Miriam Tedeschi | University of Turku (original) (raw)

Books by Miriam Tedeschi

Springer, 2021

This open access monograph provides an overview of the everyday lives of undocumented migrants, t... more This open access monograph provides an overview of the everyday lives of undocumented migrants, thereby focusing on housing, employment, social networks, healthcare, migration trajectories as well as their use of the internet and social media. Although the book’s empirical focus is Finland, the themes connect the latter to broader geographical scales, reaching from global migration issues to the EU asylum policies, including in the post-2015 situations and during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as from national, political, and societal issues regarding undocumented migrants to the local challenges, opportunities, and practices in municipalities and communities. The book investigates how one becomes an undocumented migrant, sometimes by failing the asylum process. The book also discusses research ethics and provides practical guidelines and reflects on how to conduct quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research about undocumented migrants. Finally, the book addresses emerging research topics regarding undocumented migrants. Written in an accessible and engaging style the book is an interesting read for students, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners.

Routledge, 2019

With cities increasingly following rigid rules for designing out crime and producing spaces under... more With cities increasingly following rigid rules for designing out crime and producing spaces under surveillance, this book asks how information shapes bodies, space, and, ultimately, policymaking.

In recent years, public spaces have changed in Western countries, with the urban realm becoming an ever-more monitored, privatised, homogeneous, and aseptic space that has lost its character, uniqueness, and diversity in the name of ‘security’. This underpins precise moral and political choices in terms of what a space should be, how it can be used, and by whom. These choices generate material consequences concerning urban inequality and freedom, or otherwise, of movement. Based on ethnographic and autoethnographic explorations in London’s ‘criminal’ spaces, this book illustrates how rules, policies and moral values, far from being abstract concepts, are in fact material. Outlining the basis of a new urban information ethics, the book both exposes and challenges how moral values and predefined categories are applied to, and materially shape, the movement of bodies in urban space with regard to crime and security policies. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s information theory and a wide range of work in urban studies, geography, and planning, as well as in surveillance studies, object-oriented ontology, and contemporary theoretical work on both materiality and affect, the book provides a radically new perspective on urban space in general, and crime and security in particular. This book uses a balanced mix of theoretical concepts and empirical study to bring theory and practice together in an intertwining of ethnography and autoethnography.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fielda of urban studies, urban geography, sociology, surveillance studies, legal theory, socio-legal studies, planning law, environmental law, and land law.

Papers by Miriam Tedeschi

The Law Teacher, 2024

At the Faculty of Law, University of Turku (Finland), law students have the possibility to attend... more At the Faculty of Law, University of Turku (Finland), law students have the possibility to attend a set of three interconnected courses: Posthuman and postmodern challenges to law; Challenging the legal truth; Law and the urban. While keeping a common critical engagement with law, each course invites students to explore the tensions and criticalities arising between law and a specific “matter”: the first course delves into law and human bodies; the second into law and non-human bodies; the third into law and space. With three different yet complementary approaches, these courses aim to cultivate a normative knowledge that is critical, experiential and embodied, situated, interdisciplinary, and extends beyond legal texts. Ultimately, they venture into efforts to reconnect law with the materiality of everyday life, bodies and spaces. This article is based on the authors’ own interconnected teaching experiences, where they experimented with alternative ways of thinking and practising law.

DIS (Designing Interactive Systems) Conference, 2024

The walkshop introduces participants to an embodied, structural approach to understand, conceptua... more The walkshop introduces participants to an embodied, structural approach to understand, conceptualize, and design experiences that blend physical and digital space to create a novel space of action, with its own sense of presence, its own afordances, and its very special challenges. It consists of an outdoors morning walking and exploratory session, and of an afternoon mapping and refective session at the conference venue. During the morning session, participants directly experience the urban fabric of Copenhagen and engage in activities meant to explore and expose the way digital and physical space commingle and become a layered blended space. During the afternoon session, the participants turn notes and observations into maps with the help of methods and tools provided by the facilitators. Attention is paid to identifying friction between pace layers and to the structure, participating elements, and relationships that support the experience in either digital, physical, or blended space, and to refect on how the structures of embodiment and spatiality shape experience and act as important, non-interface level grounding elements in the design of human activity in all types of space. The walkshop concludes with a plenary discussion of the deliverables created by participants, what insights were gained in the process, and possible developments to follow.

