Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG)

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 are involved in the Research Program on the Politics of Space and the Environment (POLEIS) in the Faculty of Management.

In general, our theoretical and empirical research aims to develop new perspectives to understand political subjectivity and subject formation, and on this basis the conditions of possibility of political agency, transnational political engagement, popular geopolitics and place attachment, and local governance and participation.

We consider these processes deeply implicated in socio-spatial contexts that should be understood beyond simple dichotomies such as topographical/topological or relational/territorial. Our key analytical lens bridging these conceptual positions is subjectivity, opening at once a range of questions concerning the forces of (spatial) socialization, modalities of space, agency, identity, alterity, domination, and resistance.

Reseach in SPARG is organized through four research streams:

1. State and the spaces of political agency aims to understand the social dynamism of transnationalization and demonstrate the effects that transnational fields have on social and political practices.
2. Citizenship and networks of governance seeks to analyze how administrative territories are defined, and what is the citizen's political leverage under increasingly de-territorial decision making.
3. Forced displacement, humanitarian migration and the experience of place seeks to analyze humanitarian migration from the points of view of people in vulnerable positions.
4. Spatial socialization and subject formation analyzes the political subjectivity embedded in people's involvement in matters they consider important.

Jouni Häkli

Professor, leader of the group

jouni.hakli [at] uta.fi

+358 40 197 3664