This article analyses how processes of 'human capitalisation' work in various labour-market activation services aimed at young people in Finland. Drawing on multi-site ethnographic research on activating workshops, public employment services, and career counselling for youth in the Helsinki metropolitan region of Finland in 2014-2016, we trace sites and instances of human capitalisation. Capturing processes through which previously non-economic areas of life become economised, human capitalisation marshals abilities, skills, knowledge and a consumeristic understanding of self-responsibility. Its promise is a more flexible workforce that can be adjusted to the varied demands of the labour market in the future. Taking a Foucauldian approach to governmentality, our research demonstrates that activation practices focus on generating a form of human capital that enhances a particular relation to and understanding of one's self, body and skills.

The article examines children’s clothes in the practices of everyday life in day care. The data for the article are drawn from an ethnography of three- to seven-year-old children’s day care groups in a day care centre intended for children of shift-working parents in southern Finland. Rather than focusing on the relations between identity, representation and clothing, the article examines what clothes do in the everyday practices of day care. Clothes are seen, first, as mediating perception, and, second, as taking part in and maintaining affective everyday practices. The effects of wearing clothes are analysed using the concept of plug-ins by Latour and that of affordances proposed by Gibson. The plug-ins detect the ways in which objects transmit selfhood, while affordances describe the relation between body and environment in perception. Through the analysis of everyday practices of wearing clothing, clothes are seen as connectors. They enhance, diminish or expand possibilities for perception, action and affective practices in which children engage, thereby altering the children’s ways of being. The article proposes that the wearing of clothing plays a role in constituting selfhood outside of mere representations.

In this article, I explore the orientations towards the future and their consequences for action in youth activation workshops. My analysis is drawn from a distinction between embodied and embedded futures, on one hand, and empty and decontextualised futures, on the other hand. The relations among past, present and future times are explored, as well as the embodied or disembodied nature of orientations towards the future. I analyse the embodied orientations towards the future through Bergson's work. The collisions between two different time frames and projections for the future are found to require adjustments on an individual level in the private sphere. The various orientations towards the future are valued differently, and the embodied orientation is overridden by an understanding of the future as empty or even cruel. Nonetheless, I interpret the future to be active and to produce effects. My analysis draws from empirical data based on an ethnography conducted in youth activation workshops in the metropolitan area of Helsinki, Finland.

This article examines the dynamic process constituting the researcher-subject in ethnographic fieldwork. Applying the theoretical framework of AN Whitehead AN (1964) The Concept of Nature: The Tarnell Lectures Delivered in Trinity College in 1919. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Whitehead AN (1929/1985) Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Free Press, I argue that the ethnographical researching subject is the outcome of fieldwork. I analyse field encounters and illustrate how the ethnographer is constituted differently depending on the field. The field encounter consists of multiple, sometimes overlapping, entities. The entities present in the field encounter may stem from the past illuminating how endurance and change simultaneously operate in the constitution of the ethnographer. Following Whitehead’s thinking, there is no separation between experience and datum. This emphasises how even in the process of knowing the subject and object of research are entwined. This article is a conceptual analysis of selected empirical cases illustrating the emergence of the researcher-subject in fieldwork encounters. I base my analysis on cases from four ethnographic fieldworks I have conducted.

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