DRS (Design Research Society), 2024

This is the introductory editorial to the papers in the track 'Spatial Justice in Design Research... more This is the introductory editorial to the papers in the track 'Spatial Justice in Design Research: A Transdisciplinary Discourse' for DRS2024. The track is an experimental opening of a transdisciplinary conversation between researchers and professionals on the spatialities of justice: how justice permeates everyday life, and spaces and communities we live in. It takes on the challenge to bringing spatial justice down from abstract theorisations, to how it can be practiced and achieved. Here the design research contribution becomes pivotal, as it shows the 'how' of navigating socio-spatial inequalities. This is what the papers in the track do: they discuss case studies, applications, tools of investigation, to explore novel paths toward more just spatial settings.

Geography Compass

In light of the challenges surrounding the conceptualization and definition of spatial justice wi... more In light of the challenges surrounding the conceptualization and definition of spatial justice within our increasingly data-driven society, this article commences an inquiry into the convergence of space, justice, and data within human geography literature and related disciplines, focusing notably on the urban field. The paper outlines theories concerning social justice-based rights to the city, especially emphasizing the significance of existing literature that bridges such theories with recent scholarship on data justice. It supplements these discussions by deriving a theoretical framework for digital spatial justice rooted in other space-based theories, exploring the more-than-human realms of non-human entities, affect, and information.

The article explores the Pervasive Information Architecture (PIA) framework as a theory and set o... more The article explores the Pervasive Information Architecture (PIA) framework as a theory and set of tools that support the identification of both the multiple physical/digital, spatially oriented elements that make up urban life and, importantly, the obstacles and barriers to information flow between them. As an example, the article presents the application of the framework in studying how first-generation immigrants experience the urban natural environment in Turku, Finland. This research contributes to advancing our understanding of how Pervasive Information Architecture can be effectively used to analyse, design, and optimize urban landscapes, thereby promoting a more inclusive urban development.

Law and Critique, 2023

Recent algorithmic technologies have challenged law’s anthropocentric assumptions. In this articl... more Recent algorithmic technologies have challenged law’s anthropocentric assumptions. In this article, we develop a set of theoretical tools drawn from new materialisms and the philosophy of information to unravel the complex intra-actions between law and computer code. Accordingly, we first propose a framework for understanding the enmeshing of law and code based on a diffractive reading of Barad’s agential realism and Simondon’s theory of information. We argue that once law and code are understood as material entities that intra-act through in-formation, the concept of transduction allows us to trace how they push each other towards change. After developing the theoretical tools, we deploy them to make sense of how law and code have changed in response to increasing automation of decision-making and the appearance of unexplainable artificial intelligence (AI) code. Thus, we employ a case study to trace transformations of the right to explanation under the European data protection regulations. This provides the backdrop for our account of how law transduces into code (and vice versa) and a proving ground for our framework.

Culture, Theory and Critique, 2023

This article explores the ontogenesis of software (code) and law and how they are entangled and i... more This article explores the ontogenesis of software (code) and law and how they are entangled and in-form bodies and urban space. Herein, I investigate how this process of in-forming creates ruptures, differences in the otherwise smooth experience of the urban. These remain largely invisible but surface when interruptions in the everyday use of technologies affect urbanites. These interruptions might be data breaches, frauds, invasive phishing emails and the likes. Information and affect play a key role as posthuman elements in the ontogenesis. Ruptures, differences may also open up lines of flight and resistance that highlight differences rather than conceal them. Taking an ontogenetic and new materialist perspective, this paper contributes to strengthening the theoretical dialogue between law, the science of space (geography) and philosophies of technology.

GeoHumanities, 2022

This article explores how irregular migrants in/visibilise themselves in socio-spatial contexts i... more This article explores how irregular migrants in/visibilise themselves in socio-spatial contexts in Finland. Drawing upon new materialist thinking, specific strategies of in/visibilisation are interpreted herein as fully part of irregular migrants’ lawscapes, that is, of their ontological movements and the material interplays between laws and spaces, allowing bodies to create their own desired spaces of survival. This article is part of a larger research project using ethnographic methods and a new materialist approach to explore irregular migrants’ everyday lives in Finland. It shows how law is embodied by individuals and, thus, materially influences and affects their movements and emotional activities.

Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 2022

Activities in natural environments greatly enhance human well-being and can support the integrati... more Activities in natural environments greatly enhance human well-being and can support the integration of foreigners into a new country. This article explores how residents from different ethnic backgrounds in Turku, Finland appreciated and engaged with urban natural environments and how this engagement benefitted their well-being and, ultimately, their integration. Individuals enjoy activities in nature in particular ways, which may vary according to a person's physical, social, and psychological characteristics. This is especially true for immigrants who apply traditions from their home countries to the ways in which they interact with their new environment and enjoy activities in nature. Three dimensions of nature experience-social, emotional, and normative-emerged from the research, which, in turn, supported well-being and different types of integration: interactive, identificational, and cognitive. We argue that because these dimensions are an integral part of a person's identity and cultural background, familiarity with them may prove pivotal to constructing more welcoming and intercultural urban natural environments. Different approaches to engaging with nature should be considered in the design of urban environments and urban nature, as well as in integration programmes, to enhance the well-being and integration of foreign-background populations.

The Geographical Journal, 2021

This article explores how multiple layers of spacetimes overlap and merge in individuals’ lives a... more This article explores how multiple layers of spacetimes overlap and merge in individuals’ lives and relationships, transforming, enhancing, and/or hampering their abilities to interact with the environment. Drawing upon content‐analysed ethnographic notes, the article investigates the case of irregular migrants in Finland. It shows how their past activities, practices, and relationships, as well as their hopes and fears for the future, materially shape their now‐times. The latter change and evolve through a relentless combination of different past and future elements, in multiple, disparate, and often contradictory ways. This article considers how these migrants survive by inventing new activities and practices and building social relationships (with local residents and their own communities) on a daily basis, negotiating disparate elements, such as laws, digital and physical spaces, and work‐ and health‐related issues. In so doing, migrants acquire, in roundabout (non‐linear) ways, the knowledge and capacity to deal with their current, stressful conditions. The article shows how a spatio‐temporal approach can transform the emotional geographies of irregular migrants by shedding light on how they navigate the disparate and often conflicting elements of their lives, activities, and relationships.

Dialogue of Human Geography, 2021

This author’s reply responds to the commentaries by Collins, Conradson, Gilmartin, Jacobsen, and ... more This author’s reply responds to the commentaries by Collins, Conradson, Gilmartin, Jacobsen, and Shubin of my article, ‘On the Ethical Dimension of Irregular Migrants’ Lives: Affect, Becoming and Information’. What I suggest in this commentary and in the article has to be considered only as a starting point in developing an operationalisation of a Simondonian theory and vocabulary, which might provide further insights into the complexity of migration phenomena and beyond. In this response, in particular, I highlight how a spatial ethics of affects can be further developed to better comprehend migrants and their daily struggles.

GeoJournal, 2020

This article provides evidence-based results regarding current debates on transnationalism. It dr... more This article provides evidence-based results regarding current debates on transnationalism. It draws on the content analysis of the 50 most cited (according to the major academic databases and search engines in 2020) and the 50 most recent (published or forthcoming in 2019-2020) articles and/or books on transnationalism. The study analysed the main definitions of transnationalism, identified classification criteria for transnational experience, and reviewed the concept of transnationalism in the studied articles and books. In transnationalism, a broad range of economic, sociocultural, and political cross-border activities and practices, and their various combinations , modify people's sense of belonging to places; affect their citizenship and nationality; change their aspirations, imagination and decisions in everyday life; and influence their identity. In the studied academic literature, transnationalism was often associated with globalisation, migration, cosmopoli-tanism, multiculturalism, diaspora, post-migration studies, and internationalism. Transnationalism has an inner processual and in-becoming character, leading to difficulty in giving it a precise and clear theoretical definition. Many studies have shown the need for conceptual academic clarity regarding transnationalism, whether considering it from narrow or broad perspectives. Transnationalism is transfor-mative, and powerful enough to trigger changes in contemporary societies. This article suggests a number of particularly intriguing research fields regarding transnationalism: telecommunications (ICT-Information and Communication Technology/the inter-net/social media), return migration (aspirations to return, and in relation to telecommunications), as well as the connection between bodies and the law (the incorporation of the body into transnational practices and in relation to the law).

