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In a conversation with the editors of the book, Ánneristen Juuso discusses Sámi identity in contemporary Finland. The interview offers a historical and contemporary analysis of the deracination of Sámi peoples and the intentional and strategic formation of a hegemonic Finnish national identity, a process that renders Indigenous rights and knowledge invisible. The phenomena of Finnish coloniality, and its denial, sets the context for othering immigrants and refugees who also face erasure, othering and enforced dependency.
The conclusion to the edited volume, Decolonising Social Work in Finland: Racialisation and Practices of Care, identifies the main themes in the book. The book examines how colonial structures, systems, knowledge and ways of being still influence society and social work practices in Finland. In pointing out the myriad ways that asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants inhabit precarious circumstances amid welfare state nationalism and homonationalism, the authors call for a more emancipatory Finnish social work praxis. It argues that decoloniality is not a vague futurism, but rather a practice that requires practitioners to imagine and design pathways for learning, engaging, revising and responding to the everyday ways that colonial ideology is rooted in systems of welfare.
This chapter examines how universalism is implemented in practice in the contemporary Finnish public health and social services by analysing the service experiences of 20 migrant parents of a disabled child. The focus lies on the structures and practices in the services that frame the everyday lives of migrant parents. The analysis reveals systematic limitations based on implicit bias. Monolingual practices, standardised services and asymmetrical relationships between parents and professionals appear to be connected with universalistic practices that limit parents’ agency in many ways while they struggle to contact, find and use information about services. More inclusive health and social care services require recognising and addressing the different needs of a diverse population.
Three academics moving and living in Nordic countries and the West Coast of the US explore practices of city walking as a means of challenging colonial public archives. City walks from Gothenburg, Sweden and Fresno, California, are scrutinised as examples of decolonial social work pedagogy that build on Yoon-Ramirez’s (2021) notion of sensory and experiential learning as well as Sharp’s (2016) concept of ‘wake work’. The practice of wake work, which entails counter-archiving, is a decolonial pedagogy that challenges and attempts to rupture the colonial narratives and spatial mappings that erase specific communities’ histories and contributions to our collective spaces. By moving collectively through city space and counter-archiving public art, monuments and various geographic locations through dialogues, we aimed to make visible the everyday salience of colonial history in these city spaces.
In this chapter, our goal is for Finnish social workers to understand the health-promoting benefits and significance of mindfulness for systems change. We present information regarding the use of mindfulness interventions to support social worker healing and practices, share the ways that decolonised mindfulness can engage practitioners in systems thinking and change, and offer mindful meditations for students and practitioners to use. We encourage both social work students and practitioners to use mindfulness to promote their own individual health and well-being and also to engage in wise judgements that collectively lead to social workers being good ancestors to future generations.
This book examines the contemporary social care realities and practices of Finland, a small nation with a history enmeshed in social relations as both colonizer and colonized. Decolonising Social Work in Finland:
• Interrogates coloniality, racialization and diversity in the context of Finnish social work and social care.
• Brings together racialized and mainstream white Finnish researchers, activists, and community members to challenge relations of epistemic violence on racialized populations in Finland.
• Critically unpacks colonial views of care and wellbeing.
It will be essential reading for international scholars and students in the fields of Social Work, Sociology, Indigenous Studies, Health Sciences, Social Sciences, and Education.
Introduction and Chapter 10 available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
In the Nordic context, young asylum seekers of colour are often presented as potential societal threats through racialised risk-based discourses, which contrasts with the anti-racist principles of social work. Nevertheless, social work has shortcomings in effectively addressing cultural and racial otherisation. This results in contributing to and maintaining White normativity as well as Eurocentric and colonial epistemologies in professional settings. This chapter discusses arts-based social work research with young people from asylum-seeking backgrounds. It combines theoretical perspectives from critical Whiteness studies, decolonial and Indigenous paradigms. The findings suggest arts-based entry points that integrate social and environmental aspects and centralise the knowledge, creativity, capabilities, and agency of youths. Ultimately, the chapter discusses ways to strengthen an anti-racist stance and advance epistemological pluralism in social work.
This chapter explores how current paradigms of healing and wellness in Finland often replicate the same dominator systems of oppression and harm that they are trying to heal from in the first place. It interrogates the efficacy of the paradigm under which norms of care operate; namely, as part of a global, neoliberal ethos of performative wellness, which are rooted in racism, sexism, ableism and cis-heteronormativity. A quote by J. Krishnamurti, ‘It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society’, serves as a way of examining what we might mean by emergent healing spaces. Adhering to domesticated healing modalities serves to soothe one from the ails of neoliberal dominant culture through escapism and denial. Emergent healing spaces offer a way for the collective context to join the space too, as a way to practise naming the harm from which we seek healing in the first place. My enquiry into what the work of ‘healing’ entails in postcolonial emergent envisioning will be informed by the following questions. In a toxic culture in which we are all indoctrinated, to varying degrees, what are we healing from? What are we healing for?
This chapter investigates the homonationalist and colonial meaning-making processes in Finnish social work. It asks what kind of stories social workers and non-heterosexual people with refugee backgrounds tell about Finland, about the refugees’ countries of origin and about migrant communities. The data consist of semi-structured interviews with 12 Finnish social workers and six non-heterosexual people with refugee backgrounds living in Finland. The analysis indicates that social workers discursively use the oppression in refugees’ countries of origin to construct Finland as superior to them – as a discrimination-free gay haven. The participants with refugee backgrounds talk back to these single stories by telling alternative stories of their countries of origin, of migrant communities and of Finland. To decolonise social work, it is essential to move beyond the homonationalist meaning-making processes and towards cultural humility.
