Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologists of the Month for May 2025, Suvi Salmenniemi and Hanna Ylöstalo (University of Turku, Finland). Their article for Current Sociology Everyday utopias and social reproduction was shortlisted for the Annual SAGE Current Sociology Best Paper Prize’s third edition (Vol. 72), and is Open Access.

Suvi Salmenniemi

Hanna Ylöstalo

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

S. Salmenniemi: I am professor of sociology at the University of Turku, Finland, specialising in political sociology, therapeutic culture, feminist theory, ethnography and critical social theory. My research has been driven by my interest in dynamics of social change, domination and resistance. I have studied a range of topics during my academic career, including political activism and civil society in Russia and therapeutic culture in Russia and Finland. My research has been predominantly ethnographic. My current research explores political imagination and everyday utopias, and the changing patterns of work in sustainability transformation.

Our article “Everyday utopias and social reproduction” draws on the research carried out in a research project, Political imagination and Alternative Futures (POLIMA), led by me and funded by the Research Council of Finland. Combining sociological and artistic research, this project has studied the ways in which people imagine, live out and pursue social change in the here and now. It has sought to identify conceptual and empirical elements for alternative social formations and advance theoretical understanding of political imagination and its role for transformative politics.

H. Ylöstalo: I am a sociologist and a gender studies scholar, currently working as Associate Professor in gender studies at Tampere University, Finland. My research interests lie in the fields of feminist political economy, political sociology and gender equality policy research. During my more than 20-year research and teaching career at the academia, I have studied various topics: work, welfare state, public governance, gender equality policy, knowledge-policy relations, social movements, and utopias and political imagination. I have always employed feminist theories and feminist methodologies in my research, which has brought these varying topics together. My research is broadly concerned with gendered economy-society relations, meaning that I am interested in different ways in which capitalist economy and economic policies are gendered, and how they contribute to local and global gendered, racialized and class inequalities. As a researcher, I am also motivated by the possibility of social change and better futures – gender equal, socially and ecologically sustainable – and I try to address this possibility also in my research.

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “Everyday utopias and social reproduction”?

S. Salmenniemi & H. Ylöstalo: One of our empirical cases in the POLIMA project was communities that we call ‘everyday utopias’, following Davina Cooper’s work. Everyday utopias are spaces and practices that experiment with alternative forms of life and create new social imaginaries. During ethnographic fieldwork, we were alerted to the centrality of labour in everyday utopias. Labour was constantly done, talked about, planned, anticipated, and wrestled with. People talked a lot less about the ideas of better futures than about the everyday practices that enabled building these futures. This perspective had been largely sidelined in earlier, often quite philosophically oriented, utopian scholarship. As Suvi had worked with Marxist feminist theories and Hanna with feminist political economies, we built our analysis of labour in everyday utopias on feminist social reproduction theory, which enabled us to capture the basic elements of labour that sustains everyday utopias.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

S. Salmenniemi & H. Ylöstalo: The article draws in dialogue two bodies of scholarship that have seldom been brought together: feminist social reproduction theory and utopian studies. One of our key findings concerns feminist social reproduction theory. By investigating empirically reproductive labour in everyday utopias, we identify four forms of reproductive labour: manual, affective, mnemonic and experimental. Feminist social reproduction theory has tended to focus on the reproduction of labour force, while less attention has been devoted to mapping the diverse forms of reproductive labour and their role in transformative politics. We address this lacuna in the article and show how the historically-sedimented patterns and practices of labour, in general, and reproductive labour, in particular, can be critically rethought, subverted and reconfigured in everyday utopias. Our article also contributes to utopian studies by arguing that labour is highly important to understand, and appreciate, everyday utopias as utopian sites. Counter-hegemonic forms of life are prefigured in everyday utopias through reproductive labour, which holds important transformative and transgressive potential. Utopias are not merely theoretical conceptions of better worlds, but also material processes embodying and realising other ways of being through hands, land, and houses.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

S. Salmenniemi & H. Ylöstalo: We think that everyday utopias are a particularly timely and acute topic for sociological research. The vexing global problems we are facing right now, such as the global climate emergency, wars and armed conflicts, the erosion of democracy, and seismic social inequalities, underline the need to envisage more socially and ecologically sustainable social formations. Everyday utopias can disrupt the prevailing anti-utopian sentiments and political disenchantment by creating alternatives to the existing forms of life and experimenting with ideals in practice. They can combat the anti-utopian and dystopic scenarios engendering hopelessness and disenfranchisement by showing that political alternatives are constantly articulated and practiced in a host of spaces that people inhabit. Everyday utopias offer a productive vantage point for what sociologist Erik Olin Wright has called ‘a sociology of the possible’, aiming to develop strategies that enable us to make empirically and theoretically sound arguments about emancipatory possibilities.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

S. Salmenniemi & H. Ylöstalo: We have also written about political imagination from a pedagogical perspective. We have developed the practice and notion of utopian pedagogy by exploring how arts-based exercises can be used in engaged pedagogy to facilitate the cultivation of political imagination.

Salmenniemi, Suvi, Porkola, Pilvi & Ylöstalo, Hanna (2024) “Political Imagination and Utopian Pedagogy”. Critical Arts. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2023.2299450

We have also edited a special issue, together with Inna Perheentupa, on political imagination and social change, which will be published in Sociological Research Online later this spring. The special issue consists of seven research articles, two ‘Beyond the Text’ publications and five book reviews, as well as our Introduction to sociological research on political imagination and social change.