Space, Justice and Everyday Democracy: Urban Marginality and The Limits of Language
The aim of the project is to study everyday democracy and the interlinked questions of socio-spatial justice. Everyday democracy offers an alternative perceptive to the ideas of active citizenship and top-down participation.
The sites of everyday democracy are homes, park benches, “forest pubs” and care homes, where the views and opinions of the residents often stay invisible or become silenced.
By studying e.g. elderly people, neurominorities, and the marginalized residents in cities, we ask:
- What are the societal, embodied, and cultural processes that cause marginalization among elderly and/or vulnerable people as regards everyday democracy and participation?
- How do the limits of language and argumentation create obstacles to societal participation and how could these obstacles be lowered?
- What kind of potential can be recognized in the everyday lives of elderly people and urban marginals and how this potentiality and its utilization could be supported? and
- How do the results of the study reframe the concepts of everyday democracy and spatial, social, and digital justice?
The research material will be collected from Turku, Helsinki, and Tampere, and it will be analyzed with various methods: a postal questionnaire, document data, in-depth interviews, walking interviews, voluntary ethnography, and textual analysis will guarantee a multidimensional interpretation of the topics of everyday politics, democracy and justice.
Funding source
Kone Foundation (2022-2025)