In this article, identity politics is understood as a form of politics stressing collective but malleable group identities as the basis of political action. This notion of identity politics also allows thinking of identity as intersectional. The focus of this paper, and a problem related to identity politics, is that when discussed in the context of the neoliberal order, identity politics has a tendency to become harnessed by the ethos of vulnerability. Some implications of the 'vulnerabilizisation' are considered in the field of education, which is a field currently thoroughly affected by neoliberalism.Therefore, it is also important to look closer at the relationship between identity politics and the ethos of vulnerability. In addition, we re-consider poststructuralist thinking as a theoretical and political approach to see what it can offer in terms of re-thinking identity politics and in analyzing the ethos of vulnerability. When categories of vulnerability keep expanding into various psychoemotional vulnerabilities defining subjects that can be known and spoken about, it is crucial to ask whether we regard these changes as educationally and politically progressive. The article discusses some problematic policies in educational environments and the phenomenon of trigger warnings.

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Vuonna 2015 Eurooppaan pyrki Lähi-idästä ja Pohjois-Afrikasta historiallisen suuri joukko turvapaikanhakijoita, pakolaisia ja siirtolaisia. Osa heistä päätyi suuntaamaan Suomeen Pohjois-Ruotsin ja Venäjän rajojen yli. Lapin sodan aikaan, vuonna 1944, pakolaisvirta kulki toiseen suuntaan: Suomesta Ruotsiin. Artikkeli tarkastelee taideteosta, jossa rinnastetaan nämä kaksi aikatasoa ja tapahtumakulkua.Minna Rainion ja Mark Robertsin lyhytelokuva They Came in Crowded Boats and Trains (2017 Suomi) kuvaa ”pohjoista” osin uudesta näkökulmasta. Elokuvan päähenkilöt, reaalielämässään itse turvapaikanhakijoita, ovat lukuisten mediaesitysten kehyksessä tunnistettavasti ”eteläisiä” hahmoja pohjoisessa maisemassa. Teoksen kertojaääni taas lukee otteita pohjoissuomalaisten pakolaisten kirjeistä ja päiväkirjoista seitsemänkymmenen vuoden takaa.Teoksessa menneisyyden ja nykyisyyden tapahtumat asettuvat ajan ja paikan ylittävään dialogiin. Kysymme artikkelissa, millainen kulttuurinen muisti ja kuvasto on rakentunut evakkouden ympärille ja miten Rainion ja Robertsin teos asettuu suhteessa siihen. Onko kahden aikakauden pakolaiskuvien välillä löydettävissä samanlaisuutta tai eroja? Analysoimme teoksessa rakentuvia suhteita ja asetelmia, kuten eri ajassa matkaavien pakolaisten eroja, erilaisuutta ja vertaisuutta, mutta myös elokuvassa rakentuvaa tietoisuutta suhteessa pakolaisuutta määrittäviin valtarakenteisiin ja historiallisiin rinnastuksiin.Escape from the North and to the North: Two Temporal Levels of Exile in the short film They Came in Crowded Boats and TrainsIn 2015 a historically vast number of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants strived towards Europe from the Middle East and North Africa. Some of them ended up arriving in Finland, crossing the borders from either Northern Sweden or Russia. During the Lapland War, in 1944, the stream of refugees went to the opposite direction: from Finland to Sweden. In our article, we discuss a work of art, which draws a parallel between these two temporal levels and historical events. Minna Rainio and Mark Roberts’s short film They Came in Crowded Boats and Trains (2017 Finland) describes “the North” partly from a new perspective. The protagonists of the film, asylum seekers in their personal life, are in the framework of countless media representations recognizable as “southern” figures in a northern landscape. The voiceover in the film, however, reads excerpts from letters and diaries of northern Finnish refugees or evacuees from 70 years ago.In the film the events of past and present are situated in a dialogue, which transgresses both time and place. In the article we ask what kind of cultural memory and imagery has been constructed around being evacuated in 1944, and how Rainio and Roberts’ film situates itself in connection with this memory and imagery. How are the refugees represented in the film, and what kinds of similarities and differences are there to be found between the refugee representations of the two different eras? What kinds of associations, insights, and maybe even objections or criticisms the film evokes? Our article analyzes relations constructed in the narration: differences and similarities represented between refugees traveling in different times, but also the consciousness built in the film in relation to existing power structures and historical parallels defining what it means to be a refugee.

The result of the U.S. presidential elections 2020 included a feminist victory, also from an intersectional point of view: for the first time in the country's history the elected vice-president was a woman, and a woman with an Indian-Jamaican family history. For anybody who thinks Kamala Harris might in her new position help start a new chapter in American women's rights, Lynn S. Chancer's book After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism offers an interesting perspective, both critical and positive.Being a 1960s child, Harris (who also as a schoolchild participated in Berkeley's comprehensive desegregation plan) actually is approximately as old as the "second and third waves" of the American feminist movement, the topic of Chancer's book. Harris' rise from a middle-class academic background to the top of the political system of the United States may also be read as the rise of American feminism -without the "stall" Chancer is also interested in. The agenda of her book is to find reasons for only partial successes of feminism in the United States, and even provide some ideas for ways to get beyond contemporary dilemmas of the feminist movement. The latter solutions, one could claim, may to some extent apply to feminism globally.Chancer has written her analysis and critique in the context of Donald Trump's presidential term, and the major offences against American women's and minority rights that political period of time made possible. Nevertheless, this period marked also an era of remarkable resistance, including feminist mass demonstrations around the time of Trump's inauguration and the #MeToo campaign, which again can be seen as one of the impacts American feminism has made globally.Throughout the book Chancer focuses on both the success of the feminist movement and the "tapering off, plateauing, or political pausing" (especially in this millennium) that has taken place since the 1970s. The