Activities

Welcome to our local and international seminars and to follow our work in Finland and abroad through lectures and research visits. Our researchers are also active commentators in the media.

Here are some highlights from the project years.

Panels

MAPO also studies Nordic populism, we are proud to present a panel with our PI Juha Herkman at the Council of Finnish Academies event Europe On Test yesterday: panel discussion was streamed and stored (watch at the 5 hours mark or through the link below). Juha starts the panel discussion with outlining populism, seeing it as a process of identity construction, allows us to tackle different populist movements and the ways in which they articulate together different kinds of ideals in a shared identification with “us” or common enemy. In the Nordic countries we have quite a long history of populist parties. Originally, they were quite different from these current so called populist movements and parties that oppose immigration, Herkman argues. The populist movements in the 1970s they were established against the welfare state and whereas now they can be defending it. Populists may argue that there is a crisis. Often there is a stagnation of the party system where the populist movement can announce how they can be different from other parties. 

Lectures

Visiting La Trobe University in 2018, Emilia Palonen gave the Thesis Eleven Annual Lecture on Populism and Democracy in Contemporary Europe.

Palonen has also delivered keynote lectures on Rethinking and Researching Populism: the Case of Hungary at Provinzialising Populism conference at Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey, 3 September 2018; and on Populism on the Loose: From Demography to Democracy at The Aesthetics of Social Equality: Avant-Garde, Populisms and the People, conference at the Higher School of Economics, HSE, Moscow, 10 May 2018.

Palonen also contributed on populism and space, giving a talk at UVic’s Distinguished Downtown Lecture Series the The City Talks: Space of Passions: Populism and the Politics of “Us” in the Urban Streetscapes of Europe, in at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada, 30 November 2017.