Suchergebnisse

Artikkelissa tarkastelemme suomalaista uutisointia yksin maahan saapuneista pakolaisnuorista. Aineisto koostuu Aamulehden, Helsingin Sanomien ja Ylen teksteistä vuosilta 2014–2016. Tämä ajanjakso on ollut merkittävä määrällisesti poikkeuksellisen Eurooppaan kohdistuneen maahanmuuton vuoksi. Kysymme, miten suomalaisessa uutismediassa kerrotaan yksin tulleiden nuorten tilanteesta? Millaiset teemat ovat juttujen keskiössä? Entä mitkä aihepiirit jäävät marginaaliin? Aineiston analyysin pohjalta väitämme, että kaikissa kolmessa mediassa toistuvat epäilyksen ja myötätunnon representaatiot entisestään kaventavat julkista keskustelua yksin tulleiden nuorten arjesta, vaikeuksista ja mahdollisuuksista uudessa kotimaassaan. Myöskään nuorten omaa toimijuutta ei juuri nosteta esille näissä medioissa. Artikkelimme ottaa laajemmin kantaa kahteen yhteiskunnalliseen kysymyksen. Yhtäältä jäsennämme, miten suomalainen media raportoi yksin tulleisiin liittyvästä maahanmuuttopolitiikasta ja erityisesti biopoliittisista käytännöistä. Toisaalta osoitamme, miten analyysin kohteeksi valitsemiemme medioiden välittämät representaatiot vahvistavat uhri- ja uhkadiskursseja. Nämä diskurssit eivät tue nuorten kotoutumista saati heidän aktiivista toimijuuttaan heille uuden yhteiskunnan jäseninä.

In 2015, military conflicts and related humanitarian crises neighbouring areas of Europe made millions of people leave their homes. Europe, including Finland, experienced a rapid increase in the number of asylum seekers. In this article, we examine the reception of asylum seekers by Finnish higher education institutions mainly by analysing media data written about and written by universities and universities of applied sciences in Finland. The higher education institutions, in keeping with their societal role, spontaneously developed various kinds of pop-up courses, co-operation projects and other activities for asylum seekers. These activities range from crisis work to medical clinics and sports events to language teaching. This led us to ask in this article, whether new tasks were emerging in the Finnish higher education institutions' understanding of the societal role of higher education. This main question is operationalised in three subquestions. Firstly, we are interested in seeing how higher education institutions motivate their actions on developing activities for asylum seekers. Secondly, we analyse the goals and gainers of these activities. Thirdly, we discuss the challenges faced by the higher education institutions in their refugee and asylum seeker activities. Based on our findings, we suggest that new kinds of voluntary and humanitarian activities appear to be emerging at Finnish higher education institutions, as they responded to the increase in the number of asylum seekers, suggesting a change in the traditions of societal impact of Finnish higher education. Our analysis also shows an apparent paradox in the activities of the institutions: while they had no way of knowing how many asylum seekers will remain in Finland, they still organised activities that implied staying in Finland for a longer time. The higher education institutions themselves benefitted from the activities: they could exhibit their expertise and previous research in the area of immigrant studies, and aspects of service-learning system of societal activity could be taken into their curricula. Helping the asylum seekers brought the university community together while the asylum seekers themselves remained passive objects of the activities. ; peerReviewed

