Abstracts

Border Heritage: Ideological Legacies of Division Encounter an Emerging World of Mobility and Diversity

Victor Konrad, Carleton University, Canada

Ideologies of nationalism and fundamentalism accrue in part as border heritage from territorial inheritance, national identity, hardened gender roles, naturalized hierarchies, and belief in racial superiority, among other forces that form tradition and sustain power structures. Throughout human history, people have created and shaped borders, and, fashioned approaches and strategies to cross the boundaries established. Human imperatives to first draw lines and limits for territory, and then to move across and beyond the limits imposed, characterize human social, political, and cultural life. The process of delimiting space and then shifting it is not ephemeral; it leaves a legacy, a heritage of borders. This heritage of borders is not necessarily permanent or durable because border heritage is reinterpreted, revised, and re-established as regimes that border heritage. On the one hand, people create border heritage, that is, a heritage of borders, and on the other hand, humans contribute to the bordering and selectivity of heritage. Border heritage is shared and divided past that is acutely created, contested, and experienced. This presentation unfolds the geopolitics of the dilemma of exclusion and inclusion as border heritage encounters globalization and manifests in border walls. It traces how border memory in time changes into border memorialization as place, how border heritage tourism ideologizes colonial pasts, and how border heritage cultures perpetuate a continuing politics of legacy. Over all, the presentation highlights the centrality of understanding border heritage to mediate polarized ideologies. 

Synthetic Communication and Populism: Use of Deepfakes in the Trump Administration

Outi Hakola, UEF

This paper explores how the Trump administration employs deepfake videos and AI-generated images as part of its public relations strategy. From Donald Trump’s presidential campaign onward, Trump and his team have actively shared synthetic audio-visual content online. During his presidential term, such content has become part of the White House’s official communication.

Examples like mischievously self-promoting Trump as a Pope, or the satirical portrayal of budget officials as the Grim Reaper, illustrate how deepfakes are used to create humorous, meme-like media with a popular culture aesthetic. This communication style reflects Trump’s preference for direct engagement with supporters “in their own language,” rejecting traditional presidential decorum.

At the same time, the combination of mockery and self-praise reinforces bipartisan division and political polarization. These deepfakes are not merely playful or provocative—they are calculated instruments of populist political messaging. They continue the post-truth tactics of earlier Trump-era politics, where emotional impact and visual spectacle override factual accuracy.

By analyzing deepfakes, this paper places synthetic media within the broader framework of political communication. It examines how deepfakes contribute to affective polarization and asks what happens to public trust in the presidential institution when a political polarization is synthetically manufactured.

The Digital Gaze of Integration: Unpacking the Ideology of Neutral Bordering in Finland and the EU

Ville-Samuli Haverinen, UEF

Contemporary European mobility governance increasingly depends on digital systems, including biometric
databases, interoperable information systems, and risk-assessment technologies. These systems are
commonly justified through the language of security, efficiency, and neutrality. This paper argues that such
neutrality is ideological: claims to objective risk calculation can mask political distinctions between desirable
and undesirable forms of mobility. Finland brings these questions into sharp relief, combining extensive
public-sector digitalisation with an eastern EU border whose securitisation has intensified since 2022.
The paper develops the concept of the digital gaze of integration to examine how anticipatory data practices
carry classificatory logics from integration governance into pre-border settings. It approaches digital
bordering as an assemblage of data infrastructures, legal norms, institutional practices, and social relations,
within which political judgments about mobility and membership can appear as technical outputs.
Drawing on EU and Finnish legal, policy, and governance documents, the paper shows how risk-based
border practices may extend and reorganise established forms of inclusion and exclusion. It connects border
technologies and datafied governance to wider questions of societal membership, contributing to dialogue
between critical border studies, digital migration studies, and critical algorithmic studies.

Discourses of Finnishness and Finland in Popular Russian YouTube Travel Vlogs (2015–2022, prior to 24 February 2022)

Maija Hämäläinen-Abdessamad, UEF

Before the outbreak of COVID-19 and the beginning of Russia’s full-scale war of
aggression in Ukraine in February 2022, Russian tourists constituted the largest group
of foreign visitors to Finland. During this period, many highly popular Russian youtubers
visited the country and published travel vlogs documenting their experiences. Using a
dataset of 36 travel vlogs published between 2015 and 2022 from 12 popular Russian
travel-oriented YouTube channels, this study examines the discourses through which
the vloggers construct images of Finland and Finnishness in their speech.
Drawing on historical context and theories of cultural encounters, travel, and social
media—particularly vlogging—I demonstrate, how vloggers construct their
representations of Finland and Finnishness through different intersecting discourses of
proximity and otherness, that compete, overlap, and intertwine in different ways. Based
on rarely studied material from a recent historical period, this master’s thesis in
sociology highlights competing Russian narratives about Finland in contrast to the
hostile state-driven narratives prevalent today. At the same time, the discourses largely
reflect earlier mainstream perspectives in Russian travel representations of Finland
only a few years ago.

Rethinking Postcolonial Mobilities through Literature

Anna-Leena Toivanen, UEF

Inspired by research that positions literary texts as capable of contributing to theoretical discussions on mobility (Merriman & Pearce 2017; Frenay et al. 2025), this paper argues that literature can enable a deeper understanding of ‘postcolonial mobilities’ than mainstream postcolonial literary scholarship. Although there are signs of increasing dialogue between postcolonial studies and mobilities theory, many analyses of ‘mobility’ within the field are not about mobility as such. Rather, there remains a tendency to approach mobilities metaphorically or through their outcomes, as well as to equate mobility with migration in ways that disconnect it from other categories of mobility. In this paper, I address these tendencies and simultaneously map out recent developments in the study of postcolonial literary mobilities. Drawing on contemporary postcolonial literature – a travelogue by Emmanuel Iduma, a road novel by Max Lobe, and narrative non-fiction by Khalid Lyamlahy – the paper demonstrates how literary texts diversify discussions about postcolonial mobilities, both thematically and through their form. I approach the texts less as objects of detailed close reading than as catalysts for theoretical thinking and argue that, unlike much postcolonial literary scholarship, they engage with the material, multiple, and relational dimensions of mobility in the global aftermath of colonialism.

Sound as Borderwork: Infrastructural Sound and Listening Politics on Taiwan’s Archipelagic Borderland Kinmen

 Chengyu Yang, University of Bristol

This article examines how borders come about as the outcome of acoustic effort by residents and institutions, at moments when infrastructural change loses its material visibility through decay, conversion, or unfinished construction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2025, I trace the changing infrastructural politics of Kinmen, a Taiwanese archipelago lying a short distance off the southeastern coast of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Over the past two decades, infrastructural conditions on the islands have gone through large-scale suspension and renewal, following both the demilitarisation that came with the lifting of War Zone Administration and the rapid urbanisation of Xiamen, a similarly sized PRC island just a few miles away.

