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Nationalism as an ideology seeks to assert the primacy of national community in children’s thinking, beings and feelings through curricula and official school rituals. Another form of nationalism p...

In this paper, we explore how place leadership aims at producing transformational changes in the context of green growth. We ask what the main leadership strategies are that key actors pursue to ga...

The study of regional growth paths is a key theme in economic geography and of elemental interest for regional development. This paper addresses the interplay between path-dependent, structural forces and the construction and utilization of opportunities through agentic processes. Extending the evolutionary framework, it is argued that not only history but also perceived futures influence agentic processes in the present and thus shape regional development paths. The paper discusses the relevance and interdependencies of three types of agency with distinct theoretical roots, namely Schumpeterian innovative entrepreneurship, institutional entrepreneurship and place-based leadership, as main drivers of regional structural change. publishedVersion

In this article we sketch out a geography of hope in Palestine. We focus on ‘hyperprecarious’ sites, exactly those where exposure to harm is heightened and where thus reasons not to hope seem plentiful. Focusing on fieldwork at such sites, we examine hope as a temporal practice of waiting, attending especially to how a ‘moment to come’ (kairos) constitutes and affirms anti-colonial practices and topologies of everyday Palestinian life. Hope in the cases we discuss is not simply a positive orientation to the future, but an experience of kairo-logical time that ties hopeful waiting to topo-logical practices that disrupt the space-times of the Israeli occupation, and the horizon of hopelessness it creates for Palestinians. We propose that attending to kairos and topos can therefore reveal the ways that together they can operate as conditions of possibility, as a ‘moment’ and ‘place’, for time-spaces to come forth anew, and so as structuring conditions for everyday Palestinian hope for life that is irreducible to the systematic subjugation and violence of the occupation.

In the West Bank, hundreds of non-Palestinian women who are married to Palestinian men have recently been issued shortened visas with tightened restrictions. This means they are often prevented from working, their mobilities are severely reduced and they are placed in extremely precarious bureaucratic and procedural positions. The research in this article draws from fieldwork interviews with women affected by such restrictions to show how politically induced precarities produce gendered effects towards specific ends of the occupation of Palestine. We thus frame a discussion of the women’s experiences of visa regulations through precarity before giving an account of the profound effects on women’s roles in family and political life. We then broaden the focus to consider Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the demographic implications of the gendered effects of visa precarity. In doing so we make the argument that Israel’s spousal visa regulations contribute to the (re)production of uneven gender relations and the demographic objective of emptying out the West Bank.

Building on the idea of the humanitarian border, the paper seeks to theorise its fluctuating geographies as growing from particular governmental strategies, yet shaped by social elements operating beyond the migration regime. We approach the humanitarian border topologically as a relational space experienced by refugee-subjects and constituting of regulations, techniques, tactics and (counter)practices that have emerged, and keep evolving, when people seek asylum in different parts of the world. We suggest that one of the asylum seekers' key assets in navigating the humanitarian border is agency based on subjective relatedness with the figure of the refugee. Hence, we direct our analytical attention to experiences of refugeeness that we have studied empirically in the context of forced migration in Finland and Jordan. The analysis identifies asylum seekers' ambivalent emotions and agencies, foregrounding political subjectivities both in the context of immobile life in Amman, and on the move along the Western Balkans route. This reveals the dual politics of the humanitarian border, at once constitutive of and constituting in encounters between asylum seekers and its other actors. In conclusion, the paper makes two suggestions regarding the study of refugeeness as political subjectivity and the topological theorisation of the humanitarian border.

Work on large-scale plant closures has provided a rich vein of scholarship and academic debate. This paper articulates a new set of methods and concepts for understanding how large-scale redundancies associated with the closure of manufacturing plants affects society and the economy at the local, regional and national scales. It posits the need for a more comprehensive exercise in data collection and experimentation with previously unused methods, including the application of discrete-choice experiments in order to understand better the choice and decision-making frameworks adopted by affected workers. The paper argues there is a need to integrate community-wide policy responses into the core of the analyses. publishedVersion

In this paper we discuss how art workshops can be used to examine dimensions of belonging. We draw on our findings of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork with unaccompanied refugee minors in Finland. The practical aim of the art project was to offer a platform for transcultural communication and interaction, and to support mutual understanding and solidarity among the refugee minors and Finnish pupils. The collaborative ethnographic approach gave us an opportunity to meet the young people through working together and be equally active members of the group sharing the same classroom. Theoretically we aim to enlarge the understanding of the sense of belonging and the role of the subjective agency of the unaccompanied minors, including everyday participation. We highlight the practices through which the minors can be supported in an embracing manner in their everyday lives in new host societies.

