NB! All comments from the audience are removed to secure privacy.
Panel discussion:
Prof. Helen Johnston, University of Hull
Prof. Kate Rossiter, Wilfrid Laurier University
Prof. Jen Rinaldi, Ontario Tech University
Prof. Pauli Kettunen, University of Helsinki
Prof. Pirjo Markkola, Tampere University/HEX
Chair: Dr. Johanna Annola, Dr. Hanna Lindberg & Dr. Antti Malinen, Research Fellows, Tampere University/HEX
The session discusses the interplay between experience and agency as analytical tools by exploring different conceptualisations and contextualisations of the lived welfare state. In everyday life, the welfare state is lived through various social benefits, services and institutions, some of which date back to earlier periods. These institutions and structures of welfare provision are based on shifting constructions of the “social”, and they generate special experiences of the individual-society relationship. Thus, the focus on the lived welfare state calls for new perspectives and conceptualisations to combine micro level from below approaches and a macro analysis of society.
This session explores and problematizes the ways in which the concept of “agency” is used to explain the space of experience in the lived welfare state. We focus on lived institutions, lived institutional care, and encounters between individuals and institutions, ca 1700s–2000s. What do “agency” and “experience” mean in these encounters and how could scholars of the welfare state deal with concepts such as agency, experience, emotions, and subjectivity, among others? How can agency be re-evaluated when moving between different institutional and experiential settings?
Click here to read the panelists’ bios.
Introductory material and videos
Pirjo Markkola: Lived institutions as an approach to the experience of the welfare state
Jen Rinaldi & Kate Rossiter: Huronia’s Double Bind: How Institutionalization Bears Out on the Body
Notice to viewers: the following video deals with a particularly harsh subject.
Helen Johnston: Motherhood and long-term imprisonment in Victorian England: Experience and Agency in female convict prisons
Pauli Kettunen: The agent called society as a mediator between experiences and expectations – a conceptual history perspective to the making of Nordic welfare states
Click here to read the presentation (pdf file).
NB! It is no longer possible to post new comments.
Following question was posed by Ho Chi Tim during lived panel discussion, but due to schedule could not be answered:
“Comment/Question: Thank you all for a fascinating discussion on agency. How much is our understanding of agency affected by our immediate field / politics? I come from a Southeast Asian Studies/History field where its the norm to look for local (i.e. non-colonial/Western) perspective, which in turn affects the types of sources we prefer, and also how we read them. For my research, I was encouraged to deliberately look past state institutions (which were usually colonial) and it sources, and to look for instance how potential welfare recipients actively looked for assistance from state institutions.”
Antti Malinen
9.3.2021 14:11