I therefore ask how these shifting infrastructures continue to act on the border once their material forms have decayed, been converted, or been left unfinished, and thus fell out of the sight. Moving beyond the discussion of visual absence, I show that the sound of these infrastructures becomes central to borderwork, and I do so through three cases: a local collective effort to protect ageing casuarina windbreaks, the debate over the demolition of retired military installations, and the PRC’s ongoing airport construction on reclaimed land a few miles from Kinmen. Bordering activities here take place precisely through the work of keeping, (re)simulating, and repeatedly listening to infrastructural sound, work carried out by institutional and non-state actors alike. Such work also opens room for anticipation and speculation about futures of border lives. Residents select and debate about which sounds to hold on to and which to treat as intrusion, and in doing so they make one version of local livelihood audible while leaving others aside, so that borders are kept porous and open to negotiation. The article challenges and extends work at the intersection of sound, infrastructure, and border studies, which has so far concentrated on noise governance and on the shared memory and/or ideologies that infrastructural noise calls up.

Gender and Mobilities in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees

Justyna Kiełkowicz

Chinelo Okparanta’s oeuvre abounds in narratives of mobilities and cultural encounters. Her short story collection Happiness, Like Water (2013) addresses a wide range of societal issues, including homophobia and sexism, while the novel Harry Sylvester Bird (2022) explores racism, migration, and nation, deconstructing traditional notions of identity through satire. Okparanta’s characters traverse physical and metaphorical borders both within and outside Nigeria. Employing an intersectional approach to literary mobilities, this paper demonstrates how Okparanta’s novel Under the Udala Trees (2015) assists in unpacking conservative ideologies and challenging prevalent ideas about race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Set against the background of the Nigeria–Biafra War (1967–1970), the narrative focuses on trauma and personal loss, a difficult mother–daughter relationship, and the conflict between the protagonist’s Christian upbringing and her lesbian identity. The paper utilises the notion of transnation (Ashcroft 2025) and transnational literature to analyse the novel’s complex entanglement with mobilities and cultural identities. In doing so, it explores the connection between representational and actual mobilities (Cresswell 2006; Aguiar et al. 2019; Toivanen and García 2024), indicating how literary research may contribute to the understanding of diverse contexts and practices of mobility. The paper also argues that, by foregrounding the history of queer women’s subversions of gendered ideas, the novel encourages affective readings beyond the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and nation. 

Border Crossing with Christian Dance in Finland

Tuomas Järvenpää, UEF

In this presentation, I examine the embodied experiences of dancing women in the context of contemporary Finnish Christianity, where dancing has become increasingly normalized in recent years. My data consist of written responses collected in spring 2026 from 41 women who practice various forms of dance in Christian contexts. The material is analyzed using qualitative content analysis.

The material highlights a broader transformation in Finnish Christian culture compared to earlier decades, when church authorities strongly defined themselves in opposition to dance. On the one hand, Finnish churches rejected dance as part of a wider struggle against modernization, in which dance was perceived as a threat, particularly to the morality of women’s bodies. Furthermore, for centuries Finnish church institutions sought to suppress spiritual practices considered ecstatic or otherwise excessive, and these practices were likewise often associated with women’s religiosity.

This historical continuum of opposition to and prohibition of dance provides the central context for the narratives of the Christian women who responded to the writing call. Their accounts are written against this history of prohibition, marginalization, and dismissal. They describe both profound spiritual experiences facilitated by dance and the grief and shame associated with their marginalized position within Finnish Christianity.

Straightened Imaginations, Affective Encounters: Terraqueous Borders Across Antep and Izmi

Dirim Dinçer, Delft University of Technology/Independent Research Collective Lokaal, Netherlands

Populist and nationalist ideologies rely on spatial fixes and exceptional scenarios attributing meaning to them, effectively straightening ideals and imaginations by keeping them in places. Borders, in this sense, can be considered as aligning objects, materials of desire within the namesake regime, exercising agency over bodies, (re)emerging as spatial and ecological entities, ordering relations across overlapping worlds. On a scorching summer day -July 22, 2022-, what composes a border site between Turkish and Syrian nation-state authorities offered me entry to this
world of many worlds, dissolving the spectacular image of the wall: an ancient city half
unearthed, a minefield half de-mined, a Mesopotamian river running low through riparian and stateless nations, a barbed-wire border wall with advanced technologies, and a military station overlooking the whole, us, and beyond.
This contribution accounts for what falls beyond cartographically constructed recognition of belonging and bordering through an architectural investigation of multi-sited fieldwork around what I call terraqueous borders, from the ancient town near the Euphrates to a dispossessed mansion or a migrant neighborhood on the Aegean coast. I will share two compositional, fragmented and situated, registers from my approach, “anecdoted cartographies,” both of which attune to dissonance
from an outsider-within position through affective encounters, unfolding spatial-material dimensions of terraqueous bordering.

Concepts and Practices of Religious Encounters in Culturally Diverse Madagascar

Jenni Mölkänen, UEF

Madagascar is a place where diverse cultural encounters define the everyday life. Located in the western Indian Ocean, the island has been a place where different people, ideas and practices have moved, mobilized and blended. Scholarly debates have shown that the tropes of syncretism, creolization, and hybridity have framed discussions of interreligious contact. However, these concepts have come under scrutiny, and scholars have begun to explore what new conceptual and theoretical possibilities may emerge.

Madagascar’s religious landscape is highly diverse, encompassing numerous Christian denominations as well as Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and folk religions. Drawing on debates about East African and Indian Ocean perspectives concerning religion and religious practice, I examine the concepts and practices developed by different religious groups, state representatives and local people within this context of multiplicity and, more recently, amid a growing emphasis on Christian nationalism.

From Silence to Suffering: Remembering the Finnish Occupation in Russian Karelia

Alexander Osipov, UEF

In 2019, the film Vesuri was released in Russia. It tells the story of children held in a Finnish concentration camp during the Finnish occupation of Soviet Karelia from 1941 to 1944. The film itself attracted little attention, but the film set – including barbed wire, barracks, and watchtowers – caught the attention of local authorities and entrepreneurs, who planned to turn the site of a former concentration camp near Petrozavodsk into a tourist attraction. It soon became clear, however, that local residents were opposed to such a project and to the memories of the war that it evoked, and the plan was eventually abandoned.

This study examines the changing memory of the Finnish occupation in Russian Karelia, focusing on former concentration camp prisoners and sites of public memory. It explores how memories of the occupation have changed over time, how the relationship between former prisoners and Soviet and later Russian authorities has evolved, and why their suffering has once again acquired political and public significance. More broadly, the study examines
transformations in Russia’s dominant historical narrative, with particular attention to the shift from heroic representations of the Great Patriotic War toward narratives centered on suffering and sacrifice.