Urban strategies, representing stories of possible futures, often intervene in already established local communities and therefore call for a considerate urban intervention. This article utilises the ideas of Henri Lefebvre’s socially produced space and of literature on stories involved in planning. Our empirical example tells a story of urban densification aspirations for an inner-city neighbourhood in Tampere, Finland. By combining the interviews of local people and planners with policy documents, we argue that planners’ stories pay too little attention to the place and to local stories. Planners’ abstract visions of the future and local stories building on lived experiences both draw meanings from the same place but have very different intentions. In our case, the consultation of the project started out wrong because the planners neglected a neighbourhood thick in symbolic meanings and the local stories’ power in resistance. By understanding the place as polyphonic in its foundation, planners could learn about the symbolic elements and reasons for people’s place attachment, and thus end up re-writing the place together. Urban interventions such as urban densification should connect to the place as part of its polyphonic historical continuum and acknowledge the residents’ place attachments.

Tunnustuksen etsiminen muilta ihmisiltä on yleisinhimillistä mutta ei yksinkertaista. Erityisesti työssä tunnustuksen saaminen on tärkeää, ja siinä korostuu nykyteoreetikoiden mukaan tekemisen sijaan esittäminen. Kuitenkin näiden teoreetikoiden mukaan on olemassa myös tunnustuksesta vapaata käsityöläisyyden kaltaista työtä, jota tehdään sen itsensä vuoksi. Tämän artikkelin aineistona ovat maaseudulla toimivien pienyrittäjänaisten seurantahaastattelut. Kysyn, millaiselle toimijuudelle he haluavat ja voivat saada tunnustusta. Laadullinen analyysi osoittaa, että haastateltujen pienyrittäjänaisten työssä keskeistä on hyvin tekeminen eikä oman aseman korostus. Lisäksi haastateltavien arjessa on toistoa, muista huolehtimista ja asioiden yhteensovittamista, toisin sanoen naistapaisuutta. Taloudellinen selviytyminen kuitenkin edellyttää näkyvyyttä ja itsen esille tuontia, siis tunnustuksen hakemista. Päätuloksena esitän, että haastateltavat etsivät tunnustusta naistapaiselle pienelle toimijuudelle. Tällainen tunnustus vahvistaa toimijuuden tuntoa. Valtavirtayrittäjyyden kentillä toimittaessa haastateltavien toimijuus ei kuitenkaan välttämättä tule tunnustetuksi. Naistapaisessa yrittäjätyössä selviäminen ilman ulkoista tunnustusta näyttää hankalalta.

The study of political leadership in Lebanon has most often revolved around the questions of the attributes and networks of leaders commonly considered within the frame of patron–client rel...

The concept of smart specialization has rapidly acquired a central position in European policy and academic circles. It raises interesting challenges for the regional studies agenda. First, smart specialization is about not only policy formulation, implementation and evaluation but also pooling scattered resources, competencies and powers to serve both shared and individual ambitions. Thus, policy formulation and implementation need to be seen in a new light. Second, when smart specialization is seen as one of the platforms for aligning several actors to boost regional economic development, the need to understand agency in its multiplicity emerges as central. This paper argues that to achieve truly transformative smart specialization strategies, there is a need to investigate in more depth the multi-actor strategy processes and new forms of leadership, as well as to invest time and money in advancing related capabilities across European regions.

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This article explores mundane political agency. We introduce the notion of the political ordinary as agency based on the capacity of human beings to carry out acts that are undetermined and unexpected, and thus capable of challenging, opposing, negotiating, maintaining, and readjusting prevailing conditions. We approach subjectivity from a pragmatist and phenomenological point of view and argue that it is the condition of possibility of political agency. The paper demonstrates how political subjectivity can be located in the ways in which people take up issues that stand out as important to them. To this end, we look into the everyday life experiences of an eleven-year-old girl whose struggles related to proposed subject positions provide examples of mundane political agency. We conclude by arguing that political agency is the subject’s action when in a state of becoming prompted by future-oriented demands and contingencies of social life.

