Abstract
Noora Pyyry and Inka Kaakinen write about More-than-human politics in the new Arctic landscape: shifts in atmospheres at the shopping mall. They examine the shopping mall as “a landscape, which has become axial in the everyday geographies of contemporary Arctic youth”. In their analysis, they probe politics at the mall by looking at the practices of hanging out. By thinking of shifts in the rhythms and atmospheres of the mall, they discuss the politicization of events. A more-than-human take on the issue gestates a relational political human subject. Politics is then approached beyond the subject–object divide: it is an affectual response to the prevailing circumstances that emerges from the joint-participation of diverse materialities. This makes it possible to analyze encounters at the mall without characterizing young people through the binaries of victim/rebel, angel/devil, consumer/activist etc. The new arctic landscape is approached in its complexity.
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Notes
- 1.
The participants of the study in Helsinki were 15–16 years of age. The research was conducted with the help of a 9th grade geography teacher and partly in connection to school work. The idea was to link young people’s everyday geographies of hanging out to their formal education and re-cognize their spatial-embodied knowledge of the city.
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Pyyry, N., Kaakinen, I. (2019). The Mall. In: Rautio, P., Stenvall, E. (eds) Social, Material and Political Constructs of Arctic Childhoods. Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3161-9_7
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