Institute for the Study for Societal Issues

, six years before the subprime crisis that would send the global economic system into a tailspin, then president George W. Bush addressed the congregation of the St. Paul AME Church in Atlanta, Georgia. The topic of his speech was a new program aimed at fulfilling the "American dream" through an ambitious domestic project to extend private home ownership to those who had hitherto been excluded from it. Explicitly acknowledging the disproportionately low percentage of African American and Hispanic homeowners, Bush's plan involved removing the barriers people of color faced when buying a home. This address, just one year after New York's Twin Towers were toppled, politically and historically linked the war on terror with a revised project of domestic racial equality: And as we work for a more secure world, we've got to work for a better world too. And that means as we work on our security from possible attacks by terrorists, we also work on economic security. The two securities go hand in hand.. .. And part of economic security is owning your own home. Part of being a secure America is to encourage homeownership. So somebody can say, this is my home, welcome to my home. 1

Ethnographic research approach is used to study how food collective movement organizations (FCMOs) organize and create markets for locally produced and organic food in Finland. Increased evidence related to unsafety, unsustainability and unjustness of contemporary food markets has resulted in the mobilization of various food movements over the world in order to challenge the current systems of food provisioning. These movements are striving towards creating more sustainable markets – practices of food production and consumption. This study elaborates on how social movement organizations make markets for good food by engaging in and managing market exchange of local and/or organic food.

When I was a little girl, I would spend hours of time at my grandmothers' allotment garden collecting parsley, cilantro and dill, picking up berries and harvesting carrots, among other crops and vegetables. The next day, we would travel to a local marketplace on three different buses to sell what we'd collected during the previous day. I would praise the taste of our herbs, berries and vegetables to people approaching our tiny little stand, learn to bargain, count the change and walk around to compare our produce with that of others' who all seemed like grandmothers to me. In the end of the day, I would come to my grandmother's home exhausted, but happy to count the money and not so happy about knowing that I will have the unsold harvest on my dinner plate again in the evening.

Johdanto Seison ja kuuntelen. "No hirvee kiire, tosi paljon hommaa. Yks revisio työn alla, ja ton yhen paperin pitäis lähtee kohta. Niin, ja sit pari muutaki paperii, joissa oon mukana..." Olen hämmentynyt. En ole varma sainko kysymykseeni vastauksen: kysyin, mitä kuuluu. Kuuluu papereita. Hän kertoo kirjoittavansa strategisista innovaatiodisruptioista, institutionaalisista affekteista, sustainabilitytransitioista. Kuinka hölmöksi tunnenkaan itseni: kuulen hepreaa, tai jotain salaista koodikieltä. Nyökkäilen, suuntaan katseeni maahan. Etsin kiintopistettä. Sanat lentävät ohitseni, putoilevat lattialle. "Temporaalinen agenssi, tekno-loginen digitalisaatio, co-creation… jokos sulla on muuten lähteny väikkäripapereita lehteen?" Havahdun. Kysymys iskee vasten kasvojani, kouraisee vatsanpohjasta. "Ei vielä, mutta…", alan kertoa, kuinka innoissani olen: siitä, että väitöstutkimukseni tuntuu kiinnostavan monia; siitä, että olen aloittanut uuden kenttätyön; siitä, että lähetimme juuri yhteiskäsikirjoituksen suomalaiseen tiedejulkaisuun tärkeäksi kokemastamme aiheesta. Hiljaisuus. Vaivaantunut hymy. Kengissäni on multaa, sen voisi vaikka pyyhkiä.

Questions of value are central to understanding alternative practices of food exchange. This study introduces a practice- based approach to value that challenges the dominant views, which capture value as either an input for or an outcome of practices of exchange (value as values, standards, or prices). Building on a longitudinal ethnographic study on food collec- tives, I show how value, rather than residing in something that people share, or in something that objects have, is an ideal target that continuously unfolds and evolves in action. I found that people organized their food collectives around pursuing three kinds of value-ideals, namely good food, good price and good community. These value-ideals became reproduced in food collectives through what I identified as valuing modes, by which people evaluated the goodness of food, prices and community. My analysis revealed that, while participating in food collectives in order to pursue their value-ideals, people were likely to have differing reasons for pursuing them and tended to attach different meanings to the same value-ideal. I argue that understanding how value as an ideal target is reproduced through assessing and assigning value (valuing modes) is essential in further explorations of the formation of value and in better understanding the dynamics of organizing alterna- tive practices of food exchange.