Multidirectional Memory and Asymmetrical Memorialization: An Analysis of the Memorial Landscape of Berlin

Anitta Anna Moncy, University of Bonn, Germany

Walter Benjamin calls Berlin ‘the mnemonic city’ in his posthumously published work, A Berlin Chronicle (1970). This is particularly due to its extensive state-sponsored memorialization of the Holocaust. At the same time, the city has become a site of contested political memory, especially
regarding public expressions of solidarity with Palestinians. This paper examines Berlin’s memorial landscape and probes into how the state-sanctioned Holocaust memorials, especially the ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’ and the ‘Stolpersteine’, and grassroots Palestinian memorial expressions in Berlin reveal and produce hierarchies of memory within urban public space.

Michael Rothberg challenges the notion that collective memories compete in a zero-sum framework. In Multidirectional Memory, he argues that memories interact productively across histories of violence, colonialism, and genocide. Rather than displacing one another, different memories can coexist dialogically. However, the institutional and spatial organization of memorial culture may nevertheless produce hierarchies that privilege certain histories while marginalizing others. This tension between multidirectionality in theory and hierarchy in practice forms the conceptual core of this paper. This analysis uses the framework of ‘Abnormal Justice’ by Nancy Fraser and the conception of the ‘contemporary’ by Giorgio Agamben to probe into the multilayered temporal and spatial asymmetry of the sets of memories in question and their historical location.

The paper juxtaposes two sets of memory sites. First, it examines state-sanctioned Holocaust memorials in Berlin, particularly the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas) and the ‘Stolpersteine’, as emblematic of institutionalized remembrance embedded in national identity and public space. Second, it analyzes grassroots Palestinian memorial expressions like different forms of political graffiti calling for Palestinian liberation. Unlike official Holocaust memorials, these expressions often lack institutional recognition and are subject to removal, policing, or political controversy. The discrepancy between the environment in which these two sets of memories are set and received cannot be
explained by the semantics of contemporaneity or temporality and therefore the affect that their coexistence produce needs to be analysed

Methodologically, the project combines spatial and visual analysis of memorial sites with discourse analysis of public debates surrounding them. By examining their location, scale, materiality, and degree of institutional protection, the paper explores how authority and legitimacy are inscribed into the urban landscape. Secondary literature on memory studies, memorial culture in Germany, and political contestations of public space will provide contextual grounding. 

The paper advances the preliminary argument that Berlin’s memorial landscape reflects a structured hierarchy of remembrance shaped by state power, geopolitical positioning, and the discourse on Germany’s historical responsibility. While Rothberg’s framework suggests the possibility of solidarity, the empirical case of Berlin demonstrates how political institutions regulate which memories achieve permanence and legitimacy and which needs to be regulated and mutilated. The analysis contributes to broader debates on memory culture by interrogating how global histories of violence are differentially recognized, connected, or silenced within European memory regimes. 

Borderland Narratives. Negotiating Memory and Political Identity in the Vilnius Region Museums

Rūta Vyšniauskaitė, Vilnius University, Lithuania

In the historically contested borderlands of the Vilnius region, local museums act as mediators of historical knowledge for the public, playing a significant role in shaping the social cohesion and sense of belonging that underpin regional stability. Drawing on this case, this paper examines how memory institutions in borderland regions today navigate complex heritage shaped by interwar nationalizing projects, the Holocaust, and Soviet era forced modernization. These ruptures created a “fractured public memory” where multi-ethnic histories were long relegated to private remembrance or suppressed by state-supervised Soviet and post-Soviet narratives. Arguably, this fractured public memory can be seen not only as a sign, but as a result of the borderland region’s contested or even ambiguous political identity. By marginalizing the region’s Polish, Jewish, and Belarusian histories and avoiding politically charged topics like local collaboration or forced modernization, these museums risk leaving “memory voids” that can be exploited by contemporary disinformation or polarize local communities. The paper argues that moving toward more transparent, inclusive versions of history is a prerequisite for resilient social integration. By transforming museums into “contact zones”—using tools like the digital repatriation of diasporic archives —these institutions can help “un-silence” marginalized perspectives. The goal is to integrate these disparate memories into a cohesive regional identity that reduces social fragmentation and mitigates the risk of heritage being weaponized in regional conflicts. 

Colonialism, Memory, and Territorial Disputes: The News Discourse of the Territorial Conflict over Essequibo between Guyana and Venezuela 

Virpi Salojärvi, UEF, and Minos-Athanasios Karyotakis, Hong Kong Baptist University

The territorial dispute between Venezuela and Guyana over the Essequibo region, an area rich in oil and other natural resources, has gained renewed political attention since 2023. This dispute is tied to a long-standing historical, economic, and political conflict between Venezuela and British Guiana, which was resolved in 1899 in favor of Britain, with Venezuela not present. Venezuela’s referendum in December 2023 intensified the conflict, with reports indicating that voters favored annexing Essequibo. Following this, a law was enacted in March 2024 establishing Essequibo as a new Venezuelan state, to be administered from Tumeremo. Through a rhetoric-performative discourse analysis () of 673 news articles from Al Jazeera, BBC, Efecto Cocuyo, Ùltimas Noticias, Stabroek News, and Kaieteur News, published between 2023 and 2025, this paper explores the ways in which historical and political assertions are utilized to heighten polarization and construct narratives grounded in binary relationships (i.e., us versus them). It highlights the colonial origins of divisive matters and memory politics surrounding a continuing and unresolved territorial conflict. 

Beavers and Bears at the Latvian–Belarusian Border: Nature, Mobility, and Placemaking

Aija Lulle, UEF

This paper examines the Latvian Belarusian border as a more-than-human borderland, arguing that animals, water, forests, and wetlands are not auxiliary features of border politics but foundational to how borders are made, experienced, and contested. The paper explores how nonhuman actors participate in the production of “green” and “blue” borders: landscapes where forests, rivers, marshes, and animal movements shape the practical and symbolic life of territorial division. 

I position ecological life as central to the study of mobility and immobility. Beavers alter waterways, flood paths, and reshape infrastructures; bears cross, inhabit, and disrupt territorial boundaries in ways that exceed state control. Their movements and habitats reveal how borders are porous and obstructive, mobile, naturalized and engineered. In this sense, nature is an active force in their formation. 

I contribute to border studies by insisting that animals and environments must be fully integrated into analyses of bordering, placemaking, and spatial governance. The Latvian–Belarusian border emerges not only as a geopolitical line but as an ecological assemblage where human and nonhuman mobilities intersect. Any account of mobility’s immobilities remains incomplete without nature as a foundational analytic category. 

