Browsing by Subject "governmentality"

The thesis deals with discourses and experiences of positive parenting and ‘mother love’ in Somaliland within the context of Save the Children’s development intervention called the Parenting without Violence common approach and its parenting advising component, the positive-parenting sessions, aiming at reducing violent and humiliating punishment that children may face in their homes. The study aligns with the anthropological approaches to global development that emphasise the importance of paying attention to the multiple ideas, identities, social roles and social relations of different development actors. Through the theories of caregiving of children, motherhood, human development, personhood, governmentality, social orders and social change, the study explores the Save the Children’s policy discourses and the experiences of different development actors as they encounter and interact in some real-life situations and negotiate the diverse meanings around positive parenting and ‘mother love’, what they mean and how they are achieved. This study rests on discourse analysis of the Save the Children’s policy material as well as ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the space and facilities of the Save the Children’s country office in Hargeisa, Somaliland, during the period of one month in August 2021. Predominately, the study is based on semi-structured interviews of eight Somali mothers who had taken part in the positive-parenting sessions and three Somali community mentors who facilitated the sessions. By looking into the Somali mothers’ experiences of motherhood, the thesis contributes to the anthropological discussion about the intertwined concepts of mind, body, self and emotions. Furthermore, it seeks to point out how the emotional and embodied experiences of motherhood connect with the wider social structure in Somali context. The study suggests that the approach to human development and caregiving of children that Save the Children reproduces might be quite different from the ideas, morals and norms of the local communities, where the positive-parenting sessions are implemented. By the means of parental self-reflection, self-control and parenting advising, the positive-parenting sessions play out as a form of governmentality in a neo-liberal world, attempting to shape subjectivities and to manage the conduct of caregivers. The Somali mothers’ accounts indicate that their concept of the self is much more socially related than the Western individual concept of the self, upon which the ideological and theoretical foundations of the positive-parenting sessions are built on. Save the Children’s positive-parenting sessions, as a form of parenting advising, reflect individual mentality and they attempt to intervene with the patterns of human development, parental behaviour and emotional expression. The study argues that the Save the Children’s positive-parenting sessions’ development ideas are transferred into practice instrumentally by using Somali culture and Islam as resources for the project aims. However, when the Save the Children’s policy discourses are negotiated by the different development actors at the grassroots level, the ideas of positive parenting and ‘mother love’ achieve quite ambiguous and multiple meanings, along with the complex theorisations of culture and religion. The study shows that people live among multiple social orders and people can resist, appropriate and adopt different caregiving approaches. However, the core idea of the study is that the cultural construction of personhood, and how an individual is oriented and related with social relationships and structure must be considered in development thinking and practice if the development interventions aim at understanding the diverse approaches to human development and caregiving of children in different cultural contexts.  

Foucauldian concepts of bio-power and biopolitics are widely utilized in contemporary political philosophy. However, Foucault’s account of bio-power includes some ambivalence which has rendered these concepts of bio-power and biopolitics rather equivocal. Foucault elaborates these concepts and themes related to them in his books Discipline and Punish (1975) and History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976), and also in his Collège de France-lectures held from 1975 to 1979. Through a detailed analysis of these works this research suggests that there are differences in Foucault’s account of bio-power. The aim of this thesis is to shed light to these differences, and consequently, clarify Foucault’s account of bio-power and biopolitics. This research is divided into two main sections. The first analyzes Foucault’s works of 1975-76. In those works Foucault investigates relations of power and knowledge through a framework of what he called the normalizing society. Foucault identifies two essential forms of power operating in the normalizing society: individualizing discipline and population targeting bio-power. Together they form a network of power relations that Foucault calls power over life. By this concept Foucault designates the process by which human life in its totality became an object of power and knowledge. In this framework bio-power and biopolitics are essentially connected to particular system of norms which creates its power effects through medicine, human sciences and laws and regulations. The two pivotal reference points for normalizing techniques are race and sexuality. The second section focuses on Foucault’s lectures of 1977-79 and his other works published approximately until 1982.In these works Foucault elaborates the subject of governing population from different angle and with novel concepts. He abandons the view according to which one could locate a uniform architecture of power operating in society. Rather, he begins to analyze society as being constituted by multiple different forms of power and political rationalities. The crucial research question is what kinds of modifications take place in techniques of government when relations of power and knowledge are changed. In these investigations bio-power and biopolitics are identified with liberal apparatuses of security and pastoral power. The conclusions deduced in this thesis are that Foucault’s preliminary analysis of bio-power in the context of normalizing society is not sufficient to produce a firm analytical ground for concepts of bio-power and biopolitics. However, in his later elaborations of these concepts Foucault manages to demonstrate how political rationalities and different forms of power are related to the ways in which human life is governed and modified. Thus Foucault succeeds in creating analytical tools by which to have better understanding through what kinds of rationalities human life is managed in contemporary societies.

