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This article is part of the issue “Inclusive Media Literacy Education for Diverse Societies” edited by Çiğdem Bozdağ (University of Groningen / University of Bremen), Annamária Neag (Charles University), and Koen Leurs (Utrecht University) In this article, we show how everyday difference is conceptualised in Finland through our analysis of media products for children (HBL Junior, HS Lasten Uutiset, and Yle Mix). We consider media as a part of the “lived curriculum” 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.

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).

The starting point for this chapter is that hybridization processes in contemporary media spheres, together with the growth of neo-conservative and xenophobic movements across Europe and a general tendency to understand radical anti-racism within a framework of political extremism, have created new conditions for claims-making against racism. Drawing on the politics of listening (Bassel, The Politics of Listening: Possibilities and Challenges for Democratic Life. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017; Dreher, Continuum, 23(4), 445–458, 2009) and political claims-making theory (Koopmans et al., Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe. University of Minnesota Press, 2005), this chapter focuses on four mediated events of racism and racialization in Helsinki and Malmo—two urban milieus marked by different historical, demographic, social, and political realities. By examining the content and circulation of claims against racism as well as the responses to such claims, and by showing the value of political listening in the analysis of debates on racism, the chapter examines how some events develop into “critical events” while others do not.

Despite the apparent failure of the European news media to create solidarity across geographic and mediated space during the Rwandan genocide and the Second Congo War, humanitarian suffering in the region has recently reached Europe through literature and cinema. Amongst the recent cultural oeuvres dealing with humanitarian issues in the region, we find the autobiography A long way from paradise (2010) by Leah Chishugi and the documentary film Blood in the Mobile (2010) by Frank Poulsen. Drawing on an empirical study encompassing online discussion sites, news media and magazines in three European countries (Denmark, Finland and the United Kingdom), we ask how journalists and web commentators relate to these two cultural products in particular, and human suffering on the African continent in general. We are particularly interested in whether and how compassion is verbalised and visualised in online and offline narratives when the African Great Lakes region is discussed. We also ask whether and how ...

We use the mediated debate on the Kony 2012 campaign as a case study to explore whether and how traditional and new media practices enable sufferers of humanitarian conflicts to find a voice and to be listened to in both the local and international news media. Within the context of political voice, we emphasise political voice as a social process that involves not only speaking, but also the right to be listened to and to be engaged in conversation. The empirical material for this study consists of a selection of Ugandan newspapers and social media platforms, as well as a selection of international newspapers. Media texts related to the Kony 2012 campaign during the 2 months following the launch of the campaign were singled out and studied with the help of qualitative claims-making analysis. Our findings show that the voices of northern Ugandan victims were heard and conveyed through personal testimonies of Ugandan bloggers and via privately owned local news media. Despite Ugandan victims being temporaril...