Dialogues in Human Geography, 2021

This article operationalises Simondon’s theory of becoming and Deleuze and Spinoza’s ethics and u... more This article operationalises Simondon’s theory of becoming and Deleuze and Spinoza’s ethics and unfolds their conceptualisations in the lives of a group of irregular migrants in Finland. From an ontological and ontogenetic perspective, individuals and their environment are always in a non-complete, non-linear and ethically affective state of becoming. In this sense, migrant bodies register the positive and negative affections accumulated over time, and, via information, make them a material, yet unfinished, and ready to be challenged again, part of their becoming. Applying these concepts to ethnographic fieldwork, this article highlights three dimensions of the observed irregular migrants’ becoming: their relentless efforts of becoming themselves through hardships; non-linear tensions with disparate realities, such as the bureaucratic procedures, and the negative affections the latter entail; and the struggle towards positive affections in temporary stabilities (e.g. in community life). In focusing on the processual and ontological making of migrants in their environment, the article contributes to broader debates regarding the non-linear and ethical dimensions of their everyday lives, as well as their capacity of transforming themselves, and aims at opening up dialogues on the significance of an ontogenetic approach to the field of irregular migration and beyond.

Dialogues in Human Geography, 2020

Drawing on non-representational theories in geography and beyond, this commentary provides an aut... more Drawing on non-representational theories in geography and beyond, this commentary provides an autoethnographic account of the material and spatial dimensions of the law as well as its effects and affects on bodies in-between two countries, Italy and Finland, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

plaNext. Next Generation Planning, 2016

This article explores an ethical approach to urban planning, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s ph... more This article explores an ethical approach to urban planning, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming. A central argument in this study is that the reality policymakers face when deciding how to pursue good (in the moral sense) actions or how to eschew bad ones is ontologically unpredictable and unstable. Unpredictability and instability are characteristics of urban assemblages, which compose and decompose affecting each other in a positive or negative way. Following Deleuze and Spinoza, this paper claims that urban composition and decomposition are good (empowering) and bad (harming), respectively, in an ethical and amoral sense. However, moral and fixed values, often left unchallenged in urban planning and policymaking, fail to describe these ethical transitions among assemblages: in fact, urban planning and policies’ unavoidable conatus, namely their survival as rational system, is to avoid direct confrontation with ethical and dangerous happenings and, instead, increase their power of acting so as to make urban bodies docile, controlled and normalised through standardised moral categories and classifications. These categories are but ethically generated information shorn of their situated and eventful role, acquiring the shape of data and transformed into fixed layers of apparently stable and predictable reality.

Emotion, Space and Society, 2016

This paper explores a new way of conceptualising urban space as the manifold continuum where bodi... more This paper explores a new way of conceptualising urban space as the manifold continuum where bodies encounter, affect emerges, and emotion spreads out from. With this theoretical purpose, we explore the case of poor doors, i.e. the practice of designing London buildings with two separate entrances – a main entrance for private residents and a second one for social renters. We illustrate how this practice becomes a theatre of conflict between over-hierarchized spaces of control (a by-product of urban policy) and bodies that attempt to flee them, how a whole range of disruptive emotions, such as uneasiness, rage and fear, arise as a result. We further limn this concept by referring to J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise, which recounts how the spatial order of a social hierarchy suddenly becomes an uncontrollable jumble of hatred, vengeance, and frightfulness. Drawing on Deleuze, Guattari, and Simondon’s philosophy of becoming, as well as on Spinoza’s ethics, we focus on an ontogenesis of space that actively unfolds as a rhizome, i.e. a multiplicity of bodies. In this process of unfolding, the combination of embodied layers of space relentlessly produces affects, which become emotions when they assemble to find temporary unity. Each ‘layer’ of the rhizome strives affectively and ethically for its own survival (conatus), which it might end up fighting other bodies for.

Planning Theory

Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming, as well as by Spinoza’s ethics, this a... more Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming, as well as by Spinoza’s ethics, this article advocates that planning be apprehended as a transitory construct to deal with social processes, which are inherently unpredictable, and to enact a justice that is ontologically spatial and amoral. This idea stems from conceiving of reality as the relentless encounters of bodies (assemblages) whose fight for space determines unique temporary agreements (spatial justice) as a result of power exchanges (affects) among these bodies – and of their stabilisation and escape movements, of course. This approach aims to overcome conceptualisations of justice that focus primarily on superstructural causes of injustice or on ready-made normative solutions. Although widely accepted by scholars in fields such as geography or planning research, these conceptualisations are still unable to account for the increasing incidence of social inequality our cities face. A case study, drawing on the fight for space among women in prostitution in a historic Genoa, Italy, neighbourhood, will serve as a translation from theory into practice.

