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in English: Migration and diversity in official curricular descriptions of university social work and UAS social services education in Finland Here we reveal patterns and themes about migrancy and migration-related diversity derived from official curricular descriptions of social work and social services education in Finland. How is migrancy understood in relation to cultural homogeneity, the welfare state and equality narratives? Our material consists of catalogue material, including syllabi and program descriptions from six universities (in Finnish and Swedish) and five Universities of Applied Sciences (in Finnish, Swedish and English). The analysis consists of identification, and abductive elaboration, of overt and covert themes in the material. The conclusion is that migration is not presented in light of human and societal diversity but as a special question pertaining to “others.” Moreover, courses on migration are usually optional. This delimits recognition of structural inequalities in social service systems. Artikkelissa kysytään, millaista ymmärrystä siirtolaisuudesta ja siihen kytkeytyvästä moninaisuudesta tuotetaan sosiaalityön yliopisto- ja sosionomi (AMK) -koulutusten opetussuunnitelmissa sekä miten siirtolaisuus suhteutuu yhtenäiskulttuuria, hyvinvointivaltiota ja yhdenvertaisuutta koskeviin kertomuksiin. Aineistona ovat lukuvuonna 2017–2018 voimassa olleet sosiaalityön opetussuunnitelmat kuudessa yliopistossa (suomi ja ruotsi) sekä sosionomi (AMK) -koulutuksen opetussuunnitelmat viidessä ammattikorkeakoulussa (suomi, ruotsi, englanti). Analyysimenetelmänä on laadullinen abduktiivinen sisällönanalyysi. Tulosten perusteella siirtolaisuudesta ei yleensä puhuta osana elämän ja yhteiskunnan moninaisuutta vaan erilliskysymyksenä. Siten käsitys yhtenäiskulttuurista ja palveluiden tasa-arvoisuudesta voi jatkua. Lisäksi siirtolaisuusteemat sijoittuvat yleensä valinnaisille erityiskursseille. Tämä voi vaikeuttaa palvelujärjestelmän rakenteellisen eriarvoisuuden tunnistamista.

Globally spreading neoliberal doctrines regarding the need to ‘flexibilise’ the allegedly bureaucratic welfare states have been shown to contribute to the ‘flexibilisation’ of care work, involving austerity measures and reliance on migrant labour. Focusing on public eldercare in Finland, this chapter adds to the literature a close intersectional examination of the exploitative ‘coping management’ that the neoliberal discourse underpins. This management style fails to challenge inadequate resources and instead extorts nurses, treating them as disposable routine workers. We argue that coping management is expressed through ‘flexibility talk’ that emphasises personal characteristics rather than formal skills, and that there is an inherent affinity between ‘flexibility talk’ and ‘migrant flexibility talk’. We maintain that the re-articulation of care work as work requiring ‘flexibility’ and therefore particularly fitting for migrants has problematic gendered and racialised implications in the workplace. Our analysis draws on interviews with managers in public eldercare and observations from eldercare units in Finland. We show how the practices and discourses of flexibilisation help care managers to reconcile the practical and ethical dilemmas they face in ways that appear morally and locally sustainable to them. We have observed that care managers do not currently recognise migrant nurses as stakeholders worthy of equal recognition.

In this article, we contribute to an emerging body of literature concerning the often-overlooked topics of access and consent in research. We posit our understanding of access and consent as continuous ethical reflection and negotiation, conceptualised here as ethical performance, which is particularly valuable in research in institutional contexts defined by numerous power asymmetries. We draw empirically from research on street-level institutional encounters between social work practitioners and migrant-background service users in the Helsinki capital region. Access in this research was a multi-stage process including various stage-related negotiations, and the previous stages always influenced the stages that followed. Nevertheless, access and consent were always erratic and subject to revision. We describe how the need for ethical reflexivity arises in various concrete, often unpredictable, situations, and argue for the importance of paying explicit analytical attention to negotiations regarding access and consent.

In 2007, a private recruitment agency started recruiting nurses from the Philippines to private elderly care homes and to operation wards in Finland. Although less than a hundred nurses have been recruited to Finland, the recruitment has received extensive media attention. Applying discourse analysis to the media data, the article analyzes the ways in which Filipino subjects were constructed by the Finnish media. We distinguish three types of categories relating to Filipino nurses as ‘good migrant/suspect worker’, ‘global commodity’ and as a ‘colonized subject’. The article argues that the discourse depicting Filipino subjects is a form of neoliberal postcolonialism, which combines a global geography of colonial power with a discourse of individualized economic risks and responsibilities.