Northern Tropicality – Encounters in Materiality, Knowledge and Imaginaries

Anna-Sofia Sysser, UEF

My doctoral research (UEF, Cultural Studies) explores constructions of tropicality in Finland; how tropical nature is presented in northern everyday, leisure, and consumer environments. The empirical material consists of hybrid ethnography in 20 sites (e.g. botanical gardens, zoos, spas) and ‘tropical’ grocery product offerings by Finnish companies. Of the wider phenomenon I use the term artificial tropical (keinotrooppisuus) in which tropicality is created and represented outside the borders of geographical tropics. To my observations I apply critical theories of tropicality (e.g. Arnold 1996; Bowd & Clayton 2019; Driver & Martins 2005) and discussions of cultural studies, visual culture, everyday aesthetics, and postcolonialism. As the tropics have been typically constructed as environmentally “other” to the temperate, my research contributes to understanding how meanings and imaginaries of the tropics are currently constructed and negotiated here in the warming north. Through this we can address the tensions of planetary interdependence and overconsumption, where critically considering prevailing values, imagination, and aesthetic preferences is essential. In BOMOCULT Conference I would like to present my summary section’s themes and disposition in process. 

Blue Tears as Affective Geonarratives: Reconfiguring Matsu and Beyond

Kai-Yang Huang, National Taiwan University

Each spring, bioluminescent plankton bloom off the coast of China and are carried ashore by the waves, casting a faint blue glow, known as Blue Tears, along the shores of Taiwan’s Matsu Islands. Now a fantasy destination, Blue Tears tourism marks Matsu’s transformation from a former battlefield into a spectacle of peace. Yet these luminous waters also carry the islanders’ memories of war, aspirations for development, and a therapeutic presence that flickers gently at night. Drawing on the analytical framework of geonarratives which understands story and history as inherently both ideational and material that shapes life and space, this study further examines their affective forms — namely the sensory and affect — which emerge through encounters among diverse elements such as plankton, seawater, islands, infrastructures, regulations, and Cold War legacies. We suggest that while Blue Tears generate ahistorical forms of memory that reconfigure the meaning of darkness and light, and reorient developmental desires toward mindful ways of living with the potential to heal the wounds of war, they also give rise to new forms of competition to capitalize on the branding appeal of Blue Tears. This growing competition, in turn, places increasingly mounting pressure on both the ocean and the islands. In an era of escalating regional tension and the dynamics of a “New Cold War,” Blue Tears offer a way to perceive geopolitics through illuminated waves and a haunting sense of peace — though one that lingers just beyond our human selves. 

Posthuman Contact Zones in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing 

 Pekka Kilpeläinen, UEF

Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) narrates the struggles of an African American family in the Southern United States in an undefined present. It tackles the issues of Southern racism, interracial relationships, and drug abuse through multiple narrators. Remarkably, ghosts appear in the narrative as narrators and as bearers of meaning, as symbolic figures, in accordance with Avery Gordon’s conception of ghosts as an ideologically invested phenomenon in their own right. The boundary-crossing communication between ghosts and humans entails the re-membering, in Toni Morrison’s sense, of the cultural trauma in the allegorical contact zones where the ghostly and the mundane, past and present, meet and intertwine. In this paper, I will discuss the ways in which the supernatural, ghostly aspects of the novel construct a counternarrative to the demystifying, rationalizing narrative of Western modernity. The political significance of supernatural phenomena in the novel finds its most intriguing expression in the tree of ghosts that may be grasped as a chronotope, a spatiotemporal metaphor, which embodies the borderscape between the supernatural and mundane. This may be understood through Donna Haraway’s concept of natureculture where conventional categorizations are questioned. 

South Asian Interfaith Marriage as a Transgressive Space: Everyday Negotiations of Difference

Falguny Islam, UEF

South Asian interfaith marriage is a nonconformist socio-cultural space where religious, familial, and community boundaries are continually negotiated. I argue that the everyday encounter between interfaith married couples provides insight into the social processes of migrant integration and becomes an interesting site for understanding the context of immigrants’ anxiety and fear. By studying interfaith marriage and the family practices of interfaith couples, it becomes possible to probe religious and other forms of transgression. The premise of my paper is that South Asian couples who belong to interfaith marriages are less studied in Finland. If this group is not known properly, we will not be able to know how family, marriage, and interfaith association are also related to the broader context of border, nationality, identity, integration, and many other socio-cultural factors. On that account, my paper focuses on South Asian interfaith marriage and attempts to show that knowing this group will tell us more about how negotiation with differences takes place in the most private space in the context of Finland. 

From Protection to Precarity? Employment Trajectories of Ukrainians under Temporary Protection in Finland

Saara Koikkalainen, UEF

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has resulted in the largest displacement in recent European history. In response, the European Union activated the Temporary Protection Directive (Directive 2001/55/EC), marking the first time the principle of collective protection was applied. For those fleeing the war, the years under temporary protection have signified a prolonged state of temporality, as it is still not clear if they are welcome to stay in their current host countries when the war ends, should they wish to do so. This presentation is based on linked register data obtained from the Finnish Immigration Service and Statistics Finland, which includes information on all Ukrainians who were granted temporary protection in Finland between 2022 and 2024 (N = 70 462). It examines the kinds of labour market paths the Ukrainians have had so far in Finland. Of those aged 18 or above (N= 53 401), 65% were women and 35% men. Among the Ukrainians of working age (18-65 years), the share of those in employment has varied between 5 and 38 per cent in the monthly data, with most employed individuals holding fixed-term rather than permanent contracts. Employment has been concentrated in manual and elementary occupations, such as cleaning, horticulture, food processing, and assisting agricultural labour. The presentation highlights the precarity of the situation of the Ukrainian beneficiaries of temporary protection, whose transition to the Finnish labour markets has been difficult. 

Who Makes Post-colonial East Asian Maritime Borders?

Yu-Hsiu Lien, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Scholars have long argued that external powers are the main architects of East Asian maritime borders and disputes. This paper draws on critical border studies to further examine how domestic actors and their practices constitute bordering processes. It examines Taiwan and the East Asian seas where postcolonial and Cold War legacies continue to shape claims to marine space and resources. In 1982, Japan designated its 200-mile exclusive economic zone and prohibited Taiwanese fleet from its newly established national waters. Drawing on fisheries and diplomatic archives, the paper traces how Taiwanese authorities navigated fishery regulation and diplomatic disputes while managing Taiwan’s renowned coral fishery following this jurisdictional shift. Taiwanese officials alternated between regulating and strategically overlooking this fishery, balancing geopolitical tensions with support for the domestic fleet. Japan’s maritime regime simultaneously reordered postcolonial economic connections and revealed how Taiwanese officials’ diverse positions contributed to constructing maritime borders. Findings enhance understanding of the role of maritime borders in Taiwan’s political status by demonstrating that bordering can emerge through contingent policy and actions. Rather than viewing East Asian maritime borders solely as products of geopolitical and ideological conflict, this paper highlights the endogenous calculations of bureaucrats and social groups as they do the work of statemaking through bordering. 

