Autonomous territories are geographically delimited areas where political, social, and cultural capacities have been devolved to accord a measure of self-governance to the region. The & Aring;land Islands, an autonomous territory within the unitary Finnish state, have issued stamps for more than 40 years as an element of the islands' autonomous capacities. This paper explores the & Aring;land Islands' stamps issued between 1984 and 2024 by conducting a thematic analysis and categorizing the stamps by visual content. The paper develops this analysis by considering how the stamps issued by the & Aring;land Islands differ thematically from those produced by the Finnish state and by exploring the themes of autonomy and & Aring;land as islands of peace in the visual representations on the stamps. For autonomies, the issuance of stamps is an opportunity to express cultural competence as distinct from but still as part of the central state. Stamps are a medium through which territory is visually narrated not only by states but a variety of actors in the international system.
This paper investigates the sensitivity of neighbourhood effect estimates to the operationalization of contextual poverty. It introduces the Problem of Uncertain Contextual Characteristic (PUCC), which refers to uncertainty surrounding what is measured and represented when constructing contextual variables, potentially resulting in estimation bias. Using longitudinal micro-data from Dutch population registers (2011-2020), we assess four key parameters when operationalizing poverty: poverty dimensions, reference groups, poverty-line thresholds, and aggregation statistics. We undertake a systematic analysis modelling the effect of each poverty indicator while keeping all other factors constant. We also generate models including different residential context scales and geographies to compare the effects of PUCC with other sources of estimation variation. Results show that the operationalization of contextual poverty substantially influences the estimated neighbourhood effects on individual income. In our analyses, the operationalization of contextual poverty introduced greater variation than the residential context's scale or the geographical extent of the study. Findings further suggest that PUCC and the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) are closely related, as the impact of contextual poverty measures varies significantly across spatial scales.
Flexibility is the defining promise of the gig economy, yet also its central contradiction. Often framed as a benefit, flexibility operates dialectically, as both a mechanism of control and a potential site of agency. Workers' ability to navigate or resist precarity is shaped by their position within segmented labour markets, their subjectivities, and broader socio-economic structures. The gig economy is not a single labour market, then, but a stratified one in which conditions vary drastically across sectors and worker groups. This paper examines two differently situated workers in distinct segments of gig work to explore the determinants of precarity. It identifies three key dialectical tensions: (1) flexibility as both freedom and control; (2) gig work as promizing autonomy but delivering insecurity; and (3) the gig economy as simultaneously embedded in and excluded from Sweden's labour market model, undermining protections whilst reproducing exclusion. Through digital mediation, task atomization, and misclassification, gig work entrenches inequality in new ways. In Sweden, Europe's most segregated labour market, the gig economy exacerbates existing divisions. Whilst some workers benefit, others, particularly racialized migrants, face deepened precarity and algorithmic discipline. Rather than disrupting hierarchies, Sweden's gig economy reinforces them through new forms of segmentation and spatio-temporal discipline.
