Although state-funded university education has been seen as an instrument for promoting social mobility and overcoming class conflict (see, e.g. Lund 2020), university education represents globally one of the enclaves within the national space in which privileged citizenship is manifested (Mitchell 2016). As a highly selective and stratified education institution, the university is a site of privilege, and the Finnish higher education (HE) system is one of the most competitive in the OECD countries (OECD 2019). 

In this paper presentation, we will present the research project Towards Academic Labour Market Citizenship? The Politics of Belonging in Finnish University Education (ACCEPTED), that investigates how students who do not meet expectations of being able-bodied and white with over-generational roots in Finland (hereafter referred to as ‘non-normative students’), negotiate their way in and through Finnish university education. The presentation will discuss our theoretical points of departure, objectives and the design of the project in relation to current HE discourses about diversity and (in)equalities, and to its blind spots in the Nordic space. The objective of the project is to scrutinise how various intersecting normativities – such as ableism, Finnishness and whiteness – intersect with gender and social class, paving students’ ways to academic labour-market citizenship in Finland. The study contributes to the sociological debate on HE and draws on feminist sociology, critical race and ethnic studies, and critical disability studies, and it is planned to begin in September 2022.

In ACCEPTED, we will investigate social and cultural processes within the university from the perspectives of two groups of non-normative students: (1) the students of racialised and ethnicised minorities and (2) disabled students. Students positioned to racialised and ethicized minorities consist of students, whose belonging to hegemonic majority (see Hage 2000) of white, Finnish or Swedish speaking population is often questioned, and most likely have experiences of racialised or ethnic discrimination. Disabled students are a heterogeneous group of students, some of whose abilities and/or body functions are defined as ‘disabilities’ or ‘impairments’ in relation to the norm of an able-bodied person (see, e.g. Goodley, 2014).

Our key theoretical concepts are citizenship and belonging. Citizenship, often defined through rights and duties within a particular community, is a concept that operates as an exclusive and inclusive principle of social organisation (see, e.g. Lister 2003; Yuval-Davis 2011). We consider citizenship as not static but as a process, continuously transforming over time and place (Mitchell 2016). In the ACCEPTED project, we explore the use of the concept of academic labour-market citizenship, in which we refer to the ideal of citizenry, which is produced and reproduced in national HE politics and policies.

In order to grasp how the university, as an enclave of privilege, operates and is lived and experienced by non-normative students, we rely on Nira Yuval Davis’s (2011) theorisation on belonging. Following Yuval-Davis, belonging in this study refers to ontological attachments constructed through social locations, individuals’ identifications and affective attachments to various groupings and ethical and political value systems within which people define their own belonging and that of others (Yuval-Davis 2011, 13).

Our research project will be conducted in three interlinked empirical inquiries, in which we will adopt a multidimensional research design. Each inquiry employs different methods of data production but the data will be analysed jointly so that the inquiries complement each other. Firstly, we do spatio-temporal and post-structural policy analysis on HE policy discourse. We will investigate it by analyzing the most prominent policy documents, such as laws, decrees, institutional strategies and action plans, and expert interviews at organizational, national and transnational levels. In line with post-structural policy analysis (Bacchi 2009), we understand the university space and the roles and possibilities this space offers to students as contingent and in constant construction. Policy discourses play a powerful role in this process as they create and maintain the normative categories of ‘the excellent’, ‘the able’ and ‘the adequate’. Secondly, we produce collective memory workshop data with non-normative university students (see Haug 1987; Davies & Gannon 2006). The objective is to produce insights into how students who share a similar social location marked by ethnic, racialised or disability statuses negotiate their experiences of being a university student. Following the chosen methodology, we aim to co-create safe spaces in which to find alternative ways of knowing and knowledge production together with research participants: spaces that facilitate ‘talking back’ (hooks 1989) among the non-normative student groups. Thirdly, we conduct biographical interviews with non-normative university students and alumni in different locations in Finland. With this interview data, we will explore how non-normative students conceive of their current or previous studies at university and how they envision their future as academic labour-market citizens (see Henderson et al. 2007). The focus of the interviews will be on research participants’ personal accounts and narration of their educational path, experiences of studying at university and socio-historical, cultural and local university milieus and practices. The collective memory workshop data and the biographical interview data will be analysed by using discursive and narrative analysis. The focus of the analysis is on what kinds of societally recognised dominant and counter discourses of non-normative groups the research participants draw on in their narration, and how these relate to their subjectivities and positions at university (see, e.g. Niemi & Mietola 2017; Tamboukou 2008).

So far, research focused on the dynamics of inclusions and exclusions in Finnish university institutions has been relatively limited and focused on admission to university (see however Käyhkö 2020) and a notable gap remains in academic research on how non-normative students are encountered at the university. Finnish exceptionalism and the collective national self-image as a forerunner in equality and democracy has been argued to obstruct efforts to address issues of racism in education (Rastas 2012). Furthermore, similar exceptionalism operates in relation to disability, gender, class and any other dimensions of the social categories of difference. Our research is built on the premise that students’ individual prospects for both academic labour-market citizenship and belonging are formed at the intersections of various social normativities that frame the institutional cultures of university (Ahmed 2012; Samuels 2017). When non-normative students gain access to a highly competitive university education, they have broken expectations and taken a first step towards privileged citizenship (Mitchell 2016). However, international studies (Burke 2018; Dolmage 2017) show that instead of rewarding students for this achievement, academia leaves them to struggle with various forms of exclusion despite the stated diversity and accessibility policies (Ahmed 2012). We assume, that various normativities do not necessarily actualise as explicit exclusion but may actualise as taken-for-granted expectations of adequate citizenship and ways of being, easily felt as inadequacy, shame and not belonging by those who do not smoothly meet the expectations (Käyhkö 2020; Brown & Leigh 2018). Through empirical work focusing on the perspectives of non-normative students, we expect to produce theoretically informed knowledge on the obstacles to educational equality in the context of academic university education and to find novel insights into citizenship in the European HE context.

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