This paper examines the features of Triple Helix model in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and analyses the driving forces of the featured model from the institutional logics perspective. The statist-fading balanced Triple Helix model in Shenzhen is characterized by (1) the loosened control of central government and (2) the balanced interaction of local government, industry, and university. The former character is closely related with the internal changes of state logics, i.e. the rescaling of state power due to decentralization, regional disparity, and global networks. The latter is driven by the structural overlap of state, market, and professional logics along with the transition of China from a centrally planned economy towards a market-oriented economy and the importance of innovation and learning in the knowledge society.

This article contributes to the discussion concerning the ways in which network governance and classical-modernist government practices juxtapose and redefine the idea of publicity in planning practices. Through Finnish urban planning cases we ask what kind of publicity is being promoted. We argue that new modes of governing build and employ institutional ambiguity for ‘getting things done’. This provides possibilities to ‘skim the cream’ of the best possible ways of resolving present planning issues. The crucial question is whether the possible positive outcomes give a mandate to the process, even if the process operates in a democratic void.

Knowledge brokering is on the rise in various spheres of knowledge societies. The aim has been to improve the interaction between knowledge production and use. This paper analyses knowledge-brokeri...

Made in collaboration with an independent filmmaker and two poets, the documentary-poetry film Bridges presents life in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina, and delivers a clear message: the war in Bosnia is not yet firmly located in the past. Shot through a computer screen, Bridges forces the viewer to witness the war in Bosnia and its aftermath via-the-gaze of an unknown spectator, sitting on an Apple Mac laptop. Through this modern technological distancing, we re-present here images of war in a digital age, question how war is usually packaged and represented on television, and in turn interrogate, through poetry, how war is traditionally remembered and memorialised. In so doing, Bridges leads us to a conclusion, in Srebrenica, in 2015: in order to invest in the possibility of a just future after conflict, it is necessary to acknowledge the unthinkable realities to which traumatic experience bears witness. Watch the film Bridges here and visit the Bridges website for more information

The late modern change in young people's community life has meant moving from traditional, place-based communities towards more fluid and situational contexts of belonging. These youth-initiated attachments often build on amiable relationships that fall under the umbrella of ‘friendship’. This paper analyses Finnish early youths’ friendship narratives that were produced by sequential participatory methods. It introduces the dimensional and flexible spaces created in and through the participants’ friendships. These indicate relational spheres of actual and imagined activities where young people engage with people and places important to them. As a result, the paper first shows how young people together with their peers develop committed ties of belonging that reach beyond physical connection, and how these ties constitute experiential spatial attachments. Second, it demonstrates how they also make friends with kin and non-kin adults and how these intergenerational friendships expand the variety of inclusionary spaces available to them. The findings provide alternative insights into young people's experiences and the practices of social and spatial inclusion. We hope they help to develop cross-generational inclusionary policies that acknowledge youths’ amiable relationships as important potential in their lived communities.

There are only a few studies dealing with capabilities in the knowledge-based regional development and especially in implementation of contemporary innovation policy. Drawing upon the resource-based view, the capability perspective identifies combinations of regional resources and capabilities that generate competitive advantage. In light of theoretical and empirical advancement, this paper introduces a capability framework to reveal the multi-layered and dynamic nature of capabilities in knowledge-based regional development. The paper argues that in the regional context, it is important to consider and analyse (1) the organizational level resource and knowledge base and (2) ways in which the regional networks of organizations, engaged in knowledge-based development activities, exploit and renew regional resources and capabilities. The empirical analysis is based on personal in-depth interviews and document analysis. The findings indicate that studies on knowledge-based regional development should...

During the past few decades, the global food system has confronted new sustainability challenges related not only to public health and the environment but also to ethical concerns over the treatment of farmed animals. However, the traditional threedimensional framework of sustainable development is ill equipped to take ethical concerns related to non-human animals into account. For instance, the interests of farmed animals are often overridden by objectives associated with social, economic or environmental sustainability, despite their vast numbers and influence on contemporary societies. Moreover, sustainability policies necessarily involve an element of ethical evaluation; yet this element is not explicitly incorporated in prevailing frameworks of sustainable development. Our purpose in this article is to address these shortcomings by developing a Sustainability Matrix that recognizes the need to consider food system sustainability from the perspective of all interest groups affected by the issue under consideration, from a plurality of ethical standpoints. Combing sustainability principles with the basic idea of an ethical evaluation tool, the proposed Sustainability Matrix evaluates the sustainability of food-related systems, decisions and policies from the perspectives of three major strands of ethical theory and from the perspectives of human beings, farmed animals and wildlife. In terms of policy implications, the Sustainability Matrix can be applied in deciding on the specific targets of food system sustainability that can then be utilized as a basis for designing policies and measures towards the achievement of these goals.

