Affiliate Spotlight: Jarmo Kallunki

I study experiences of recognition among working-class youth by using qualitative interviews I collected in Tampere, Finland, in Spring 2025. Theoretically, I draw on the social philosophy of Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser, and sociology of recognition developed by Michèle Lamont. My project is tied to Lamont’s ongoing work on recognition among working-class young people in Manchester, New Hampshire, and it has similar target group and interview schedule to allow for comparative analyses. Currently, I am hosted by the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University.

Before my current project, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher on a project called Cultures of the Working Class in the 2020s, funded by the Research Council of Finland. We studied the stability, fragmentation, and reproduction of working-class cultures in Finland since the 1980s, among other things. In one of our published pieces, we showed that among the Finnish working-class there are three cultural lifestyle clusters that associate with voter segments, suggesting that cultural lifestyles are associated with political behavior. Another, close-to-publication article shows that parenting practices among middle-class parents and working-class parents in Finland diverge and resemble those found by Annette Lareau in her classic Unequal Childhoods study.

In my previous scholarly work, I have studied intergenerational transmission of lifestyles in Finland, governance of Finnish higher education system, and use of knowledge in policymaking, among other things.

-Jarmo Kallunki