Sumários
23 Setembro 2026, 18:00
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Aleksi Erik Ylönen
International students have long held a privileged place in migration debates, welcomed for the economic revenue, cultural exchange, and academic prestige they bring to host countries. This presentation explores how that framing is breaking down. As far-right and populist movements gain ground, international students have increasingly been swept into broader anti-immigration discourses that recast them not as assets but as competitors for housing, jobs, and public services, and as drivers of rising migration numbers. Tracing shifts in political rhetoric, media representation, and policy—from visa restrictions to enrolment caps—it shows how the dominant image of the international student has moved from "privilege" to "burden." This shift, it argues, reflects less any change in students themselves than a growing tendency to fold nearly all forms of mobility into a politics of border control and national anxiety. The presentation reflects on what this repositioning means for students, for universities, and for the wider normalisation of restrictive migration politics.
22 Setembro 2026, 20:30
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Aleksi Erik Ylönen
In politics, development cooperation, and the economy, the African middle class is often seen as a beacon of hope for economic growth, poverty reduction, social change, and democratic development. Political think tanks, market analysts, and consumer researchers attribute key drivers of modernization, consumption, and individualization to the emerging middle class. This presentation critically examines these assumptions and argues that such characteristics cannot be derived from relative or abstract income calculations. Similarly, classical sociological class theories based on Marx, Weber, or Bourdieu struggle to adequately capture the diversity and dynamics of African middle classes and overload the concept of the middle class with pre-assumptions that are substantiated only for European middle classes.
In light of all the extensive criticism of inappropriate theoretical approaches, I follow Grounded Theory and, based on several months of ethnographic and microsociological research in Kenya, present what the middle classes are. The life courses of the Kenyan middle classes reveal their extremely high social mobility and volatility. I therefore place particular emphasis on scenarios of social decline, which are often overlooked in the debate about the emerging middle classes. As a defining criterion for class membership, I propose the possibility of diversified social security and argue that improved income levels allow middle-class households to invest more heavily in state, commercial, and “traditional” security models. Rather than distancing themselves from poorer classes, many middle-class households are also involved in financing cross-class, urban-rural social networks. Strategically maintained “networks of care” fulfill important functions of social welfare and private security and illustrate that, in many African contexts, social security is not guaranteed solely by the market, institutional security, or the state, but is based largely on social relationships.
22 Setembro 2026, 18:00
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Aleksi Erik Ylönen
This lecture examines the global housing crisis through the interconnected lenses of homelessness, urban justice and human rights. Rather than understanding homelessness primarily as the result of individual choices or a simple shortage of housing, it explores how eviction, housing financialization, unequal access to resources and systems of counting and classification produce and reproduce housing insecurity.
Drawing on examples from the United States, Portugal, Brazil, Finland and South Africa, the lecture challenges seven common myths about homelessness and housing, asking who gets counted, who receives protection, and who remains invisible within housing systems. It also considers evidence from Housing First initiatives and legal aid programmes to explore what effective responses to homelessness can look like.
Finally, the lecture approaches housing as a human right, examining the gap between rights formally recognized in law and their realization in everyday life. The central question is not simply whether we have enough homes, but why empty homes coexist with people without a home, and what this reveals about the distribution of resources, rights and urban space.
21 Setembro 2026, 20:30
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Aleksi Erik Ylönen
The ecological crisis is not simply a problem of carbon emissions, technological choices or inadequate environmental governance. It also raises fundamental questions about development, prosperity and the kinds of lives contemporary societies consider desirable. This lecture introduces post-growth thinking through a dialogue between Eduardo Gudynas’s proposals for transitions towards post-extractivism and Kate Soper’s concept of “alternative hedonism.” Gudynas challenges the identification of development with economic growth, resource extraction and material accumulation, proposing instead “alternatives to development” informed by *Buen Vivir*, ecological limits, social justice, interculturality and the recognition of multiple ways of valuing human and more-than-human life. Soper similarly questions consumerist understandings of prosperity, while emphasising that post-growth transformations need not be understood primarily through sacrifice and austerity: less consumption may enable more time, creativity, conviviality, meaningful work and forms of pleasure currently constrained by consumer capitalism.
Bringing these perspectives into International Studies highlights the unequal global relations underpinning affluent lifestyles, including extractive economies and persistent colonial divisions between centres of consumption and territories of extraction. But how can researchers identify genuinely emancipatory alternatives without reproducing the assumptions they seek to challenge? The lecture therefore argues for feminist and decolonial methodologies attentive to situated knowledge, power, care, social reproduction and historically marginalised epistemologies. Post-growth futures, from this perspective, cannot simply be designed from above: they must be investigated through dialogue with the diverse communities, movements and experiments already attempting to redefine prosperity, autonomy and the good life.
21 Setembro 2026, 18:00
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Aleksi Erik Ylönen
This lecture on China as a major power aims to explain China’s trajectory over recent decades and how it has managed to position itself as the world’s second-largest power. To achieve this objective, we shall begin with a historical perspective, followed by an examination of the internationalisation of China’s aspirations through the establishment of organisations that offer an alternative to those led by Western powers, and the management of this global actor’s ambitions within a changing international order. We shall conclude with China’s strategy for the 21st century.