International Migration and Policy Responses of Kazakhstan in Central Asia: Expectations of Efficiency through Digitalization

Minna Piipponen, UEF

The paper examines recent international migration processes in Kazakhstan and the ways its migration regime within Central Asia is shaped and shaping in the context of dynamic socio-economic development and increasingly complex geopolitical and security environment. Attention is paid to the ways in which state has recently formulated the goals of the regulatory framework for migration and to how these formulations correspond to the contemporary migration processes. As discussed in migration studies, migration regimes and politics encompass multiple political levels, historical trajectories and geographical scales. They are constituted through and (re)combine heterogeneous policies, governance practices, societal discourses, actors, infrastructures, and mobilities that regulate and influence cross-border movements and migrants’ lives. The recently renewed migration policy framework of Kazakhstan places strong emphasis on the promises of efficiency through digitalization when managing mobilities in support of socio-economic development and, simultaneously, in addressing security concerns. The paper critically analyses and evaluates state perceptions and formulations that establish linear connections from migration processes to socio-economic development and security in contemporary Kazakhstan and Central Asia. It considers how these assumptions correspond to, simplify, or overlook the complexities of migration processes. The analysis draws on policy documents, including Kazakhstan’s migration policy concepts adopted in 2022 and 2025. It also incorporates expert interviews conducted in Kazakhstan in spring 2026, alongside migration and statistical reports, and scholarly literature on migration in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. 

”They Don’t Seem That Interested in Us”: Young Immigrants’ Construction of Discursive Barriers to Intergroup Contact with the Majority Population

Helena Rovamo

In the presentation, I present findings from a qualitative study conducted in Kuopio, Finland. The study is based on three focus group discussions conducted with young immigrants originating from the Middle East currently living in Kuopio. In the focus group discussion, participants were asked to reflect on their experiences in living in Kuopio. In these discussions, participants negotiated their experiences of encounters with, or lack thereof, the Finnish majority, which we examined in more detail. Using critical discursive psychology, we analyzed how participants constructed and used subject positions and meta-perceptions in talk to rationalize existing barriers to intergroup contact; to hold other social actors accountable for the existence of barriers; and, for their own part, to justify behavior that maintains perceived barriers. The study’s findings show how meta-perceptions and subject positions are used to rationalize limited intergroup contact, attribute responsibility for barriers, and justify behaviors that may maintain separation. Furthermore, it demonstrates that barriers to contact are not only practical or spatial but also involve perceptions of being misunderstood, memories of displacement, and unequal expectations about who should initiate contact. 

Russian Prepositions in Competition and Political Sovereignty of Ukraine

Larisa Leisiö, UEF, and Elena Bratishenko, University of Calgary, Canada

Our talk examines two competing options of the locative expressions, both meaning ‘in/to Ukraine’ in Russian: one with the preposition v and the other with na. 

Historically, the distribution of these prepositions in Slavic had to do with the semantic difference between Container (v) and Surface (na). Due to the etymology of Ukraina ‘Ukraine’ as a designation of varying border regions on the territory of the modern Ukraine, rather than a name of a single territory, it was used as a semantically transparent descriptive term, not a proper noun per se. The usage of na with Ukraina as a name of the entire country is thus etymologically correct and is a continuation of the established convention.  

Since the time of Ukraine’s independence (1991), the usage with the preposition v instead of na ‘in Ukraine/to Ukraine’ has been increasingly common, chosen by the speakers to emphasize the political status of Ukraine as a sovereign state. The two prepositions have thus become a manifestation of two contesting ideologies. 

Why do these two options coexist in the cognition of native speakers? For explanation, we examine two seemingly opposite models of language change—the tree model and the wave theory which are in reality complementary, and have been accepted by the vast majority of linguists. Our talk will thus encompass both the political and the theoretical dimensions of language development and language use. 

Citizenship in Democratic Societies: Trust, Inclusion, Belonging

Zahra Hosseini, University of Helsinki

While citizenship is often conceptualized as a legal or political status, this paper argues for a broader understanding grounded in the lived experiences of trust, inclusion, and belonging that underpin social cohesion. Citizenship, it contends, is fundamentally enacted through individuals’ everyday encounters with public institutions. 

Drawing on empirical research on migrants’ experiences in Finland, including findings from the Trust-M project, the paper integrates insights from diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging (DIEB) frameworks to develop a processual understanding of citizenship. 

The analysis shows that experiences of inclusion, recognition, and equitable access to public services are central to the formation of institutional trust, which in turn shapes individuals’ sense of belonging to society. Conversely, exclusion, opacity, or unequal treatment undermines trust and produces fragmented or weakened forms of citizenship. Democratic citizenship, in this sense, is not uniformly experienced but differentiated through everyday institutional interactions. 

By connecting inclusion with the formation of trust, this paper contributes a conceptual framework that positions citizenship as relational, processual, and unevenly realized, with implications for how democratic societies understand inclusion, governance, and the conditions for democratic participation.

English Hegemony as a Monitor of Meaning Construction in Academic Discourse

Esa Penttilä, Elina Kainulainen, Helka Riionheimo, Juho Suokas and Erja Vottonen, UEF

The dominant role of English in Western academic discourse has been viewed as rational and natural (Gramsci 1971). In research publications, in particular, English is the lingua franca that everyone is supposed to know. The hegemony of English suits the neoliberalist ideologies of efficiency and economic success that function as guiding principles in modern university policies (Martín Rojo & Del Percio 2019). At the same time, the dominance of English limits the ways in which meaning is constructed and communicated. It even affects the topics selected for analysis. In general, the phenomenon sets discourse norms that expect uniform ideologies and behavior and neglect alternative ways of meaning making. This has consequences for individual researchers who start to self-monitor their communication practices, especially if they feel their language skills are insufficient to meet the requirements of the norms shared in their community (see e.g. Kuteeva et al 2020). In this presentation, we discuss how language and translation policies and ideologies guide and limit our meaning construction in academic discourse and how to deal with this. 

Organizers Po-Yi Hung, National Taiwan University, and Jussi P. Laine, UEF 

Foreign information manipulation is often described as an external threat pressing against the borders of democratic states. Yet research across several settings increasingly suggests that the real battleground lies elsewhere. Manipulation rarely succeeds by inserting wholly new narratives. Instead, it works by picking up existing domestic grievances, sharpening them, and feeding them back into the political bloodstream. The frontline, that is, runs through the ideological divisions of democratic societies themselves.  

Finland and Taiwan form the roundtable’s core comparison. Both are small, high‑trust democracies with highly educated populations and a powerful neighbour willing and able to interfere in their information environments. Both have rejected censorship as a primary defence. But their institutional trajectories diverge. Finland operates within the EU’s expanding regulatory architecture – the Digital Services Act and, more recently, the European Democracy Shield – which places platform governance within a collective, rule‑bound framework. Taiwan, after shelving its draft Digital Intermediary Services Act in 2022, has relied instead on civil‑society fact‑checking, rapid grassroots mobilisation, and a long tradition of bottom‑up media literacy. In Finland, domestic amplification of Russian narratives tends to remain on the margins, while in Taiwan it  is woven directly into mainstream political competition, because the country’s central political cleavage is itself geopolitical.   

