Minna Seikkula’s research while affiliated with University of Helsinki and other places

The article investigates the phenomenon of precarious labour within the Finnish wild berry industry, focusing on the socio‐legal dimensions that enable short‐term “just‐in‐time” migration, primarily from Thailand, for the berry season. Since the initial 2005 recruitment of Thai citizens to engage in forest berry picking for the Finnish berry industry, the industry has become heavily reliant on migrant labour. At the same time, the pickers’ situation exemplifies a case of unregulated labour, as pickers are categorised as a group outside of labour laws in Finland. By asking how this “non‐work”—berry picking without labour rights—has repeatedly been justified on a policy level, the article provides a case study that unpacks the creation of a racialised migrant labour force through a statecraft of differential inclusion, in an arrangement regarded to advance rural economies. Empirically, the article draws on an analysis of policy documents through which a particular kind of temporary migration corridor is administered.

Feministiseen ajatteluun sisältyy radikaalia potentiaa, jonka soisi saavan monissa keskuste­luissa aiempaa enemmän huomiota. Sukupuo­leen ja seksuaalisuuteen liittyvät normit ovat muuttuneet – pitkälti feminististen liikkeiden ansiosta – tavalla, joka on tarkoittanut lisää vapautta monille. Tässäkään mielessä maailma ei tosin ole valmis, ja konservatiiviset ja auto­ritääriset klikit yrittävät nakertaa feminististen liikkeiden saavutuksia. Lisäksi on syytä pysytel­lä varuillaan, jotteivät lähtökohtaisesti radikaa­lit vaatimukset sukupuolen ja seksuaalisuuden kysymyksistä pelkistyisi liberaaleiksi appropriaatioksi, jotka pahimmillaan toimivat silkkana kapitalismin käyttövoimaksi supistuvana si­sällöntuotantona. Esimerkiksi Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya ja Nancy Fraser (2019) puhuvat yhden prosentin feminismistä, jossa sukupuolten tasa-arvoisuus taataan sillä, että useampi nainen pääsee valta-asemaan kapitalis­tisessa valtiossa ja taloudessa. Samalla valtaosal­le naisista – niille 99 prosentille – tämä ei tarkoi­ta muutosta, vaan heidän asemansa jää ennal­leen ja yhtä haavoittuvaksi kuin aiemmin.

This study approaches the underrepresentation of ethnic and migrant minorities (EMMs) in political assemblies from the perspective of candidate recruitment and examines how white normativity as an ideal shapes the recruitment process. The article draws on empirical interview data from the 2017 Finnish municipal elections. Through a qualitative analysis of parties' recruiting agents' (n = 24) and EMM candidates' (n = 12) interviews, the article provides nuanced insights into the informal aspects of candidate recruitment and more perspectives into the discussions of ‘ideal’ and ‘acceptable’ candidates. The analysis identifies four discursive strategies that the parties use to describe their (lack of) efforts to recruit EMM candidates. The analysis of these strategies deepens the analytical understanding of the persistent underrepresentation of EMMs in candidate lists by explaining how recruitment is shaped by white normativity.

The chapter develops an analysis of affective practice in the context of antiracist mobilization against the radical right’s racism. More precisely, the chapter focuses on formative discussions by supporters of Silakkaliike (Baltic herring movement), an antiracist online mobilization against the radical right, which gained significant support after its founding in early 2020. The analysis draws on observations made in critical theorization of race, racism and antiracism—namely a tendency to focus on extremist forms of racism and relative silence on racialized reality—and combines these with discursive psychological notion of affective practice. The chapter argues that the analysed antiracism is mediated by affective practices refraining from hate and other emotions, disgust and hope.

Although anti-racism is recognized as a heterogeneous phenomenon, there are few studies that provide analytical tools to grasp the differences between anti-racisms in more detail. This study contributes to the analytical discussion on anti-racism through an analysis of grassroots activists’ views on their anti-racism. The data, interviews with 46 grassroots anti-racist activists based in Finland, is explored through a frame analysis. This article argues that meaning-making on racism and anti-racism is tied to conceptions of racial space. The argument is presented through an empirical typology of three anti-racist frames: defence, recognition and redistribution. Distinguishing between the defence, recognition, and redistribution frames enables an understanding of how anti-racisms assume a supposedly “race-neutral” space of white innocence and contest distinct dimensions of racial divides.

This article analyses narratives of antiracist mobilisation against anti-immigration racism and the far and extreme right in Finland. The antiracist mobilisation narrative is, first, analysed against the backdrop of critical theorisation of racism and antiracism, which has critiqued conceptions of racism that link the term exclusively to the far and extreme right as too narrow. Second, the analysis builds upon the heuristic distinction between ‘extreme whiteness’ and ‘whiteness as ordinariness’ (or ‘ordinary whiteness’) made in the field of critical whiteness studies. Drawing on empirical data on activists’ narratives on grassroots antiracist engagement in Finland, the article explores the distinct positionalities and perspectives in the antiracist mobilisation narrative. In other words, the article discusses the consequences of grasping racism primarily as anti-immigration propagation and right-wing populism – or, as extreme whiteness – in antiracist activists’ narratives on mobilisation. By locating the aspects of extreme and ordinary whiteness in the mobilisation narrative, the article shows how the antiracist narrative risks reproducing white-normativity. The article argues that to overcome white-normativity, antiracist narratives are required to grasp extreme and ordinary whiteness as interrelated parts of the same power structure.

Race and racism have traditionally been undermined and contested concepts in the Finnish academia, but they are receiving growing scholarly attention. Aside of becoming objects of critical research, they are also increasingly addressed in university education. This chapter interrogates complexities of teaching race and racism from the point of view of two researchers. It ponders views on academic antiracism education in the context of an education system with tendencies for segregation, and it provides contextual interpretations and discussions of race, racism and antiracism from a personalised perspective. The chapter is constructed as a dialogue between two researchers occupying distinct racialised positions, and thus it reflects the question of positionality in teaching about race and racism. Inspired by critical race studies, the paper introduces a unique take on practices of anti-racist teaching in Finland.

Scholarly discussions contesting post-racialism have noted how the false but common belief – that systematic racism has been defeated in Western societies – works to undermine anti-racism’s critical potential. Simultaneously, the discussion about the relativization of anti-racism has mainly been located in contexts with strong anti-racist traditions. By exploring anti-racism in the Finnish civil society, the article thematizes thinking around the post-racial modality of racism in a context where racism is often presented as a recent phenomenon. A discourse analysis of non-governmental organization advocacy materials that work to mainstream anti-racism identifies three parallel problem-definitions of racism, illustrating a tendency to understand racism as an individual flaw in a non-racist social reality. This shows that trivializing racism and recentring whiteness happen through classed and aged discourses.