Motivated by an observation that new forms of organizing and alternative practices for exchange increasingly transpire outside formal organizations, this doctoral dissertation adopts a social practice approach to study how food collectives emerged as a new practice for exchange. In doing so it challenges the dominance of markets as the focal explanatory concept of economic organization and shifts attention from organization as an entity to organization as emergent order.
In studying the emergence of a new social practice, the dissertation draws on extensive, in- depth ethnographic fieldwork on Finnish food collectives conducted during 2010-2017. Food collectives comprise of groups of households that collectively procure local and organic food directly from farmers and other suppliers and distribute it among the participating members. The data originate from participant and non-participant observation, interviews, meetings, social media discussions, documents, and archival material.
The empirical findings of the dissertation suggest that the emergence of food collectives as a new practice for exchange was predominantly a tactical rather than discursive accomplishment requiring people to invent their ways of doing while engaging in a bundle of activities and continuously re-connecting different elements, including materiality, temporality, meanings, and embodied skills that were in constant flux (Essay 1). The findings further point towards temporal and moral ordering effects of emerging social practices. The study identifies rhythmic qualities that enable people to sustain their food collective’s web of practices (Essay 2) and evaluative work that anchors common values in food collectives’ practices (Essay 3).
Capitalizing on four distinct practice theoretical approaches this study advances organizational scholarship, particularly the emerging body of literature examining alternative forms of economic organizing, and contributes to practice theory. The study finds that in order to emerge, new social practices not only involve new ways of knowing and doing, but also require people to unlearn dominant ways of knowing and doing. The study brings further attention to a web of practices and shows how social practices emerge by transforming interactional orders of existing practices and by re-connecting them in new ways. The study also raises important questions on the relationship between people and practices and offers methodological guidance for studying phenomena on emergence.
As the market economy is being increasingly contested at grassroots, the challenge for policy- makers is to understand and better acknowledge the role of alternative forms of economic organizing in the transformation towards a more sustainable economic system.

Golden Dawn was 13 years ago the third-largest party in the Greek
parliament. Following a murder of an anti-fascist rapper by an adherent,
the movement was outlawed and activists were given lengthy prison
sentences. Their appeal trial began last month

This article traces the characteristics of the political discourse in the post-modern era, which sees the necessity of using traumas and defeat to create national-religious narratives. Through a critical discourse study of two case studies-the Battle of Masada (73 CE) and the Battle of Sarikamis (1914-1915), this article presents an analytical perspective on how right-wing populist elites in Turkey and Israel use trauma to boost ontological security within their public audience. Despite the historical, socio-political, and governmental differences between the two states, these cases, throughout the last twenty years, served as a tool to turn historical traumas into national glorified collective memory. Leaning on historical backgrounds, through analysis of speeches, this article offers a socio-psychological theoretical framework for examining how traumas could symbolize 'heroic resistance' against enemies. This article explores how the right-wing leadership reshape traumas through a religious narrative of redemption and a nationalist narrative of strength. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This case study, featured in the 2024 Antisemitism Worldwide Report by the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University, investigates how elite U.S. university student newspapers covered the October 7 Hamas massacre and the subsequent Gaza war. It systematically compares this coverage with reporting on other major humanitarian crises—namely, the war in Ukraine, the Sudanese civil war, and the persecution of Uyghurs in China. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative methods, the study reveals a pronounced disparity: while Gaza received extensive, emotionally charged, and often politically framed coverage, other crises were largely ignored or mentioned only tangentially. Editorials across multiple campuses prioritized Gaza to the near-total exclusion of other global atrocities. The findings suggest a pattern of selective moral outrage that raises troubling questions about ideological bias in campus discourse and media representation, particularly in relation to Israel and Jewish issues in the post-October 7 academic environment.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fueled by contested historical narratives. This article examines how Palestinian elites have systematically re-engineered select periods and figures from antiquity to reinforce national identity while undermining rival Zionist claims. We analyze three interrelated narratives: Solomon Temple denial, appropriation of Canaanite ancestry, and the Palestinization of Jesus Christ. Through examination of official pronouncements, religious sermons, educational materials, and media content, we demonstrate how these narratives form a coherent nation-building project that simultaneously asserts Palestinian continuity on the land and challenges Jewish historical claims. Grounded in theoretical frameworks of chosen glories and vicarious identity, this study reveals how these revisionist accounts aim to foster collective pride and challenge the perception of Jews as an ancient nation. The findings illuminate how the refashioning of history shapes both Palestinian self-perception and the broader framing of the conflict.