When manipulation travels through lawful domestic political speech, any regulatory instrument strong enough to reach it risks requiring the state to adjudicate mainstream political expression – a constitutionally fraught and politically explosive prospect in any democracy. The burden therefore shifts toward education, civic culture, and the slow work of building interpretive resilience. The roundtable asks what, in these long‑term trajectories, is genuinely transferable across contexts; what is structurally embedded; and whether media‑literacy initiatives risk reframing a geopolitical security challenge as an individual competence deficit. In highly polarised environments, literacy may simply help citizens defend their prior commitments more effectively.  

To broaden the comparative lens, the roundtable also includes scholars familiar with the situation in North America and Australia, where domestic amplification has become deeply entangled with populist mobilisation, identity politics, and platform‑driven fragmentation. Their participation will help test whether the Finland–Taiwan contrast scales to larger, more polarised systems, and whether democratic resilience depends more on institutional design, political culture, or long‑term educational investment. Understanding how these different institutional and cultural configurations produce similar outcomes, and what this reveals about democratic resilience under ideological pressure, is the comparative task this roundtable proposes.  

Chair: Po-Yi Hung (National Taiwan University) 

Discussant: Jussi P. Laine (UEF) 

Panellists: Hsiu-Hua Shen (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan), Shu-Mei Huang (National Taiwan University), Ming-Feng Liu (National Quemoy University, Taiwan), Jamie Ferrill (Charles Sturt University, Australia), Alexander Diener (UEF) 

Securitizing the Stateless: The Impact of Neighbouring Countries on Bangladesh’s Rohingya Response

BMK Haider, UEF, and Jussi P. Laine, UEF

Bangladesh’s humanitarian approach towards the Rohingyas during the 2017 influx, quickly turned into a national security concern. Existing literature focuses on socio-economic strains on host communities, overlooking the role of neighboring countries. This study investigates how geopolitical strains from China, India and Myanmar impact Bangladesh’s Rohingya securitizations. This paper evaluates securitization through Thierry Balzacq’s “Pragmatic Act Theory” by looking beyond “Speech Act” and incorporating geopolitical context. In addition to considering Bangladesh’s restrictive moves as response to social economic pressure, this study argues they are a strategic reaction to regional dynamics on the Rohingya issue. The data is primarily collected through semi structured, one-on-one in-depth interviews with purposefully selected academics and researchers from Bangladesh and around the world. These interviews were designed to capture neighboring countries actions and inactions that played a role on Bangladesh’s securitization. The findings suggest that Myanmar’s denial of Rohingya citizenship coupled with ongoing armed conflict create an existential threat for Bangladesh. Moreover, India’s strategic and economic interest in Myanmar and internal communal politics, alongside China’s geostrategic interest in Myanmar and diplomatic support triggered and intensified securitization of the Rohingyas by the Government of Bangladesh. 

When Borders Become Political Narratives: Migration, Fundamental Rights, and the Legal Construction of Belonging in Europe

Mohammed Ryed Chellali, University of Oran 2 Mohamed Ben Ahmed, Algeria

Contemporary political polarisation increasingly transforms migration and border control from matters of public policy into powerful narratives of national identity and belonging. This paper examines how legal and political discourses surrounding migration can contribute to constructing the migrant as an external or internal “threat”, and how such narratives interact with the protection of fundamental rights in Europe. 

 The paper focuses on the tension between states’ sovereign power to control borders and their obligations under European and international human-rights law. It argues that the legal regulation of mobility is not politically neutral: concepts such as “security”, “irregular migration” and “border protection” may acquire broader normative meanings when incorporated into polarised political narratives. These developments can affect not only migrants’ access to protection, but also broader understandings of equality, human dignity and social inclusion. 

Methodologically, the paper combines legal analysis of European migration and human-rights principles with a discourse-oriented examination of how legal concepts are mobilised in contemporary debates on borders and belonging. It asks whether law merely regulates politically constructed divisions or can also provide a framework for challenging narratives of exclusion. 

Governing the Fluid Land-sea Border: Smooth Cordgrass and Ecological Containment on the Kinmen Islands

Mei-Huan Chen, National Taiwan University

Located only a few kilometers off the coast of southeastern China, Taiwan’s Kinmen Islands have historically served as a militarized border zone. In recent years, however, Kinmen’s intertidal coastlines have faced a different form of “invasion” – the spread of smooth cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora). Originally introduced to China’s coastal regions in the late 1970s for shoreline protection and sediment stabilization, smooth cordgrass has expanded rapidly along theChinese coast, transforming intertidal habitats and outcompeting native species (Meng et al., 2020). Its seeds can be transported through tidal currents, while its tolerance of salinity and inundation and its capacity to reproduce through rhizomes have facilitated its expansion in intertidal environments. 

Drawing on field observations, interviews, and documentary research in Kinmen, this article examines attempts to contain smooth cordgrass as a form of border governance. It highlights two sets of challenges that constrain governing efforts. First, the plant’s mobility and reproductive capacities that exceed territorially based forms of control. Second, the fluid material environment of the intertidal zones, where tides, saltwater, and mud constrain operating capacity. Engaging with more-than-human and volumetric approaches to bordering, the article argues that cordgrass containment in intertidal zones reveals the material and territorial limits of border governance. Rather than preventing movement at a fixed territorial boundary, governing cordgrass requires recurrent intervention in a fluid and volumetric environment shaped by multiple materialities. The case of Kinmen thus shows how such processes complicate line-based understandings of borders and shift border governance from defense against entry toward the continuing management of movements and effects that may not be fully contained. 

organizer Alicja Fajfer, UEF

This special session is organized by the PLURI project. The session will combine a roundtable discussion with an interactive workshop for the audience. 

PLURI promotes the achievements of the European language policy. The EU has consistently invested in research that changed how languages are taught. The CEFR tool has become a benchmark for proficiency in all member states and beyond. 

Despite notable achievements, a culture of learning that respects linguistic diversity is yet to be accomplished. Monolingual mindset is deeply rooted in institutional language policies where diversifying linguistic landscape is often framed as a zero-sum game of replacing one language with another. Debates about language policy are siloed. This roundtable aims at a solution-oriented comprehensive approach.