The article explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in and about (post)socialist spaces of southeast/central Europe and the former Soviet Union after the Cold War. We engage in a particular form of decoloniality, or what Walter Mignolo terms “delinking,” to fracture the hegemony of Western-centric knowledge and enable comparative education to gain a global viewpoint that is more inclusive of different voices. Our critique is threefold. First, we engage in rethinking and rewriting socialist past(s) through new and multiple frames to reveal possibilities for imagining postsocialist future(s). Second, we show the relations and the intertwined histories of the spatially partitioned world. Third, we examine how coloniality has shaped our own identities as scholars and discuss ways to reclaim our positions as epistemic subjects who have both the legitimacy and capacity to look at and interpret the world from our own origins and lived realities.

The pursuit of sustainability through various smart solutions has become prominent in urban policy-making. We explore how cities utilize particular planning and management tools in this endeavour. ...

This article explores the transition towards a circular economy in the context of household food waste practices. The research concerning the circular economy has mainly focused on engineering or the processes of production, manufacturing, business and industry. However, the transition towards a circular economy requires, in addition to new technologies, infrastructures and innovations, a societal change and a change in everyday practices. In this article, we address this by examining the everyday practices of food waste reduction in households as ethical work. We claim that the intertwined practices, institutions and policies of the circular economy create moral categories and responsibilities in everyday food consumption. Thus, the transition towards circular economy requires everyday ethical work carried out by consumers. However, our analysis also brings out some possible challenges related to this transition that has not yet been accomplished. Our research materials consist of 26 food waste diaries collected from Finnish households and participant observation in 4 leftover cooking workshops organized with the Finnish Martha organization. We adapt Michel Foucault’s conception of ethics, focusing on the constitution of ethical subjectivity in food waste practices. Moreover, we utilize practice theoretical approach that has been widely used in food waste and sustainable consumption studies and connect it with Foucault’s theory. Our results suggest that in order to understand the circular economy as a moral economy, it is crucial to note the moral complexity of everyday life that results from partly contradictory ethical sensitivities and practices.

Due to the national importance of metropolitan areas, central governments seek to make them as attractive and competitive as possible. In many cases, this is done through state control over metropolitan areas and their governance arrangements. This article examines the relationship between state control and metropolitan governance capacity based on a comparative case study of four metropolitan areas: Auckland, Dublin, Montreal and Oslo. These areas represent different models of metropolitan governance, as well as different forms of state control. We studied state control by focusing on political and administrative decentralization: how independently can the metropolitan government make decisions and perform its tasks? The conclusion is that the different dimensions of decentralization are connected to capacity, but not straightforwardly. This study indicates that state involvement through different forms of control can increase metropolitan governance capacity, but only if it is combined with mandate and supportive policy actions.

In 2015, more people than usual claimed asylum in Finland, inspiring many artists to organise photography workshops with refugees and migrants. This article examines in what respects participatory ...

Sergei Zalygin's (1913–2000) autobiographical Ekologicheskii roman (‘An Environmental Novel’, 1993) tells the story of a Soviet water engineer and ecologist Nikolai Golubev between the Russian Civi...

In this paper, we propose that there is a politics of encounters centered on the body at play in seeking asylum and refuge, and that it is critical to study how it unfolds from the point of view of both governing and agency. Building on existing work that looks at the role of embodiment in the political struggles of refugees, and leaning on Helmuth Plessner’s original thinking about social embodiment, we develop a theoretical understanding of this political dynamic, illustrating how it can help us make sense of power relations and forms of governance and (latent) resistance involved in it.

