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Migrant NGO practitioners in Finland: Discourses on language, integration and employment

In recent years, language has become a policy priority in Finland and has been established as a key factor in migrants’ labour market integration in academic studies. So far, however, relatively few ethnographic studies have been conducted on the migrants working in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the linguistic resources that are important for their working life integration, in addition to their communicative practices at work. The proposed linguistic ethnographic study is based on a superdiverse NGO in Finland and focuses on the migrant NGO practitioners, that is, salaried employees, subsidised employees, trainees, interns, volunteers and their Finnish NGO supervisors. The study analyses language, employment and integration trajectories of migrant NGO practitioners by cross-examining their experiences at the micro level and situating them within the macro level of Finnish policies concerning migrants and migration. It also explores multi-sited language policies and practices, along with workplace communication, in back and front regions of the NGO as a workplace. The research includes different types of multilingual/multimodal and offline/online data collected from different spaces of the NGO. The analytical framework of research draws on narrative, discourse and multimodal analysis. Overall, the study has both scientific and societal impact, from which academic communities as well as migrants, especially migrant jobseekers, employers and policymakers can benefit.

This doctoral research applied a linguistic ethnographic approach, and it focused on the experiences of migrant NGO practitioners in Finland. Through institutional narratives, the study explored the migrant NGO practitioners’ language, employment and integration trajectories in the workplace context. Meanwhile, through personal narratives, the study examined the trajectories of language, employment and integration of migrant NGO practitioners in the broader societal context. A variety of multilingual/multimodal and offline/online data sets were collected and produced with and for the research participants during the core and follow-up phases of ethnographic fieldwork. Analysis of narratives and narrative analysis were used as an analytical framework of the research. The findings of research presented and discussed the opportunities and challenges that migrant NGO practitioners faced in terms of policies and practices of language, employment and integration within the workplace and broader societal contexts of the receiving country. Overall, this doctoral research has both scientific and societal impact, from which academic communities, as well as migrants, employers, policymakers and civil society actors, can benefit.

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