Rajakontrollin menettäminen on yhä yksi kansallisvaltioiden keskeisimmistä huolenaiheista. Ajatus suvereniteetista ja yhteisestä kansallisesta kodista ovat juurtuneet syvälle oman aikamme poliittisiin rakenteisiin. Erilaisten rajojen, rajoitusten ja rajanvetojen kautta pyritään määrittelemään yksilön oikeudet toimia osana poliittista yhteisöä, tässä tapauksessa suomalaista yhteiskuntaa. Usein vasta kansakuntaan identifioitumisen nähdään muovaavan ihmisistä yksilöitä ja antavan heille viitekehyksen, josta käsin toimia. Tämä ajatusmalli johtaa ymmärrykseen, jonka mukaan kaikkien Suomessa asuvien ihmisten olisi omaksuttava yhteinen kulttuuri, joka on ennalta olemassa ja vakaa. Sitä vastoin itsen ja toisen väliset raja- ja kontaktipinnat sekä kohtaamisten aikaansaama muutos jäävät vähemmälle huomiolle. Kyseinen tutkimus pyrkii vastaamaan tähän vajeeseen ja kiinnittää erityistä huomiota kehollisiin kohtaamisiin sekä niiden poliittiseen merkitykseen. Rajojen ja rajanvetojen heijastumista yksilötasolle on tutkimuksessa tarkasteltu Suomessa vaille turvapaikkaa jääneiden kokemusten kautta. Tutkimus nojautuu vahvasti turvapaikatta jääneiden näkemyksiin, mutta myös maahanmuuttoviranomaisia ja maahanmuuttoalan ammattilaisia on haastateltu. Haastatteluaineisto osoittaa, että päätös lähteä turvapaikan hakuun kumpuaa aina havaitusta välttämättömyydestä, eikä turvapaikan hakemiseen liittyvää historiakäsitystä voida palauttaa yksittäiseen ihmiseen. Toisin sanoen joidenkin turvapaikanhakijoiden kutsuminen turvapaikkashoppailijoiksi tai järjestelmän väärinkäyttäjiksi on jo lähtökohtaisesti harhaanjohtavaa, sillä tällainen lähestymistapa jättää huomiotta asiaan vaikuttavat monimutkaiset poliittiset rakenteet ja kehityskulut. Tutkimuksen analyyttisena lähtökohtana onkin, että turvapaikkaprosessin myötä turvapaikanhakijan kehosta muovautuu paikka, jossa poliittisia suhteita tuotetaan ja luodaan uudelleen. Vaikka usein turvapaikan hakemisesta puhuttaessa korostetaan osattomuutta ja syrjäytymistä, on tässä tutkimuksessa omaksuttu toisenlainen fokus. Marginaalisesta asemastaan huolimatta turvapaikatta jääneet osallistuvat arjessaan suomalaiseen yhteiskuntaan eri tavoin, monenlaisten suhteiden välityksellä. Turvapaikanhakijat itse asiassa haastavat vallitsevan ymmärryksen kansallisvaltiosta luonnollisena tai pääasiallisena poliittisen kuulumisen paikkana ja siten tekevät paikkojen välisistä rajanvedoista monisyisempiä. Tutkimuksessa osoitetaan, miten turvapaikatta jääneet murentavat käsityksen poliittisesta elämästä jonain, joka tapahtuu vakiintuneen kansallisvaltiojärjestelmän määrittämissä puitteissa tai vakaan yhteiskunnan sisällä. Heidän moninaiset osallistumisen tapansa vievät pohjan tilalta, jossa poliittisen elämän ja olemassaolon muodot on pelkistetty kansallisen tai alueellisen turvallisuuden, järjestyksen sekä tehokkaan kontrollin teemoihin. Tutkimuksen keskeinen anti on tarjota vaihtoehtoisia tapoja keskustella siitä, mitä kuuluminen, paikattomuus ja pakkomuutto merkitsevät sekä mikä niiden suhde poliittisen elämän rajoihin ja mahdollisuuksiin on. Rajanvetojen tuntua, mieltä ja merkitystä luodaan ja niistä neuvotellaan eri tavoin kategorisoitujen kehojen välisissä suhteissa. Turvapaikkapolitiikka ei ole ainoastaan valtioiden välillä tai ylivaltiollisesti toteutettavaa toimintaa, vaan turvapaikatta jääneiden kokemukset osoittavat, että myös muunlaiset rajapinnat tulevat äärimmäisen merkityksellisiksi poliittisen paikoiksi. ; One of the greatest fears among nation-states continues to be the loss of control over their borders. Such a fear reflects the fact that sovereignty and the idea of a common national home are naturalised as the normative features of the political structures of our time. The borders, boundaries and limitations orchestrated within the international bear concrete effects on people s possibilities to enact themselves politically and are central to imagining what political life can and might be about. Indeed, these borders are instituted to reduce people s possibility to constitute themselves as political agents and claim access to socio-economic services and goods in a particular community. In this research the functioning of the border is investigated through the institution of political asylum. It is claimed that the asylum procedure with its practices of categorisation transforms the moving body into a site where political relations are reproduced. The empirical focus of this work is on failed asylum seekers in Finland. This research takes its cue from ethnographic fieldwork in three reception centres and the detention unit and interviews with failed asylum seekers and a variety of asylum professionals. With the conceptual help of Jean-Luc Nancy s philosophy of carnation, this work explores how failed asylum seekers, through their movements and acts of relating, open space for imagining political agency beyond territorially separated and ontologically fixed identities. The Nancian ontology of the body enables studying political relations without remaining captive to the dichotomous logic of sameness/alterity, identity/otherness and inside/outside. In fact, the experience of seeking asylum bears with it a sense of a history that cannot be totally owned by or reduced to an individual subject, and therefore this work is best characterised as an exploration into the ontological relationalities between selves and others. Asylum seekers both challenge and are challenged by what we think a good and happy community is. In a conventional approach on political community, identifying with a nation makes people individuals and gives them a place of reference from which to act. We, then, end up with the idea that all people in Finland should embrace the common culture, which is already given and somehow stable. With their moving bodies failed asylum seekers complicate the limits between places and disrupt the notion of political life as something that takes place either between fixed insides and outsides or within stable communities. The moving body undermines the spatial regime in which different expressions of what it means to lead a political life and be a human are flattened out and obscured by a vocabulary of security, organisation and efficiency. Through the limits embedded in the modern spatiotemporal logic this work is framed conceptually under the international. Instead of merely criticising this logic the work set out to explore the relations with and through which it expects us to talk about the possibilities of political life. By engaging with the failed asylum seekers voices, movements and their sensuous experiences this work creates new frameworks for a discussion on what belonging, displacement and being out of place mean and what their relation to political life is. While some senses of the international are produced at the border, in their daily lives the failed asylum seekers contest those senses and expose alternative ones. The relationality that characterises existence guides us towards an understanding of the international as a sphere of bodies that are with one another and that strive to surpass their artificial separation.