Political agency of refugees and asylum seekers is usually recognised as different forms of activism, focusing on rights claiming or protesting on inferior living conditions. While these activities are vitally important in the struggle over refugee rights and policies, they are not the only ways in which asylum seekers and refugees act politically. Perhaps paradoxically, the publicly visible activities may hide from the view other forms of effective and critical agency. Based on research with asylum seekers in precarious situations, this paper discusses their subtle forms of agency seldom identified as political – least by those enacting them. Many asylum seekers and refugees have little faith in exerting change though public protest and explicitly dissociate themselves from politics. With focus on mundane critical attitudes and activities, this paper suggests that thin political possibilities open through agency motivated by ‘radical hope’. The radically hopeful agencies in hopeless asylum situations, and their political dimensions, are identified through a non-linear understanding of temporality that challenges the received notion of refugeeness as generated in the past, struggled for in the present, and orienting towards a desired-for future.

We take on the challenge posed by Horton and Kraftl [2006. “What Else? Some More Ways of Thinking and Doing ‘Children’s Geographies’.” Children’s Geographies 4 (1): 69–95, 71.] that research be ‘slowed down’ through methodological and theoretical routes to acknowledge seemingly trivial details in children’s lives. Based on an ethnographic study in an Australian preschool focusing on children’s place-making in a globalizing world, this paper discusses one event in the home corner to exemplify what we understand as and how we enact methodological slowness. The event is revisited by recognizing the role of the unexpected, the troubling and paying attention to data that overspills the research engagement in conducting ‘ideally preset qualitative research’. Research engagements not only reflect but also produce children’s lives. Researching ‘the global’ is ‘doing the global’ as the frames, practices and traditions of research itself are part and parcel of the so-called answers we produce. As result, a ...

In his inspirational article titled ‘Bringing politics into the nursery’, Peter Moss argues for early childhood institutions to become places of ‘democratic political practice’. In this article, the authors add to Moss’s call and argue that these institutions are sites of ‘mundane political practice’, containing various attitudinal orientations and ideologies, and including many kinds of purposive activities. Recognizing different dimensions of political life in institutional spaces where children lead their lives requires a differentiation between two types of politics: first, official politics and policies that aim to institute certain ideals in early childhood education and care and, second, everyday politics unfolding in communities that involve people as political subjects from birth until death. When the latter is discussed in early childhood research, if at all, it is rarely identified in political terms, which the authors consider problematic. The lacking recognition of mundane politics denies important aspects of children’s agency, which is prejudicial in itself. Moreover, such ignorance may lead to unintended consequences in democratization processes, like the one suggested by Moss. Imposing political ideals without recognizing children’s existing political agencies carries a risk of interfering with their political lives so that some children may feel misrecognized or find their capacities to act hindered or their activities misunderstood. In order to avoid such outcomes, this article is an argument for research and pedagogies that acknowledge and scaffold children’s political agencies at large.

There is an emerging consensus that place leadership is the missing piece in the local and regional development puzzle. In this context, leadership is a hidden form of agency, shadowed by such visible forms of influence as structures and formal institutions, as well as development programs and plans. This article argues that one of the most central issues in a study of place leadership is to analyse the relationships between governance, power and place leadership. The governance arrangements are undoubtedly important, as they dictate the kind of resources and positions provided to regional development work, and thus they also enable, as well as constrain, the many efforts of regional champions to exercise power in complex development processes. It is argued here that revealing how place leadership is enacted in different places and times would allow us to flesh out novel aspects about the eternal questions of how and why some places are able to adapt strategically to ever-changing social, economic and environmental circumstances while others fail to do so. Additionally, deeper investigations of place leadership would hopefully allow us to provide policymakers and practitioners with added insight on the ways to make regional development policies and practices not only more strategic but also effective. This paper elaborates the conceptual link between place leadership, governance and power.

This article presents a new way of understanding local land-use conflicts, also called NIMBY, developing from justification theory and literature from the sociology of engagements. The article builds on the multiple systems of valuation used by people to perceive local land-use cases as conflicts, following the pragmatic sociology of Boltanski and Thévenot. The conflicts are shown to be not only about conflicting interests of the residents, but also about broader conflicting systems of valuation. Empirically, land-use cases in Helsinki, Finland are analysed to show the variety of argumentation used by residents opposing land-use. Over 500 dispute letters are analysed, the vast majority of which base their argumentation on common good. About 40% also use argumentation based on individual interest. Argumentation based on close familiar affinities is rare but existing, which might be because of the type of data used in the article. The framework used allows for the non-moralizing use of the concept NIMBY when describing the conflicts.

