Browsing by master's degree program "Kulttuurienvälisen vuorovaikutuksen maisteriohjelma"

In recent decades, the visibility of Finland has been increasing in Japan. It might even be almost impossible not to notice “Finland” in everyday life. -Products with Moomin characters, trendy Finnish style saunas, Finnish words used in brand or product names and Finnish themed facilities. But what kind of themes spring to mind when Finland is mentioned? What images are attached to Finland, or how is Finland talked about in everyday life? This study investigates what Japanese people post about Finland and what kind of representations of Finland appear on Japanese Twitter, as well as how the Japanese society is represented through these discussions. For the data collection, the search word and command “フィンランド min_faves: 1000” was used, in order to find tweets that included the Japanese word for Finland, フィンランド, and which had accumulated more than 1000 likes. The final data amounted to 364 tweets posted on Twitter between September 16th 2020 and November 7th 2022. The analysis was conducted in two separate phases; in the first phase, themes of the tweets which appeared in the data were identified by using qualitative content analysis (QCA), and in the second phase, representation analysis was conducted together with QCA in order to find out how Finland is represented on Japanese Twitter, and what kind of meanings are attached to Finland. The analysis identified the following themes that often appear in the tweets about Finland: Nature, travel destination, history, national defence, brands, art, language, customs, education as social welfare, school, work-life balance, gender equality, and mindset. The representations of Finland found in the data were: The ideal model for Japan (a model for a fair society/ a model for a happier life), magical and consumable Finland, a small but brave and a strong country, and questioning “the dream country Finland”. The analysis also found that the images of Finland are constructed to fit the narratives of Japanese people. “The dream country Finland” was created by Japanese people’s fantasies and ideals and it was used to criticize some aspects of the Japanese society: the Japanese government, politics, social welfare, working style, national defence, among others.

Counter-terrorism discourses have been increasingly studied during the recent decades but still mostly in the context of the Global North. One of the key researchers in this area is Elizabeth Shakman Hurd whose ‘Two Faces of Faith’ conceptual framework shows the tensions and consequences that arise when religion becomes an object of international public policy. The current study uses critical discourse analysis to apply this framework to two West African cases, ECOWAS and the G5 Sahel, to see how they construct the role of religion and religious actors in conflicts and peacebuilding. The data consist of 10 publicly available counter-terrorism and peacebuilding policy documents of the two organizations. The findings indicate that the ‘two faces’ framework is a relevant and useful analytical lens for investigating the role religious actors are given within the context of counter-terrorism and prevention of violent extremism. However, the documents are not a reproduction of Hurd’s arguments and often, the discourses do not follow the secularist dichotomies of the ‘two faces’ framework. Instead, religion is conceptualized through its role and position in the complex historical, cultural, and social systems in the region. Thus, even though the ‘two faces’ framework has been successfully used to explain the US-led political discourse on religion, more complex approaches based in systems thinking might be needed to conceptualize the West African understanding of the issue.

This thesis looks to find what types of narrative themes emerged during the 2010s from articles published in The Finnish American Reporter related to the topics of preservation and celebration in the Finnish North American context. Additionally, this thesis examines what types of activities were featured as acts of preservation and celebration of Finnish culture and which of these acts were seen as success stories or failures. To get acquainted with the topic, this thesis introduces academic research related to the concepts of identity, ethnicity, heritage, preservation of heritage, celebration of heritage, immigration, and Americanization. These topics are further complemented by looking into what types of research has been conducted on Finns in North America prior to this thesis, and by telling the history of the Finnish community in North America. The main dataset for this thesis consists of 370 feature articles published in The Finnish American Reporter between January 2010 and December 2019. This study takes a qualitative approach and qualitative content analysis was used during the data collection process to identify relevant articles. These articles were then analyzed with narrative analysis tools in order to find themes that developed across the articles. This study finds that teamwork and collaboration was an essential theme across all the articles, which made the preservation and celebration of Finnishness possible. The variety of Finnish communities, experiences and activities were also carrying themes throughout all the articles. Several different Finnish cultural activities examined here were featured as success stories, but failures were also present in the articles. Many of the articles demonstrated Finnish communities and organizations fighting hard against the decline of Finnishness in North America.

Finnish society is increasingly pluralistic regarding religion, and especially Muslims are rapidly growing in numbers. The population structure of Muslims in Finland is increasingly young, yet young Muslims’ experiences are currently under-studied. Muslims have been present in Finland since the early 19th century, along with other ethnic and religious minorities. Still, ever since then, Finland has been viewed as culturally homogeneous. This is connected to the view of Lutheranism as an intrinsic part of the Finnish national identity. This has led to an exclusion of people who do not belong to the category of Finnishness, and thus resulted in anti-Muslim racism. The objective of this master’s thesis is three-fold. The first aim is to contribute to the currently scarce research on social media representations of Islam and Muslims. Secondly, the existing media research on Islam and Muslims is heavily concentrated on media produced by non-Muslims, rather than media produced by Muslims themselves. Especially, research on media representations produced by young Finnish Muslims themselves are next to none. Thirdly, previous research shows that young Muslims in Europe are mostly studied in relation to issues of extremism, radicalization and violence. The manifolded nature of Muslim identities is not considered enough in the academia, and thus it is important to adopt an intersectional research approach that considers Muslims’ different identity categories, such as religion, ethnicity and age. This is done through qualitatively examining young Finnish Muslims in a previously unstudied social media environment: podcasts. The thesis answers two research questions: 1. ‘How do young Muslims negotiate their identities, especially in relation to Finnishness?’ and 2. ‘How are experiences of racism discussed in podcasts produced by young Muslims in Finland?’ The data of the thesis consists of four episodes from three different podcasts produced by young Finnish Muslims, ‘Ramadan Radio: Limitless Talks’, ‘Kahden kulttuurin väkeä’ and ‘Kh4nVision Podcast’. The thesis adopts a social constructionist approach to studying identity, based on the assumption that knowledge is produced in interaction with others. The chosen analytical methodology is critical discourse analysis (CDA). Six dominant discourses emerged from the data in the analysis: 1) intersectional identities as problematic; 2) code-switching between different identities; 3) Islam as an identity marker; 4) agency in change; 5) assigning responsibility of racism to the structures; and 6) internalized racism. The results reflect a complicated reality of being a young Muslim in Finland. In the podcasts, young Muslims negotiate their intersectional identities in relation to Finnishness from a problem-based perspective. Experiences of racism are manifested in the podcasts in numerous ways, from code-switching to reproducing racist language. The results of the study indicate that young Finnish Muslims’ identity is socially constructed and religious and ethnic identities are interconnected. The results of the thesis also show that discourse of identities is tightly connected to the context of production and the assumed audience of the content. The results support previous research findings, demonstrating that Muslims choose to emphasize different parts of their identity in contexts where Islam is not at center stage.