Migrant Tales insight: Throughout the years, Migrant Tales has received a lot of recognition. The latest one is from Karolina Budzisz, who wrote her thesis on anti-racism voices in Finland. During the past seventeen years, we have kept true to our goal: It aims to be a voice for those whose views and situation are understood poorly and heard faintly by the media, politicians, and the public. Migrant Tales has published 5,293 posts from over three hundred contributors to date. We stopped taking comments a few years ago, but there are 32,172 of them. We are proudly one of the anti-racism voices in Finland fighting against social ills like the Perussuomalaiset, racism, and discrimination.
Recognition of our work is the greatest reward we can get.
Abstract
Immigration remains among the most salient topics in the socio-political debate in a dynamically transforming Europe, which is reflected in the scholarly interest in the theme. However, as this thesis argues, the attention paid to anti-immigration and pro-immigration poles of the debate is not equal and the agency of immigrants in providing knowledge on the issue pertaining to them directly is relatively neglected in academia.
Read the full thesis here.
“Tales of Our Own” strives to explore the characteristics of pro-immigration and immigrant-made discourses and investigate their relationships with the dominant hostile narratives around immigration emerging in the context of the current populist upsurge. The thesis conceptualizes populism as an antagonizing mode of articulation that provides a stylistic framework for arguments inciting the process of othering. Immigrants in these circumstances constitute perfect ‘Others’, excluded through many novel narratives guising straightforward xenophobia under the mask of neoliberal values. Exploring an underdeveloped discursive frontier with regard for its authorship contributes to the study of the immigrant response and substantial argumentation in the debate. Moreover, it follows the objective of reclaiming immigration as it recuperates the voices of the very actors of it – those ‘on the move’.
Finland is introduced as a specific case study for this research. Investigating its political climate, self-perception, and international reputation allows for an additional inquest into the studied discourse’s role in contesting the hegemonic narratives about the country. The way the hosting state and society are presented in the examined data subjects the notion of Finnish exceptionalism to scrutiny.
The thesis applies a Rhetoric Performative Analysis of contents published around the Finnish parliamentary elections of 2015, 2019, and 2023 in Migrant Tales – an online, immigrant-led blog community. This method is highly advantageous for the study of antagonisms, as it is interested in the logic of equivalence (belonging) and exclusion manifested in rhetorical practices such as the use of tropology (figurative language). Drawing from Postfoundational Discourse Analysis, it assumes that the frontiers are formulated in a struggle to colonize the recurring discursive signifiers with certain meanings.
The dissertation discovers that the pro-immigration discourse is highly politicized and carries a solid agenda while remaining interactive with the competing anti-immigration narratives. The immigrants are narrated as experts of their own struggle, while Finland is narrated in a bi-polar manner, both as their cherished home and as a place of exclusion and suffering. The analysis demonstrates how the debate on immigration and, more specifically, its participants contest the notion of Finnish exceptionalism on one hand and yearn for its upkeeping, on the other.