Joonas S. Martikainen

Research Interests

My main research interest is political agency as it is experienced by agents themselves and democracy as an intersubjective phenomenon. My research makes connections between multiple fields of philosophy and social criticism.

You can visit my ORCID page here. You can also visit my PhilPeople profile.

My 2025 book Political Poverty: Losing Faith in Democracy investigates the ways that individuals and groups can lose a sense of meaningful political agency while remaining ostensibly included in democratic processes. I give a heuristic diagnosis of the phenomenon and describe it as a loss of faith in oneself as a political agent and a loss of faith in the capacity of democratic institutions to bring about meaningful change. I describe such loss of faith as the fracturing of a pre-personal embodied relationship to the social world. Such loss of faith can make marginalized groups complicit in their own domination while remaining unable to challenge it.

My post-doctoral research investigates the intersubjective enabling conditions of political agency and freedom. I especially focus on the temporal dimension of intentional experience and its dependence on social factors outside the agent's control. My aim is to provide an account of the affective and experiential components of positive democratic engagement and agency.

My upcoming work investigates the experience of agency and its enabling conditions. I am also interested in solidarity as a political ethos that goes beyond understandings of solidarity as a moral relationship, providing an alternative to pre-given ethics of political practice. An important aspect of this work is the temporal aspect of our relationship to our social environment. I have a strong suspicion that our experience of time is an aspect of intentional experience which is connected to our social situation and our share in inequally shared social goods such as employment, a fact heretofore left mostly unexamined by political philosophy and theory.

Publications

• 2025 Political Poverty: Losing Faith in Democracy. Palgrave MacMillan. URL
• 2023 "A Brave New World in the Making: Fully Automated Luxury Communism as a Political Dystopia," in .
• 2021 Doctoral dissertation "Political Poverty as the Loss of Experiential Freedom". University of Helsinki, Faculty of Social Sciences, Practical Philosophy Available at Helda
• 2021 "Without a Voice of One's Own: Aphonia as an Obstacle to Political Freedom". Acta Philosophica Fennica XCVII, pp. 105–128. Philosophical Society of Finland, Helsinki.
• 2021 "Poliittinen köyhyys toimijuuden kokemuksen murtumisena: Fenomenologinen lähestymistapa poliittiseen vapauteen ja sen ehtoihin". Niin & näin: filosofinen aikakauslehti, 2/2021, pp. 20–30.

Forthcoming publications and papers under research

• "Solidarity as a Democratic Political Ethos". A paper on the concept of solidarity and how it could be understood as both a motivational concept, but also as a way of conceptualising a democratic ethos that goes beyond positing a moral relation between political agents. I am after a conception of solidarity that helps us better understand democracy as a "practice of freedom" that always questions pre-given ethical frameworks while overcoming the legal limits and borders of any pre-given demos.

Teaching

• Introduction to Social and Moral Philosophy (5 cr) In Finnish. University of Helsinki, Bachelor's studies, Practical Philosophy, Fall 2024. An introduction to Western political philosophy from the Antiquity to the present day.
• Social and Moral Philosophy (5 cr) In Finnish. University of Helsinki, Bachelor's studies, Practical Philosophy, Spring 2021 and 2022. The course focuses on the classics of 20th and 21st Century political thought from Arendt to Habermas and Rawls.
• Philosophies of Freedom (5 cr) In English. University of Helsinki, Master's studies, Practical philosophy, Fall 2021. Advanced-level course on 20th Century political philosophies of political agency and freedom.