In this article, we examine how ethnic Finnish migrants construct their ethnic identities before and after migrating from Russia to Finland. We use a discursive psychological (DP) approach to analyse our longitudinal focus group data. In the analysis, we focus on the ways in which the participants use category labels, rhetorical devices, interpretative repertoires and other discursive resources in accounting for their identities. We also consider the social functions these identity constructions have over the course of migration. In the pre-migration data, participants mostly presented themselves as Finns. In the post-migration data, a larger variety of self-labels was used and the Finnish identity was explicitly problematized. The three main interpretative repertoires used when constructing identities both in Russia and in Finland were the biological repertoire, the repertoire of socialization and the repertoire of intergroup relations.

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Social psychological research on immigrant integration has predominantly examined multiculturalism from the perspective of majority members, and has seen it to be in conflict with that of minority members. In this discursive psychological study, we analyzed how members of the Finnish majority and different immigrant groups discussed managing ethnic and cultural diversity. As a result, four different interpretative repertoires of multiculturalism were identified. The first two repertoires normalize the hierarchical relations between immgrants and hosts. The other two repertoires questioned and criticized multiculturalism as an official policy or as everyday practices that highlight the importance of ethnic and cultural group memberships and that enable the discriminatory and essentializing treatment of immigrants. Our analysis showed that both minority and majority members can make sense of and orient towards multiculturalism in many different ways and that, contrary to the common assumption based on previous research, the viewpoints presented are not always clearly divided between the groups. Finally, implications of the results for multiculturalism as an ideology and as practices are discussed.

This study examines the discursive construction of Finnishness within the context of Ingrian Finns' return migration from Russia to Finland. The focus is on how characteristics of Finnishness, especially ancestry and language, are employed at institutional, community and interpersonal levels of text and talk. The results show how the same characteristics can be used to both in-and exclude Ingrian Finns from the national ingroup, and how essentialist notions of ethnonational belonging can be used strategically by both state authorities and Ingrian Finns themselves to make claims about their Finnishness and right to remigrate.

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