Neighbourhood solidarities – Naapurisolidaarisuus

• Halme-Tuomisaari, Miia, Tapaninen-Anna-Maria & Aunela, Hilma. 2019. Where’s the well: DNA evidence, personal narratives and unpredictability in Finnish family reunification. Migration Studies, 7(2), 245-265.

This article analyses the decisions of the Administrative Court of Helsinki and looks at the tensions between, on the one hand, decisions on asylum and, on the other, family reunifications. It is contextualised in the scholarship on biotechnologies and in the flourished ethnography of documents, this article is ultimately about the indeterminacy and superficiality about the ‘law’.

• Merikoski, Paula. 2019. Hospitality, reciprocity, and power relations in the home accommodation of asylum seekers in Finland. In Contested Hospitalities in a Time of Migration: Religious and Secular Counterspaces in the Nordic Region. Bendixsen, S. & Wyller, T. (eds.). London: Routledge, 113-128.

This book chapter discusses the power relations inherent in hospitality which affect reciprocity and the relationship formed in home accommodation of asylum seekers. It discusses also the different ways in which spatial bounaries at home as well as boundaries of belonging to family are negotiated by the hosts and guests.

• Tapaninen, A-M., M. Halme-Tuomisaari and V. Kankaanpää. 2018. Mobile lives, immutable facts: family reunification of children in Finland. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2017.1405725  

In this article, we focus on the underage children/youth, who have come to Europe without a guardian. Policy reforms speak of a growing polarity between, on the one hand, adherence to the ‘best interest of the child’ and family life, and on the other, suspicion of fraud. This article examines these tensions via exploration of family reunification procedures in Finland, particularly applications sponsored by minors, thereby drawing attention to the notion of ‘the anchor child’. Drawing on decisions by the Administrative Court of Helsinki as well as interviews with experts and the people concerned, the writers discuss how these polarities are managed in practice, centring their analysis on a quest for truth that deploys various methods, particularly DNA analysis and oral hearings. Ultimately the article highlights an intrinsic paradox in family reunification policies that incorporates the aspiration to produce facts amounting to ‘immutable mobiles’ (Latour 1986) and the evident weight of contingent temporalities.

• Tapaninen, Anna-Maria. 2018. Rajalla laboratoriossa: iän arviointia, iän määrittämistä ja ikämääräyksiä. Tiede & edistys 3/2018: 216–237.

This article discusses medical age assessment of youth who have come to Finland to seek asylum alone, without a guardian. On the basis of interviews with forensic dentists, officials, lawyers and experts in NGO’s, it contrasts the hegemonic trust in exact scientific ‘truth’ with obvious contingency, uncertainty, ethical and legal problems.

• Maury, O. (2018) Kansainväliset opiskelijat prekaarina työvoimana Suomessa: Kokemuksia työnteosta opiskelijan oleskeluluvan varassa. Sosiologia. 55(4): 334-349.

The article critically engages with governmental aims to attract foreign talent and create a Finnish educational brand. As opposed to the mobility of people understood simply through state categories, I demonstrate that people arrive in Finland and end up as students for many reasons and that their attitudes about studying and engaging in paid labour change over time. Many perform precarious jobs involving different manual or service tasks at the same time as others function as underpaid experts, thus disrupting a simplistic division between highly skilled experts in the knowledge economy relying on low-skilled migrant labour in the service sector. Lastly, the article points to a situation in which the language requirements for certain jobs, in combination with other forms of social differentiation, can function as a modality of differential inclusion through which workers are excluded from access to jobs requiring high levels of education but included in the low paid sector.

https://helda.helsinki.fi//bitstream/handle/10138/325156/artikkeli_maury_MM_RH_Olivia_Final.pdf?sequence=1

• Maury, O. (2018) Statut migratoire et développement humain: le cas des étudiants-migrants en Finlande [Migration status and human development : the case of student-migrants in Finland], Migrations société 171(1) :  79-92.

The article examines the tensions between governing labour force and governing borders by discussing non-EU student-migrants experiences of working in Finland. I contend that these tensions arise in ’bureaucratic field’ of the nation-state approached, in which overlapping logics of work, borders and education confront each other.