Enroling around—Reconfiguring place and space in the wake of a new reception centre in a small rural town

Abstract

The paper examines how a small rural town Kauhava, Finland, is reconfigured in the wake of a reception centre being established. Drawing on the conceptual toolbox of the sociology of associations, we find that regardless of attitudes towards asylum seekers, people springing into action and enroling others leads to the problematisation and intensification of place. This involves turning public and private spaces into contested places. Competing definitions of community and identity emerge. While new identities are configured, new associations and ways of linking actors and places together also take form. The paper examines how the micropolitics of place and belonging are carried out in practice, and what types of mechanisms bring about or prevent new conjunctions and transformations in places. The data consist of interviews in Kauhava with town officials, reception centre volunteers, opponents of the centre and refugees who have stayed in the town.

Talking population geographies and a ‘love letter’ to the journal

“…Taking the overall volume of papers published in the journal there is merit in such a claim, although the exact truth might rather be that theory of sorts has been present but very lightly worn. Moreover, as well as brushes with Foucault and assemblage theory, as already detailed, it is possible to find explicit engagements with the likes of de Certeau and Lefebvre (Chattopadhyay, 2010;Ho & Hatfield née Dobson, 2011), Latour (Jöns, 2015;Phillips, 2010;Välimaa et al, 2023), and-maybe a particularly distinctive dimension of papers clustering in the journal, suggesting a 'Bourdieusian' (Zotova & Cohen, 2019) population geography concerned with 'doxa', 'habitas' and different forms of 'capital'-Bourdieu (e.g., Bauder et al, 2017;Boterman et al, 2018;Holt et al, 2019;Prazeres, 2018;Schapendonk, 2015;Simpson et al, 2021;Walker, 2011). useful, and I think quite a lot of money has been put into working on things like census geographies, which can of course also benefit inquiries into migration geographies, because it's seen as providing that kind of useful knowledge.…”