Liberation – Decolonizing mobility and identity in the digital era

Application summary

I will write a peer-reviewed academic book on the lived experience of high-skilled racialized migrants in Finland. This book gives an insight into the lived experience of high-skilled racialized migrants in Europe. Through historical, theoretical, and empirical resources I collected, it delves into the case of Finland, a Nordic country whose paradox is to be both unfailingly ranked happiest country in the world and the country with the highest rate of racist harassment within the EU. In this manuscript, I offer a deeper understanding of the Finnish colonial past and contemporary relation to ‘race’, racism, and migration and I provide recommendations on individual, community, and institutional use of digital technologies that empower racialized migrants to shape their own identities, experiences, and trajectories. This book highlights how Finland and other Global North countries can make use of digital tools to support all citizens’ agency and equity and evolve into more conscious, decolonial, and ethical societies. The "liberation" project involved 50 participants from 15 countries and resulted in a dataset of more than 40 hours of video-recorded social interactions and semi-structured interviews. On this corpus, I conduct an interdisciplinary analysis drawing on decolonial visual ethnography, multimodal interaction analysis, and critical phenomenology.