Challenging Power

General description

The Finnish welfare state is known for its commitment to participatory parity not only between men and women, but also between the majority population and cultural minorities. Nevertheless, equal participation does not take place in all spheres of exercise of power. There is a need to clarify what power sharing means in the Finnish context. In order to understand the exercise of political power, it is central to clarify the multifarious ways of how marginalisation occurs by disseminating how the power structures of a hegemonic state are a hidden agency of the empowerment projects and their consequences.

This research project seeks new ways to understand power around ethnic relations and to reflect on how the commitment to equality could be realised in the Finnish context. This issue will be explored on three interdependent levels: The first level consists of an empirical assessment of ethnic and national minorities' possibilities to exercise power within both formal and informal institutions. The second level focuses on perspectives inside marginalised groups using more ethno-methodological approaches. At this level the symbolic and cultural forms of power exercise by immigrant and minority groups are analysed in order to grasp the contexts in which minority members become activated to participate. The third level involves a comparative approach with the goal of generating knowledge on why certain groups or parts of certain groups remain outside of the reach of societal empowerment or
do not seek to participate. In general terms, the research project will take a critical look at concepts that are commonly used today such as power, empowerment, integration and participation.

The study will simultaneously focus on so called historical, national and language minorities (Swedish speaking Finns, Roma, Sámi) and new ethnic minorities (immigrants from former USSR and refugees from Iraq and Somalia). Multiple diversity factors, such as class, gender and age will be explored within each group.

The research will be conducted by a research director together with the director of Ceren, two senior researchers, and two PhD students. As the group of researchers involved in this project is interdisciplinary, different methods will be used, including fieldwork, interviews, debate analysis, examining administrative practices, survey material and statistical analysis. A combination of anthropological, sociological and political science theories and methods
will allow for new and necessary insights.

In substudies to be conducted the following topics will be examined: the "external" or "imported" identity strategies of empowerment of marginalised groups; the institutional versus symbolic forms of power used among policy makers and among members of non-national ethnic communities; the significance of citizenship for naturalised persons and foreigners; the political participation of immigrants focusing on the formal channels of participation,
such as elections.