This thesis analyses the Finnish Government report on the need for a reform in integration promotion (2021:62). The material contains reform proposals to the current act regarding newcomer integration. The chosen method for studying the material is a Foucault-inspired critical discourse analysis which regards policy programmes as producers of problematizations concerning social phenomena. The primary study question of the thesis is ‘what kind of problem newcomer integration is represented to be’. This question is supported by five accompanying questions which elaborate how the representation of the problem has come about, what presuppositions and assumptions underlie the problem representation, what is silenced within the problem representation, what effects does the problem representation create and is there a possibility of thinking about the problem representation differently. The analysis concludes that the problem representation within the policy report presents the process of newcomer integration from an outdated point of view. The process is being represented as something that affects newcomers only and that the receiving society primarily has a coordinating role when it comes to providing efficient public services. The arrival of newcomers is perceived as a positive phenomenon only if newcomers commit to integrating themselves quickly and enter the Finnish labour market as soon as possible. Newcomers are thus treated as economic resources needed for solving Finland’s ongoing socio-economic challenges. The representation does not address the two-way nature of the integration process and thus accepts and reproduces the imbalance of power between newcomers and the receiving society. The proposals within the policy programme focus on creating an integration programme for the initial phase of the integration process and developing the integration service infrastructure so that the integration of newcomers could be achieved within a maximum of two years. In addition to intensifying the speed of the integration process, the analysis shows that demands for the receiving society relate mostly to redefining the responsibilities of officials at different governance levels. Equally, increasing the amount of low threshold integration services are given attention so that newcomers outside the labour market would be reached more efficiently. The analysis indicates that the purpose of this is to gather and manage all human capital that is currently left unattended, mould it into a usable resource and redirect it into the labour market. The analysis concludes that the suggested proposals advocate for increasing control on the lives and identities of newcomers as they are categorized according to their competences and skills i.e., their value to the receiving society. Thus, regardless of the reform on the act concerning newcomer integration, the process is still being thought of as a unidirectional economic process. Key words: Newcomer integration policy, two-way integration, critical discourse analysis, governmentality, biopolitics

The aim of this thesis is to study the governmentality of irregular migration in Finland by analyzing the practices, discourses and rationalities of governance through the Finnish policy discourses and policy suggestions. Irregular migration is currently a highly politicized issue in Europe, thus also in Finland. Especially after the higher inflow of asylum seekers in 2015, the government has introduced increasingly restrictive policies in attempt to govern migration. As a result, there is an increasing amount of irregular migrants at the very margins of society. Because of the politicized nature of the issue, and the direct impacts of the policies on the lives of migrants, it is crucial to systematically and critically study the policies and aim at understanding the underlying ideologies and political and ethical assumptions, as well as the possible social and political impacts of the policies. The theoretical background of the study is based on critical studies of migrant “illegality”, as well as anthropological policy studies and Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which offer a critical lens studying the larger processes of governance; the underlying political rationalities and the knowledge system that supports it. Finnish policy documents which aim to prevent irregular migration form the empirical basis for this research. Altogether 7 documents, 4 action plans and 3 yearly evaluation reports, were chosen based on their relevance to the topic. These documents are the key policy texts concerning irregular migration in Finland and they represent the official line of the Finnish Government. The methodological approach of the thesis is based on critical discourse analysis, integrated with Fairclough and Fairclough's political discourse analysis. The approach recognizes political discourse as fundamentally argumentative, primarily involving practical argumentation, and focuses on analyzing the problematizations of the issue and the proposed solutions that are based on these problem representations and the desired future state of affairs. The core findings of this research are that the policy discourses and policy suggestions constitute irregular migration as a political problem and an object of governance and highlight the need for action. The context of action is described as exceptional, characterized by a radical change and a growing number of migrants. At the same time, migrant “illegality” is produced as a natural fact, and irregular migrants are criminalized and marginalized, leading to their othering and exclusion. The measures of strict border control, increased internal control and deportation are represented as functional, natural and uncontroversial. The policy discourses promote effectiveness and efficiency, simultaneously highlighting the government in control. The policy suggestions further distinguish between those who are fit and unfit to live in the society and reinscribe the relation between the state, citizen and territory. A critical evaluation of the Finnish policies reveals their ineffectiveness and potential unwanted consequences of increasing the amount of irregular migrants, further marginalizing them and fueling public anxieties about migration. Researchers suggest that instead of basing policies on fears and ideological assumptions, they should be based on research findings, taking into consideration their long-term effects on society, the structural causes of migration and the human rights of migrants. Understanding the underlying political rationality of migration governance with its concern over the security and wellbeing of the population, and how the governmentality is connected to the development of techniques, expertise and other bodies of knowledge, helps to illuminate why the practices and discourses of migration control are so resistant to endure. The research concludes, however, that there always exists opportunities for resistance and that political claims of irregular migrants hold transformative potential that can challenge the sovereign practices of the state. Moreover, the everyday practices of the state, and how migrants actually experience the policies may be very different from the official representations of the state and would require further research.

This master’s thesis studies the Finnish migrant integration programme. Integration is a manifold concept. The term is used referring to many different aspects of social inclusion of migrants and ethnic minorities. This paper deals with the integration of newly arrived and/or unemployed migrants in Finland, through compulsory language training and workfare type internship practice – in this case publicly funded services delivered by a private training company. The research applies ethnographic participant observation data to Foucault-scholarship influenced governmentality theory. Governmentality refers modern use of state power, where governance of populations is increasingly delegated to grassroots societal actors, such as private companies, and mechanisms of state control have shifted away from direct coercion and command, into soft power of subjectification. Contributions from governmentality research allows situating ethnographic data into a wider framework of changing rationalities behind population management. Combining ethnographic research with analysis derived from governmentality theory allows relating macro-sociological analysis of social power to micro-sociological accounts of everyday life, habits and working conditions. The main aim of integration training is to increase the employability of its participants. My research describes how integration training seeks to subjectify its students as workers, or more precisely, how teaching a self-managing and disciplined worker subjectivity as a general soft-skill is embedded within language teaching. This active, flexible and service oriented worker subjectivity is reflected in classroom teaching and feedback, but also normalized in the role of the teacher. Integration training is also a place of learning, making friends, and multicultural expression. As an ethnographic study this is also a portrayal of integration training as a work place and a community. The teachers’ working conditions widen their role beyond just educators, to also carers and administrative assistants, whose work involve negotiating between the competing requirements of these roles throughout the working day.