Annika Valtonen, Tampere University: Immigrants accounting for exerting agency in problematic everyday encounters
Immigrants’ experiences of belonging and being a valued part of society are built, but also dismantled, in everyday interactions. Where mutually amicable and respectful encounters foster these experiences, problematic interactions and discrimination cause long-lasting feelings of otherness and exclusion instead. Navigating through problematic encounters is commonplace yet distressing for immigrants living in Finland.
Being able to form these troublesome experiences into a comprehensive, tellable narrative is integral for overcoming their negative effects through social support, and for seeking social change. However, this task is dilemmatic in various ways. First, accounting for interactional trouble is complicated by moral work, such as efforts to protect both the narrator’s and the account recipient’s faces. Second, the interactional trouble may be subtle and thus hard to verbalize into a coherent narrative. Additionally, lacking shared language during the troublesome encounter makes communicating the core of the problem difficult.
A dataset of 23 single-person interviews with immigrant participants and 2 focus-group interviews with intercultural discussion group attendees is analyzed, with focus on immigrants’ narratives of exerting their agency in problematic encounters. Using Bamberg’s narrative positioning analysis, the following research questions are explored: 1) How do immigrants position themselves as moral actors in the narratives and in the storytelling interactions; and 2) What challenges of telling occur in the storytelling interactions?
Findings illuminate how immigrants exert their agency in navigating everyday problematic encounters, and the dilemmas related to accounting for these experiences. The presentation concludes by discussing how the findings can be utilized for promoting social change.
Iida Kauhanen, University of Oulu: Claiming equity: Unrecognised participation of youth ‘at risk’
Young people and especially young, forced migrants are commonly not recognised as speakers. Instead of being seen as valuable participants of the society, forced migrants are often portrayed as vulnerable, at risk population and as “passive targets of our help” (Baak, 2021). Simultaneously, various models are designed to enhance youth participation to activate the ‘passive youth’. This kind of emphasis on creating new models to activate the youth, neglects the existing active demands made by young people whose voices are deserving of recognition, particularly those in minority positions.
Building on the concept of active equity rooted in Rancière’s notion of equality (1991) and expanded by Lanas and colleagues (2023), this paper focuses on participation from the point of view of activism displayed by forced migrant youth themselves. Lanas et al. (2023) argue that active equity is evident in the ways youth participate in their surroundings, demanding their rights, even when these demands go unrecognized. This paper specifically explores the experiences of young people whose participation is consistently overlooked.
The material utilised for analysing participation in this research consist of two different datasets: the first (2018-2019) employs feminist ethnography with 13 unaccompanied youth. The second (2022), from the research consortium Mobile Futures, uses walking interviews with four forced migrant youth. This paper discusses how these young individuals asserted their rights as active participants and sheds light on the reality that their demands often went unheard.
Rūta Šerpytytė, Tampere University, Aalto University: Participatory design approaches to build migrants’ agency
Participatory Design (PD) is often considered as a democratic approach that engages a diverse set of actors throughout the cycle of design. PD’s ethos aims for not just participation of different communities, but for equitably centring narratives from underrepresented populations, balancing power relations, and facilitating community self-determination (Escobar, 2018; Harrington et al., 2019; Young et al., 2024, Björgvinsson et al., 2012). However, while the Nordic roots of PD lie in engaging with societal issues of labour rights in the 70s (Bødker, 2021), under the neoliberal ideas of individualisation, depoliticisation and rapid technological developments, it has moved away from big questions and focused on sporadic PD interventions such as one-off workshops to find quick solutions for immediate problems.
Design as a field often aims for inclusion and empowerment of “vulnerable” communities and migrants across different contexts (Ramírez & Coşkun, 2020; Krüger et al., 2021; Pollini & Caforio, 2021; Bustamante Duarte et al., 2021). However, migrants are not a monolithic group, with different languages, cultural backgrounds, education, motivation, duration of stay, religions, and professions (Bobeth et al., 2013), which creates tensions when aiming for generalisable solutions (Hodson et al., 2023). Moreover, ascribing the term “vulnerable” for migrants can have negative implications by reinforcing stereotypes or even be used to justify policies that focus on perceived vulnerabilities instead of addressing the real migrant needs (Era & Mäkinen, 2022).
Keeping in mind the criticism of PD’s performative, solutionist notions, we still see the potential of using this methodology for building agency and capacity among migrants, allowing them to engage and integrate with society on their own terms. To create such conditions, it’s crucial to not only re-engage with the political and embed these practices to an institutional context, but also keep the principles of emancipation, power redistribution, and contestation in mind.
Liselott Sundbäck, Mobile Futures research project, Åbo Akademi University: Methodological reflections on researching place bound trust and distrust among migrant background stay-at-home parents
Migrant background stay-at-home parents, especially mothers, are a group positioned often both at risk (e.g. in relation to academia by emphasizing structural vulnerability and ethical approvals) and a risk (e.g.in relation to employability by the Finnish right-wing government). However, little is known on how parents themselves make sense of and experience everyday life in Finland, especially from a place and space bound trust perspective.
This paper sets out to discuss research settings for a newly started research project on place bound trust and distrust among migrant background stay-at-home parents. Methodologically, it strives towards co-creation of knowledge through co-research. As the research is only about to begin, the paper discusses potentials, possible tensions, positionings and agency within this research setting. The intention is to explore trust and distrust through co-research discussion groups, pictures, walkings (to trust-related places, institutions) however, these suggestions will be further developed, changed and decided on together with the co-researchers.
Trust and distrust sense making among migrants have in previous studies been showed to evolve partly around the notion of safety. This then poses the following questions: how to carry out co-research on the balance between structural vulnerability and various forms of agency? How to grasp notions of ontological safety among stay at home parents, especially in a space/place context, without othering? Hence, the presentation explores notions of situated vulnerability, agency, embodied knowledge and epistemic interactions in relation to research on trust and distrust.
