Doctoral student Sahradyan Sonya

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

Tieteellinen tutkimus / siihen pohjautuva työ | Yksivuotinen

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.