Carving out Possibilities: Refugee Background Young Men and Mundane Political Agency

The driving question of my research is how young refugee background men try to affect their lives and possibilities. What issues emerge as problematic and important in their everyday lives, currently based in Finland yet transnationally interlinked, and how do they act upon them? By taking these questions as the premise of my research, I open a novel vantage point on the political agency of such young people. I do not define what is political—and how one is expected to carry out political acts—in advance, which enables me to inquire into what emerges as political in their lives and to recognize ways, reasons and aims of acting that have previously been blind spots. There are prominent academic and public discourses―in Finland, but also elsewhere―that describe these young men as having worryingly low levels of participation in society and little interest in politics, and as acting instead in disturbing or worrying ways. Their presence appears frequently as disorderly; a risk to others or to themselves. In these discourses, the young men tend to be approached as Others of Finnish society, which leaves their own experiences of society and their agency out of sight.

My approach to the young men’s agency draws theoretically from anthropological conceptualizations of the political as pervasive in the practices and relations of social life, as well as from anthropological and feminist new materialist conceptualizations of agency. I understand agency both as a capacity of human beings with complex subjectivities―of fully culturally and socially constructed, but also resourced, beings―and as a capacity of material bodies, relating with other bodies. Methodologically, my research relies on the ethnographic fieldwork I carried out over a time span of over two years, both in various social settings―such as youth spaces, a vocational school, free-time activities and public city space―and in close- knit cooperation with five key research participants. My fieldwork had two foci: first, detailed observation of the young men’s bodily choreographies in everyday encounters, and, second, sustained engagement in their efforts and reflections regarding their own life projects. In order to understand the young men’s political agency, I inquire in this dissertation into how they are encountered by other Finnish (non-)citizens in the surroundings of their everyday lives, how they react to the subject positions proposed to them in these encounters, and what kind of alternative subject positions they aspire and work for.

I suggest conceptualizing “mundane political agency” in the following way: 1) the young people’s attentiveness to power relations vested in the subject positions available to them in everyday situations, 2) their immediate bodily strategies that aim at reconfiguring these positions (however subtly), and 3) their long-term projects that aim to carve out alternative subject positions. Building on this proposition, my key findings are twofold. First, in their everyday encounters the young refugee background men are constituted as different recurrently and in multiple ways. These are often, but not always, directly linked to racialization. The subject positions proposed to them are strikingly often both categorizing and constricting, something to which they are attentive, if not always consciously aware. Second, if the political agency of refugee background young men is investigated from their vantage point, they appear to be highly active: dealing with Othering and its implications is all but perpetual. In their encounters with Finnish society and its other (non-)citizens the young men are almost incessantly alert. They struggle with the subject positions that are available for them and attempt to stretch, transform or reject them, or to carve out other possibilities. This struggle happens on two levels: the visceral level of the material body and its immediate choreographies, and at the level of the intentional, future-oriented projects of human beings capable of conscious reflection. The repertoire of strategies the young people deploy and of the projects they further is large.

My research sheds light on the agentic capacities and strategies of young people in a disadvantaged situation where there is no readily available space for political agency. It thus contributes to new conceptualizations of agency and underlines the importance of the concept in anthropology and the social sciences at large. It also highlights the potency of ethnographic fieldwork as a method of producing knowledge together with research participants. The knowledge produced with young refugee background men brought forwards in the dissertation turns the tables on the discourse on participation. It suggests that Finnish society could and should participate in the project my research participants are engaged in: a project of desiring and working for another kind of society, one in which representatives of minorities as well as the majority are encountered in an open, caring, and respectful manner.