I am an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of Lapland. My work focuses on political struggles over welfare state and citizens’ social rights and responsibilities as well as on governmental aspirations and resistance to them. My intellectual home is in cultural theory, the major directions of interest being Bourdieusian and Foucauldian thinking, British cultural studies and French pragmatic sociology. In addition, I have a strong interest in qualitative research methods, in particular the use of semiotic sociology and narrative research.