The so-called 'refugee crisis' has added urgency to the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in European societies. This study explores how emotions figure in this politics of belonging by studying their discursive mobilization in Finnish and Estonian public debates on asylum seekers. Focusing on presidential speeches addressing the refugee issue, on the one hand, and their reception by online commenters on popular tabloid news sites, on the other, the comparative analysis highlights both similarities and differences in how emotional expressions are employed in these two countries with very different experiences of taking refugees. Despite employing common discursive elements in their speeches, the diverging national contexts prompted the two presidents to emphasize contrasting emotional positions: the insecure Finn, threatened by abusive asylum seekers, and the compassionate Estonian, capable of identifying with the plight of refugees. In contrast, the reactions to speeches by Finnish and Estonian citizens on tabloid news sites demonstrated highly converging emotional positions. Online comments in both countries revealed deep anger and distrust of political elites among tabloid news audiences, articulating a complex relationship with the nation as a divided and exclusive political community. ; peerReviewed

In 2012, two Afghan asylum seekers camped outside the Parliament building in Helsinki during a hunger strike that lasted for 72 days. Although the protest was very visible in the city space, the mainstream media and most politicians ignored it. This paper analyzes the protest and its mediation through the concepts of borderscape and visibility. Using methods of visual and discourse analysis, we examine the ways in which the hunger strike protest – and its mediation – negotiate the (in)visibility of borders. We show how the city can be a site for both policing and for politicizing asylum issues. In particular, we focus on the ways in which protesting asylum seekers embody borders and border control, making dis-located borders visible in spaces where citizens do not see them. The concept of "borderscape" is an example of the view on borders that sees bordering as a practice that disperses borders in physical and socio-political space. Moreover, we examine the mediated reactions of various agents, such as the Lutheran church, activists, politicians, and journalists, as well as the protesters themselves, focusing on visibility as social recognition. Our analysis of the hunger strike reveals the situated gaze of social actors. It shows how border struggles are situated within landscapes of politics of protection and politics of listening. ; peerReviewed

This article aims to analyse anti-immigration discourse in the electoral and political programmes of the Finns Party from the 1990's until the parliamentary elections of 2019. A particular attention will be payed to the evolution of this topic after the refugee crisis of 2015 and the split of the party in June 2017. These events led the party to adopt a more radical angle on immigration and related questions, especially during the campaign for the parliamentary elections of April 2019. ; peerReviewed

This article analyses the role of affect and emotions in Finland's first large-scale anti-deportation protest, the 2017 Right to Live protest in Helsinki. Despite deportation protests having recently gained scholarly attention, their emotional dimensions have not been sufficiently studied, especially as concerns the emotions of protestors with vulnerable legal status. This article is based on in-depth interviews with key activists in the anti-deportation protest network in Finland, including asylum seekers, refugees and Finnish citizens. The article argues that in order for the protest of asylum seekers facing the threat of deportation to become public and visible, it was important that citizens who supported the cause not only offered material assistance but also shared their emotions. The article applies Margaret Wetherell's theoretical concept of affective practices to analyse interactions between asylum seekers and their supporters, and Sara Ahmed's circulation of affect and affective economies to explain how affect and emotions played a role in mobilizing protesters and sustaining the protest. The article concludes that the circulation of affect within the network of asylum seekers and supporters produced lasting affective value during the protest and after the protest ended. Strong affective ties enabled the protesters' network to function effectively in a challenging political climate and despite the network's lack of formal organization, leadership and shared ideological premises. ; peerReviewed