In 2017, in the center of Helsinki, the Right to Live collective, consisting of Iraqi and Afghan asylum seekers and their allies, protested day and night for more than 6 months against unjust asylum processes and deportation. By so doing, the collective broke the culture of gratefulness that asylum seekers in Finland have traditionally adhered to and stretched the understanding of who and what constitutes civil society. In this chapter, I explore the following questions: what are the strategies used by the collective for gaining voice, visibility and legitimacy as information sources or experts in the public sphere; and what are the main obstacles that hinder protesting asylum seekers from being understood? The theoretical framework through which these questions are approached is formed around the contradiction between the “right to be under stood” (Husband 1996) and the “impossibility” of political activism by asylum seekers (Nyers 2003).
In this article, we show how everyday difference is conceptualised in Finland through our analysis of media products for children (<em>HBL Junior</em>, <em>HS Lasten Uutiset</em>, and <em>Yle Mix</em>). We consider media as a part of the “lived curriculum”<em> </em>through which media professionals intentionally or unintentionally reproduce particular discourses of difference and sameness that become part of children’s everyday learning and understanding of multicultural society. Our aim in doing so is to consider what marks these discourses produced specifically for children, and what versions of difference they replicate and advance. We find that children’s media advances discourses of “comfortable conviviality” through the paradigms of colour-blind friendship, the universal experience of childhood, and through a firm belief in social cohesion as the master signifier of Finnish society. Through the lens of inclusiveness, we discuss the implications of these discourses on journalism and media literacy.
While ethnic hierarchies and labour market enclaves are commonly discussed at the macro level, this study focuses on a less explored area of research, namely, the study of ethnic and professional hierarchies on the level of mediated discourse. Taking various kinds of online discussion forums as the empirical entry point, this article sets out to answer if and how ethnicity, migrant background and/or language skills emerge as new hierarchical logics beside divisions, such as gender and education, when professional status is assigned online. Drawing on affect theory and the notion of status conflict, this article argues that in Finnish online discussion forums, the high-skilled migrant care worker is envisioned as a paradoxical figure who at the same time is seen as a saviour from abroad and an "affect alien" who causes confusion and discomfort. Both positions, the article argues, are the fruits of a narrow discursive construction of the commodified high-skilled migrant as "a servant" for our needs.
KeywordsGlobalising health-care industry • migrant physicians • online discussion forums • status conflicts and affect
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