Ph.D. Research Projects

Doctoral Researcher Mila Seppälä

This dissertation project examines how the movement for gun control and gun violence prevention has evolved and changed in the 21st century. The starting point for the research is the watershed movement of the March For Our Lives (MFOL) demonstrations to end gun violence that were organized after the Parkland, Florida high school shooting in 2018. The marches became the largest student-led protests since the Vietnam War.

Three research questions have guided the dissertation:

• 1) How are young people making sense of the issue of gun violence and what can be done about it?
• 2) How do young people share and communicate their understandings of gun violence and their visions for gun violence prevention in the current media landscape?
• 3) How has evolving understandings of gender, feminism and the intersections of class and race impacted the way advocates perceive the problem of gun violence and what is effective activism?

The four peer-reviewed articles of the dissertation draw on materials collected from various online sources as well as fieldwork conducted in Austin, Texas including interviews, written testimonials and protest event observations. The project approaches the study from a transdisciplinary perspective, bringing together theoretical and methodological insights from North American Studies, social movement studies, feminist security studies and ethnographic research.

More information: mila.t.seppala[at]utu.fi

• Doctoral Program of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Turku, 2021-2023
• American-Scandinavian Foundation, 2021-2022
• ASLA-Fulbright Pre-Doctoral Research Fellows, 2021-2022

Doctoral Researcher Jaakko Dickman

This dissertation examines the visual politics of online post-left communities in the United States. Departing from mainstream politics, the so-called post-left is an internally fractious political movement influenced by Marxist ideas and occupied with constructing radically new social systems that reject current social forms and institutions. By examining the visual materials in post-left online spaces, the dissertation analyzes how the collectively produced visual materials are seeking to reinvent U.S. society by pushing the boundaries of political imagination. The dissertation is particularly interested in visual conceptions of utopian and dystopian futures. The research seeks to answer how post-left utopias generate and sustain online counterpublics, how the utopias seek to reinvent the U.S. political system, and what the epistemological possibilities of the post-left utopias for the democratic process are.

The aim of the dissertation is to produce new information on the previously understudied post-left communities and to study modern forms of political participation in digital environments. The research conceptualizes post-left communities as “counterpublics” which promote and develop oppositional communication practices. Contextualized within the theoretical frameworks of aesthetic politics and radical democracy, the research considers visual culture to be of pivotal importance to political research because it gives us information on how people understand and construct the societies they live in. The study approaches the visual materials through a mixed methods approach, comprising visual, rhetorical, and network analysis.

More information: jaakko.k.dickman[at]utu.fi