January 15, 2014: 14:00-16:00
Johanna Sumiala (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Youth Street Politics in the Media/on the Street
University of Westminster, Harrow campus, room A6.08

Registration at latest until Sunday, Jan 12, to [log in to unmask]

Abstract
In recent years, the issue of boundary has attracted considerable 
interest among scholars of cultural and media geography, anthropology, 
cultural studies, sociology and media studies (see e.g. Soja 2010; 
Massey 2005; Dikec 2007; Fassin 2010). In this presentation I will 
examine urban youth life from the perspective of crossing of different 
physical, virtual and symbolic boundaries. To follow Malone’s (2002: 2) 
insight: ”All boundaries, whether national, global or simply street 
names on a road map are socially constructed. They are as much the 
products of society as are other social relations that mark the 
landscape. For this reason, boundaries matter. They construct our sense 
of identity in the places we inhabit and they organize our social space 
through geographies of power.”
The crossing of different boundaries has become a routinized practice of 
everyday life for many young people. McLuhan’s famous idea on media as 
an extension of man is truer than ever as young people connect 
themselves to the surrounding realities and social worlds with camera 
phones and Facebook postings. As urban city life has become increasingly 
mediatized the meanings of geographical places and spaces have been seen 
to diminish simultaneously when the online environments have gained new 
significance (e.g. Baym & boyd 2012). Yet, how these geographical and 
virtual realms are connected or separated and what kind of hierarchies 
and power relations are created and maintained between these two scales 
of spatialities in the everyday experiences of young people still 
remains much under theorized, let alone empirically researched.
The goal of this presentation is to sketch the concept of ‘street 
politics’ to better grasp the dynamics of constant crossings of 
different boundaries in youth life. In this exercise of sketching street 
politics, I will pay special attention to the intersection of local, 
national, transnational and global dimensions of street and the media, 
the role of the interface between the private and the public in the 
street and the media and the contested interplay between the two as both 
the embodied and the imagined. The theoretical approach to street 
politics is complemented with empirical examples drawing on media and 
street ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tower Hamlets London and 
Malmi Helsinki. The research project Youth Street Politics in the Media 
Age: Helsinki and London Compared is carried out in the University of 
Helsinki, The Finnish Youth Research Society, UCL, in cooperation with 
the Tampere University of Applied Sciences, The British Council, and The 
Finnish Institute in London.
For more info, please visit: http://blogs.helsinki.fi/streetpolitics/

Bio:
Johanna Sumiala, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor in the Department of 
Social Research/Media and Communication Studies at the University of 
Helsinki, Finland, and a senior research fellow at the Helsinki 
Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her main interests are media and social 
theory, social media, media anthropology, virtual ethnography, ritual 
theory, media and violence. Her studies have been published in both 
English and Finnish. In addition to writing numerous articles for such 
journals as Media, Culture & Society; M/C journal, Communication, 
Culture & Critique; and Social Anthropology, she has co-edited and 
contributed to several books, including Implications of the Sacred 
(2006), Images and Communities (2007) and School Shootings: Mediatized 
Violence in a Global Age (2012). Her most recent monograph, Media and 
Ritual: Death, Community and Everyday Life, was published by Routledge 
in 2012.

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