Browsing by Author "Budzisz, Karolina"

Immigration remains among the most salient topics in the socio-political debate in a dynamically transforming Europe, which is reflected in the scholarly interest in the theme. However, as this thesis argues, the attention paid to anti-immigration and pro-immigration poles of the debate is not equal and the agency of immigrants in providing knowledge on the issue pertaining to them directly is relatively neglected in academia. “Tales of Our Own” strives to explore the characteristics of pro-immigration and immigrant-made discourses and investigate their relationships with the dominant hostile narratives around immigration emerging in the context of the current populist upsurge. The thesis conceptualizes populism as an antagonizing mode of articulation that provides a stylistic framework for arguments inciting the process of othering. Immigrants in these circumstances constitute perfect ‘Others’, excluded through many novel narratives guising straightforward xenophobia under the mask of neoliberal values. Exploring an underdeveloped discursive frontier with regard for its authorship contributes to the study of the immigrant response and substantial argumentation in the debate. Moreover, it follows the objective of reclaiming immigration as it recuperates the voices of the very actors of it – those ‘on the move’. Finland is introduced as a specific case study for this research. Investigating its political climate, self-perception, and international reputation allows for an additional inquest into the studied discourse’s role in contesting the hegemonic narratives about the country. The way the hosting state and society are presented in the examined data subjects the notion of Finnish exceptionalism to scrutiny. The thesis applies a Rhetoric Performative Analysis of contents published around the Finnish parliamentary elections of 2015, 2019, and 2023 in Migrant Tales – an online, immigrant-led blog community. This method is highly advantageous for the study of antagonisms, as it is interested in the logic of equivalence (belonging) and exclusion manifested in rhetorical practices such as the use of tropology (figurative language). Drawing from Postfoundational Discourse Analysis, it assumes that the frontiers are formulated in a struggle to colonize the recurring discursive signifiers with certain meanings. The dissertation discovers that the pro-immigration discourse is highly politicized and carries a solid agenda while remaining interactive with the competing anti-immigration narratives. The immigrants are narrated as experts of their own struggle, while Finland is narrated in a bi-polar manner, both as their cherished home and as a place of exclusion and suffering. The analysis demonstrates how the debate on immigration and, more specifically, its participants contest the notion of Finnish exceptionalism on one hand and yearn for its upkeeping, on the other.