Participants: 

• Alicja Fajfer (facilitator) 

• Anna Björno (Laurea University of Applied Sciences) 

• Ilja Moshnikov (UEF) 

• Johanna Ennser-Kananen (University of Jyväskylä) 

• Juho Suokas (UEF) 

Alter-Geopolitical Encounters: Creative Practice, Everyday Abolition, and the Possibilities of Unbordering

Kathryn Cassidy, Northumbria University

Since February 2022, communities across Europe have built spaces where displaced people from Ukraine and their host communities encounter one another across difference. Drawing on my forthcoming book Alter-geopolitical Lives (Manchester University Press, with Maria Dubrova), which arises from a 36-month, ESRC-funded project (2022–2025) based on interviews, policy and media analysis in the UK, Poland and Romania, I analyse the role of creative practices in these spaces. Through Sara Koopman’s concept of alter-geopolitics, I frame connection across difference as a path to secure lives with dignity and justice, positioning these practices as incipient acts of unbordering where new imaginaries of security and belonging counter divisive ideologies. However, critiques of the hierarchies of deservingness, which treat responses to Ukraine as exceptional rather than instructive, risk foreclosing these possibilities. Following Lamble’s work on everyday abolition, this keynote asks what becomes possible if we hold structural critique and creative practice together, refusing to let unevenness foreclose the potential for unbordering to extend to all displaced people. 

Remembering the Cambodian Genocide through Mobilities in Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan and Music of the Ghosts

Ari Räisänen, UEF

This paper examines the ideological implications of mobility in two novels by the Cambodian American author Vaddey Ratner: In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012) and Music of the Ghosts (2017). The novels are read through the lens of mnemonic mobility: a concept which suggests that literary representations of meaningful movement also often articulate cultural and individual memories. Ratner’s novels examine individual and cultural memories of the autogenocide resulting from Khmer Rouge policies aimed at resetting Cambodian society, such as the forced transfer of populations from urban areas to rural areas to serve as agricultural workers. These policies were rooted in an ideology that imagined a rural and agricultural future for the Cambodian people. The regulation of forms and infrastructures of individual and collective mobility played a central role in enforcing this vision. This paper looks at how representations of these mobilities in Ratner’s novels trace memories of the disintegration and eventual reformation of Cambodian society during and after the Khmer Rouge. In so doing, the paper argues that literary representations of movement also act as archives of mnemonic mobility that repoliticize traumatic memories by contextualizing them with the collective structures of transcultural memory. 

Trauma, Identity, Belonging, and Displacement in Zoulfa Katoush’s As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

Hanaa Hamdan, UEF

This paper examines the representation of trauma, identity, belonging, and displacement in Zoulfa Katouh’s As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow (2022). Drawing on trauma theory, war trauma studies, and identity studies, it explores how experiences of war, violence, loss, displacement, psychological suffering, and survivor guilt affect the protagonist’s sense of self and belonging during the Syrian civil war. Through Salama’s experiences of war atrocities, the novel illustrates how trauma reshapes identity and influences perceptions of home, community, and belonging. Haunted by the loss of loved ones and burdened by survivor guilt, Salama experiences symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which contribute to the formation of trauma-shaped identities. The paper also considers how displacement and the possibility of crossing national borders influence her understanding of identity and belonging. Torn between the desire to seek safety and a sense of responsibility towards her homeland and community, Salama negotiates competing forms of attachment, belonging, and selfhood. The paper argues that war trauma, displacement, and survivor guilt play a significant role in reshaping identity and belonging in contexts of conflict and migration. 

Preparing the Frontline: Uneven Bordering along the First Island Chain

Lin Liang Yin, National Taiwan University

What does it mean to live in a place repeatedly imagined as a future battlefield? This paper treats the First Island Chain not as a fixed strategic line, but as a geopolitical abstraction continually enacted through bordering practices: military basing, civil-defence planning, evacuation, and everyday preparedness. Drawing on longitudinal public-opinion surveys in Taiwan, Japan’s Defense White Papers, and preliminary fieldwork, I trace how the same anticipated conflict is made present differently across these borderlands. In Taiwan, high recognition of China’s military threat coexists with more moderate stress and limited material preparedness, showing that recognition, emotion, and readiness do not necessarily move together. In Okinawa and the Sakishima Islands, anticipation is territorialized differently: territory is hardened through new military bases, missile deployments, and surveillance infrastructure, while civilian populations are rendered movable through evacuation planning. I conceptualize this as uneven preparedness, operating both within populations and between places. In dialogue with Nordic scholarship on strategic non-peace (Ljungkvist, 2024), this paper argues that preparedness is itself a practice of bordering and territorialization: the First Island Chain is not simply a border awaiting war, but one being remade through the anticipation of war. 

Imperial Legacies and Narrative Markets: Comparing Russo-Ukrainian War Narratives in Taiwan and Finland

Ming-Feng Liu, National Quem University, Taiwan

Existing research on wartime disinformation focuses heavily on the supply side—how states disseminate manipulative narratives. Drawing on comparative historical sociology, this study shifts focus to the demand side, asking why narratives resonate differently across societies. Comparing Taiwan and Finland, it conceptualizes their historical relationships with China and Russia as imperial legacies. Though transformed, these power asymmetries persist through collective memory, security imaginaries, and affective dispositions, e.g. fear, affinity, and distrust. Integrating Bourdieu’s symbolic market theory with the affective turn, the study proposes the concept of an imperial narrative market to examine how Russo-Ukrainian War narratives align with historically shaped societal demand. It identifies four ideal-typical narratives: Imperial deterrence, Imperial proximity, Imperial glory and dividends, Anti-Western imperialism. Comparing their salience reveals how discourses framed around peace, security, realism, or anti-imperialism can reproduce imperial hierarchies and ideologies. Ultimately, the study demonstrates how distinct imperial legacies shape democratic societies’ understanding of war, security, and global order. 

Organizers Pauliina LUkinmaa, UEF, Daria Kuznetsova, UEF, and Kaarina Aitamurto, University of Helsinki

In Russia’s increasingly restrictive political climate, both LGBTIQ+ people, feminists and members of religious communities deemed marginal by the state have been accused and convicted as, among other things, foreign agents, representatives of undesirable organizations, and members of extremist groups. However, these groups face different opportunities and constraints for action, reflected, for example, in varying forms of criminalization as well as in the scale and trajectories of exile and emigration. Differences and tensions also exist within these communities themselves. The divergent experiences of these groups provide an important lens through which to examine broader changes in the conditions under which civil society operates in contemporary Russia.

In this roundtable discussion, we examine the practices, networks, and strategies of LGBTIQ+ and feminist networks, and marginalized religious communities, both separately and in relation to one another. We approach minority status not only as a form of collective identity but also as a political position shaped by the state’s definitions of legitimate and acceptable action. From these perspectives, we explore how relations between the state and minority communities reflect broader transformations in the position and character of civil society in contemporary Russia.

We ask how and why some actors become marginalized, criminalized, or forced into exile, while others retain room for action or are even able to strengthen their position. We also consider why opportunities for action have evolved differently across minority groups and what these differences reveal about the state’s relationship with minorities and the conditions under which civil society operates. In addition, we highlight connections and tensions between these groups and critically reflect on the extent to which they can be meaningfully compared.

