Browsing by Subject "Otherness"

This research explores manifestations and negotiations of Otherness in the life stories of six adults who moved to Finland from Latin American countries as children. Throughout oral history, the purpose is to highlight the individuality of the migration process, emphasising the importance of looking at personal experiences and narratives. Otherness is understood in the research as a key factor in the migration process, by which the individual feels displaced and ‘otherised’ in the new environment due to a complex combination of circumstances. The research questions explore how materialisations of Otherness affected greatly the identity construction of the narrators. Otherness is thus approached through a timeline perspective; the narratives are examined with special attention to accounts of Otherness as children, and accounts of Otherness that manifest currently as adults. The research also explores why, when looking at migration processes, an intersectional approach is welcomed and relevant, since the category “immigrant” can neither be understood as homogeneous, nor isolated from other identities in life. The narrators moved to Finland between 1989 and 1999, in a decade that was crucial for Finland regarding immigration arrival numbers and policies. The thesis is informed by this: the fact that Finland witnessed increased immigrant arrivals and asylum seeking petitions during the 1990s, did not translate in abundant arrivals from Latin America, as it was the case with countries from other regions. Therefore, the narrators did not have ample representation or a proper diaspora community to ease their identity construction process and their migration journey in general. This is why research on Latin Americans in Finland is not only important but also necessary and interesting: they can be considered “a minority within a minority”, relatively invisible and scarcely researched. An oral history perspective when approaching Otherness is also justified and pertinent. With the use of narrative analysis, the interviews reveal in detail how Otherness does not disappear with the passage of time, but instead transforms in its materialisations and overall nature. Simultaneously, narrators also develop different negotiation mechanisms, and even incorporate Otherness to their own identity. Finally, the thesis links how these first-person narratives examined can inform future policy making: the thesis proposes that looking in detail at individual stories can contribute to the development of integration practices that would be more attuned to both migration processes and to the need of involving the native population in the two-way integration endeavour.