commentary on Valli

dissemination as explored by Valli in this issue of Fennia. It discusses three main aspects of the approach. The first aspect relates to IBZM as being dissemination of result or an additional research method. The second focuses on the entanglements between representation and the potential tensions and conflicts that may arise when the workshop participants read interview transcripts from other members of the community. The third aspect focuses on interpretation and how to deal with the thin line between representation of research participants’ understandings of interview transcripts and the researcher’s interpretation and analysis of these.

Discourse in a modern Arctic: can we supplant sovereignty? – commentary to Pawliw, Berthold and Lasserre

In this reflection I contemplate on the nature of claiming sovereignty over the Arctic through the political discourse, as used in the Harper administration. I question the mobilization of discourses to substantiate claims and lasting jurisdiction over the Arctic as the true nature of reconstructing narratives. In particular, whether the truer questions are how and why we seek sovereignty over areas of wilderness and why discourse is needed at all to legitimise the goodness of such claiming.