Participants

Kaarina Aitamurto (University of Helsinki)

Governing Islam After February 2022: Tightening Control and Deepening Divisions

Bio: Kaarina Aitamurto is Adjunct Professor (Docent) of the Study of Religions and a researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. Her research interests include the governance of minorities and the intersections of religion and nationalism in Russia. Aitamurto’s publications have addressed topics such as religion and violence, Russia’s Muslim minorities, Central Asian migrants, and contemporary Slavic paganism in Russia and Eastern Europe. Her work has been published in leading academic journals and by major scholarly publishers.

Daria Kuznetsova (University of Eastern Finland)

Selective Visibility: Shamanism, Political Loyalty and Indigenous Authority in Wartime Russia

Bio: Daria Kuznetsova is a Doctoral Researcher at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland. Her research focuses on contemporary Indigenous shamanism in Southern Siberia and its intersections with state politics, Indigenous belonging, gender, and the changing political environment in Russia. Her doctoral research examines transformations in shamanic authority and public visibility, particularly in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and media materials from Buryatia, Tuva, and Khakassia.

Pauliina Lukinmaa (University of Eastern Finland)

Activist Approaches to Preserving LGBTIQ+ Activism in Contemporary Russia

Bio: Pauliina Lukinmaa is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Gender Studies at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research focuses on LGBTIQ+ activism, queer mobilization, and transnational solidarity in contemporary Russia and among Russian-speaking exile communities. Her recent peer-reviewed articles include The Politics of Transnational Solidarity Among Exiled Russian-Speaking LGBTIQ+ NGOs (forthcoming), and “It is a representation of what we all need as a queer community”: Transformative Power of Communal Queer Quilting at the Behemoth’s Centre, Estonia (with Alexandra Milyakina, 2025). She has also co-edited special issues in scholarly journals.

Daniil Zhaivoronok (University of Tampere)

Resistance and cooptation: feminism in Russia after 2022

Bio: Daniil Zhaivoronok is finishing his doctoral studies at Tampere University. His interdisciplinary dissertation is titled Digitalisation and Feminist Media Practices in Contemporary Russia. His research interests include gender studies, social movements, Russian politics and media, science and technology studies, and feminist and queer theory.

The roundtable will also reserve ample time for discussion with the audience and encourage participants to contribute their own perspectives and questions.

 Migration, Gender and the Uneven Geography of Agrarian Service Access in Northern Ghana

Ebenezer Nikoi, University of Ghana

Migration has long shaped agrarian livelihoods in Northern Ghana, and remittances are known to ease farmers’ access to inputs. This paper asks a different question: not whether migrant households do better, but how migration reorganises who gains access to agricultural services, where, and on what terms. 

Drawing on a survey of 2,107 agrarian households, 56 interviews, and focus group discussions in the Upper West and Savannah regions, and framed through feminist political ecology, the study finds three things. Migrant households are more likely to report improved seed availability and market access, the latter through urban networks supplying price information and buyer contacts; but migration predicts nothing about weather information, the service the state is meant to provide. Gender is associated with access to every service in bivariate tests, yet loses significance once wealth, education and household characteristics are controlled – disadvantage operating through structure rather than through any rule. And place dominates: households in the Savannah region are roughly nine times less likely than those in Upper West to report improved seed availability. 

Migration reorganises agrarian inequality rather than resolving it. Male outmigration expands women’s agricultural responsibilities without extending their control over the services those responsibilities require. 

Social Infrastructures, Place Identity and Community: De-coding Urban-Rural Divides

James W. Scott, UEF

The urban-rural divide is narrated as a major source of political polarisation in Europe. However, several scholars argue that geographically based resentment is spatially diverse and not limited to peripheries in decline or structurally linked to unequal income levels between regions (McKay, Jennings and Stoker 2024, Vigna 2024). This suggests that the question of urban-rural divides needs a more nuanced perspective and I argue that debate regarding cohesion within the EU needs to more directly address the significance of place and place identities as central organising elements of everyday life. Recent scholarship has documented the significance of locally available social infrastructures (understood as services, meeting places, shared amenities) as benchmarks of community cohesion and identity (Tomaney et al. 2024). As the case of East German regions indicates, the erosion of social infrastructures and community services has impacted on the ontological security that place affords. Evidence of the politicisation of unequal access to social infrastructures lends credence to the assumption that urban-rural divides remain highly significant as challenges to European cohesion. 

When Mobility Meets Territory: Legal Pluralism, Cultural Boundaries and Community-Led Peace in Nigeria 

Omotomilola Ikotun, UEF

Farmer-herder conflict in Nigeria is often described as competition over land and water. This paper examines a different dimension: the encounter between mobility-based and territorially anchored systems of access, authority and belonging. It asks how pastoral mobility interacts with customary tenure, administrative boundaries and community claims, and how community-led conflict resolution mechanisms respond when these orders overlap. The paper draws on a qualitative synthesis of secondary sources on farmer-herder conflict and local dispute resolution in Nigeria, analysed through legal pluralism and conflict transformation. It treats mobility not simply as movement but as a social and institutional practice shaped by rules, relationships and negotiated access. The analysis shows how disputes may intensify when state law, customary authority and locally recognised norms assign different meanings to land use, passage and legitimate decision-making. It then examines community-led mechanisms as sites where these differences can be negotiated rather than reduced to fixed ethnic or occupational divisions. The paper contributes to debates on borders and cultural encounters by showing how everyday boundary-making and plural authority shape both conflict and possibilities for peace. 

Moderator: Olga Davydova-Minguet, UEF 

This roundtable explores how migrants encounter, interpret, and position themselves in relation to the historical narratives of the societies in which they live. These questions become particularly acute in wartime. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has intensified debates about history, security, national belonging, and political loyalty across Europe. In this context, war museums, memorials, commemorative practices, and other sites of memory become important spaces where migrants encounter national narratives and where different historical experiences meet. The roundtable draws on the research projects Towards Relational, Multidirectional Dialogues on Memory Politics in Diverse Finnish Society (2024–2027),  supported by the Kone Foundation and Migration, Affective Geopolitcs and European Democracy in Times of Military Conflicts (2024–2028), supported by the Horizon Europe program. In particular, it draws on group visits by Ukrainian and Russian-speaking residents of Finland and Germany to several war memory sites. The roundtable brings together theoretical, empirical, and comparative perspectives on the nexus between migration, integration, and memory politics in times of geopolitical polarization.  

Anssi Neuvonen (Karelian Institute, UEF): Immigration into History? Rethinking the Migration–Integration–Memory Politics Nexus in a Changing Geopolitical Context 

Tetiana Nahirniak (Karelian Institute, UEF): Encountering Finnish War Memory: Ukrainian and Russian Visitors at Muisti and Suomussalmi Memory Sites  

Olga Filippova (Karelian Institute, UEF): Ukrainian and Russian-Speaking Migrants as Publics of War Memory Sites in Finland and Germany: Negotiating Interaction, Researcher Positionalities, and Reflexivity in Times of War 

Olga Davydova-Minguet and Daria Agapova (Karelian Institute, UEF): War Memory in Migration Contexts: Fieldwork Reflections from Finland and Germany