While the Roma in Finland share history and national myths with the majority population, they have maintained their particular sense of identity. In spite of increasing recognition, manifested in legislation, their socio-economic position is still poor. This article explores the articulation of citizenship, identity and belonging among Finnish Roma. The study is based on conversation-like interviews with Romani activists. Recognising the marginalised position of Finnish Roma, the interviews are seen as a form of claims-making. The overarching narratives which evolve from the material point to a threefold sense of exclusion from full citizenship, entailing a material, symbolic and emotional dimension. While notions of the “good state” constitute a rather dominant and inclusive narrative, exclusionary practices are located in the area between the public and private realm.

Processes of defining citizenship become particularly exposed in a media context, since this is an arena where a broad range of actors get their voice heard. The aim of this contribution is to explore the claims-making activities by different actors in stories about the Roma in Finnish newspapers. I want to elucidate the access to the mediated space and provide some examples of how citizenship claims are raised and contextualised. The empirical study is based content analysis and qualitative text analysis of articles from 1990-2003 in both the largest Finnish-language and the largest Swedish-language daily newspapers (Helsingin Sanomat and Hufvudstadsbladet). While Romani voices do have the possibility to contest dominant views in newspaper stories related to the Roma, this article argues, firstly, for a diversified coverage on Romani issues and, secondly, for increasing dialogue between a broader group of actors.

The arrival of groups of Romani asylum‐seekers in Finland during 1999–2000 sparked an intense political debate, largely conducted in the press. The Finnish Aliens Act was eventually changed and ‘manifestly unfounded’ applications could be rejected in accordance with an accelerated procedure. By scrutinising the press debate on Romani asylum‐seekers this article sheds light on the articulation of various nation‐state dilemmas in relation to immigration control. Empirically the article draws on argumentation and claims‐making by different actors: political and administrative elites, experts, NGOs and the Roma. By the use of instrumentalist ‘common sense’ arguments, the elite actors point to the significance of protecting the Finnish nation‐state, but also of situating the young nation‐state in an international community. The marginalised position of the Roma is reproduced through their lack of space in the debate.

Research on welfare regimes and migration regimes has shown that Sweden and Finland have similar elderly care regimes but different migration regimes. It is against this backdrop that we set out to study what Swedish and Finnish daily press focusing on elderly care has written about ethnic minorities, migrants and migration. The study uses quantitative content analysis to analyze 241 daily newspaper articles published between 1995 and 2008. This article presents the themes that have been discussed, the elderly care actors that have been in focus (i.e. whether the focus has been on elderly care recipients, elderly care providers or informal caregivers), the ethnic backgrounds that these actors have had (i.e. whether the focus has been on the ethnic majority or on ethnic minorities) and the type of explanatory frameworks that the newspaper articles in focus have used. On the basis of this, we problematize the representations of ethnic minorities, migrants and migration that the newspaper articles in question put forth and the fact that the Swedish and Finnish daily press treats the issues at hand as if migration is mostly an issue that can be relegated to the periphery of the elderly care sectors’ agenda.

Media representations are important sources of information especially about contexts that people have limited access to (such as the one we address here, that is, elderly care). Representations of this also give us an insight into how ethnicity-, culture-, and migration-related issues are regarded. This article aims to shed light on media representations related to the nexus of elderly care, ethnicity, and migration in Sweden and Finland, given that the two countries have similar elderly care regimes but different migration regimes. The study uses quantitative content analysis to analyze all of the daily newspaper articles on elderly care that have touched upon these issues and have been published in one major newspaper in each country between 1995 and 2011 (N=347). In this article, we present the topics that these newspaper articles discuss; the elderly care actors that the articles focus on (i.e. whether the focus has been on elderly care recipients, elderly care providers or informal caregivers); the ethnic backgrounds of those who expressed themselves in the articles (i.e. whether the focus has been on the ethnic majority or on ethnic minorities); and the type of explanatory frameworks used in the daily press reporting in question. The article problematizes the media representations of ethnicity- and migration-related issues within the Swedish and Finnish elderly care sectors that the analysis has unveiled in relation to the debate on the challenges that the globalization of international migration poses to the elderly care sector.Keywords: Media representations; elderly care regimes; migration regimes; migrants; Sweden; Finland(Published: 19 November 2014)Citation: Vulnerable Groups & Inclusion. http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/vgi.v5.21260