Springer, 2021

Routledge, 2019

The Law Teacher, 2024

DIS (Designing Interactive Systems) Conference, 2024

DRS (Design Research Society), 2024

Geography Compass

Law and Critique, 2023

Culture, Theory and Critique, 2023

GeoHumanities, 2022

Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 2022

The Geographical Journal, 2021

Dialogue of Human Geography, 2021

GeoJournal, 2020

Dialogues in Human Geography, 2021

Dialogues in Human Geography, 2020

plaNext. Next Generation Planning, 2016

Emotion, Space and Society, 2016

Planning Theory

Over the last few years the phenomenon of the poor doors has emerged in the UK, supported by demi... more Over the last few years the phenomenon of the poor doors has emerged in the UK, supported by demiurgical and moral narratives promoting the development of mixed communities. Actually, we hold this process responsible for concealing gated communities and pretending them to be an innocuous separation of common spaces in the same houses. In fact, space is not a passive background when social processes are at stake: it is ontologically ethical and does have proper agency in shaping them. Inspired by J.G. Ballard’s book High Rise (1975) – which illustrates how the illusory order of a perfect pyramidal social hierarchy, created by the architect’s demiurgical mind, suddenly becomes an uncontrollable jumble – we argue that a rhizomatic approach to planning and an ethical understanding of space might help include the unpredictable in our work as planner.

The main current understanding and practice of justice in planning and public policies is mostly ... more The main current understanding and practice of justice in planning and public policies is mostly based on distributive and moral paradigms that involve fixed and dichotomous categories as well as meta-narratives about the (re)production of spatial and social inequalities. Approaches of this kind are actually well exemplified by interventions aimed to improve or retrofit disadvantaged urban areas. By way of example, the French national agenda has been implementing throughout the decades a very extensive policy programme known as la géographie prioritaire de la politique de la ville, which has been recently reformulated with the goal of filling the gap between territories that still show sharp differences in terms of wealth, despite the remarkable deployment of efforts and investments. We believe that the static and oversimplified reading of the reality of those territories through moral tenets and rigid taxonomies has been reducing opportunities for planning to deal with the complexity of urban dynamics. Against the dominant strand of thought (and action) on justice we would like to put forward the Spinozan-inspired ethics of Deleuze, while engaging at the same time with the late poststructuralist approach to urban studies and geography. Through a discussion of the example drawn on the French urban policies, the purpose of this paper is to open the discussion and raise some important questions about how planning could be concerned with ethics and the complexity of the real world in order to better respond to actual challenges of inequality and crisis.

by losquaderno_ journal, Cristina Mattiucci, Alessandro Coppola, Fuad Musallam, Serena Olcuire, Lucia Baima, Plácido Muñoz Morán, Miriam Tedeschi, Andrea Pavoni, Valeria Raimondi, Gaia Caramellino, and Giuseppina Forte

Retfærd (Nordic Journal of Law and Justice), 2024

NordiCHI '24 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 2024 Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 2024

As AI becomes ever more embedded into daily life and spaces, the discussion of whether AI empower... more As AI becomes ever more embedded into daily life and spaces, the discussion of whether AI empowers or disempowers human agency has garnered significant attention. However, AI agency and human agency may not necessarily represent opposing extremes on a continuum. Previous studies have suggested that humans and AI followed different decision-making strategies which lead to results complementary to each other [3, 8, 10]. The aim of this workshop is to explore the role of design in the co-construction of agency in human-AI interactions. By bringing together an interdisciplinary group of researchers in a half-day workshop, we intend to explore design issues and factors that shape agency in collaborative relationships involving humans and AI technologies. Workshop participants will be asked to submit cases where there is evident tension between human and AI agency, and, using Research Through Design, work in exploring issues of human-AI agency in scenarios fueled by the cases submitted to this workshop. As AI technologies move from emergence to being entangled in the everyday, it is increasingly important to thoughtfully design their place in our lives.