The concept of difference has long been integral to geographical thought. However, it is rare for geographers to consider precisely what difference is, or how it functions, and there are several contrasting traditions through which difference is understood. We argue that geographers could helpfully extend their theorizations of difference through Deleuze’s philosophy of ‘difference-in-itself’. We examine the value of a ‘difference-in-itself’ that views difference as generative, originary, and primary, in productive tension with conceptions of difference that tend to, purposefully or otherwise, subordinate difference to presupposed identity-based, representational categories, or dialectical forms of contradiction and opposition.

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© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Simin Davoudi, Richard Cowell, Iain White and Hilda Blanco. Green citizenship has received growing interest in the past two decades given the current grave ecological concerns and an increasing awareness that environmental degradation and change implicates directly on the rights and responsibilities of citizens. Yet as a field, it still involves static and instrumentalist conceptions of citizenship and the environment. In this chapter, we propose more dynamic, transnational and inclusive notions of lived green citizenship, drawing on feminist theorisation and citizenship conceptions introduced by Engin Isin. We argue for a greater acknowledgement of spatial relationality and the multiple scalar and practised dimensions of citizenship in order to recognise the diversity of citizens represented in society, and their experiences and practices. We suggest that this broader understanding of green citizenship provides access to trans-local and networked thinking for environmental planning, citizenship and political theory, as well as highlighting the importance of lived experiences of citizenship.

In this article we discuss the precarities induced by the threat of home demolitions in occupied Palestine. Drawing on fieldwork from four separate sites, the discussion begins by showing how the threat of demolition exposes Palestinians to a powerfully affective future of a violence that will arrive at an uncertain time. From this we develop the notion of ‘affectual demolition’ to describe how the anticipatory affective dimensions of demolition structure the present and the ways that precarities are embodied in Palestinian communities living under the threat of demolition. The discussion then moves on to further consider how anticipatory affects relate to different practices, including ways of acting on and against induced vulnerabilities and insecurities. We thus argue that the continued threat of home demolitions evokes precarities that are (politically) induced and (ontologically) productive and that they hold significant world-making and -annulling capacities. We thus argue that the continued threat of home demolitions evokes precarities that are (politically) produced and (ontologically) productive and that they hold significant world-making and -annulling capacities.

Artikkelissa tarkastelemme suomalaista uutisointia yksin maahan saapuneista pakolaisnuorista. Aineisto koostuu Aamulehden, Helsingin Sanomien ja Ylen teksteistä vuosilta 2014–2016. Tämä ajanjakso on ollut merkittävä määrällisesti poikkeuksellisen Eurooppaan kohdistuneen maahanmuuton vuoksi. Kysymme, miten suomalaisessa uutismediassa kerrotaan yksin tulleiden nuorten tilanteesta? Millaiset teemat ovat juttujen keskiössä? Entä mitkä aihepiirit jäävät marginaaliin? Aineiston analyysin pohjalta väitämme, että kaikissa kolmessa mediassa toistuvat epäilyksen ja myötätunnon representaatiot entisestään kaventavat julkista keskustelua yksin tulleiden nuorten arjesta, vaikeuksista ja mahdollisuuksista uudessa kotimaassaan. Myöskään nuorten omaa toimijuutta ei juuri nosteta esille näissä medioissa. Artikkelimme ottaa laajemmin kantaa kahteen yhteiskunnalliseen kysymyksen. Yhtäältä jäsennämme, miten suomalainen media raportoi yksin tulleisiin liittyvästä maahanmuuttopolitiikasta ja erityisesti biopoliittisista käytännöistä. Toisaalta osoitamme, miten analyysin kohteeksi valitsemiemme medioiden välittämät representaatiot vahvistavat uhri- ja uhkadiskursseja. Nämä diskurssit eivät tue nuorten kotoutumista saati heidän aktiivista toimijuuttaan heille uuden yhteiskunnan jäseninä.

This essay draws on a visit to the Finnish contemporary artist Riiko Sakkinen’s exhibition Closing borders (Mantta 2017–2018) that portrayed various border locations around the European Union (EU). This essay entwines the analysis of these artistic works (collages, drawings, installations), the book produced as accompanying material to the exhibition and ethnographic material (field notes, interviews with people on the move and solidarity activists) collected at same sites since 2010. This essay examines border politics, knowledge formation via responsible witnessing and multiple forms of resistance to violence at borders. I argue that while it is important to document the forms of violence, it would also be necessary to recognise ongoing forms of resistance and the continuities of these struggles in order to reach beyond the mediatised spectacle.