Even though Finland scores relatively well in terms of educational equality of opportunity, persons with white ethnicities, middle class background and who speak national languages as first language are most likely to end up university education (Nori et al. 2020). In this presentation we analyse interviews conducted with students, who share the experiences of racialisation in Academia (lately referred students racialised as non-white). We focus on manifestations of normative whiteness in informal social encounters outside official teaching and learning situations. Our study conceptualises whiteness as a normativity that often acts invisibly but operates constantly as a racialised touchstone for belonging in Finnish universities. We regard whiteness as a hegemonic power structure and a set of norms against which ‘others’ are defined. (Keskinen & Andreassen 2017). This means that whiteness should not simply be reduced to bodily features or skin colour but rather it should be approached as a structural position of privileges that some bodies can occupy and some not due to racialising practises. Our analysis is based on 16 thematic interviews of university students. Common to all of them is that they have grown up in Finland, but their belonging to the hegemonic white, Finnish- or Swedish-speaking majority population is continuously questioned by racialisation on the basis of skin colour and/or other physical features. Our analysis has been inspired by Nirmal Puwar's (2004) question of what happens when those bodies not expected to occupy certain places, here university, do so. Our preliminary analysis suggests that from the perspective of our research participants, the university is a bastion of normative whiteness. In informal encounters, normative whiteness manifests for example as disregarding racist comments, automatic positioning out of Finnishness, and assumptions where students are regarded rather manual workers than privileged university students. The analysis of normative whiteness in informal encounters at Finnish universities troubles the Finnish collective self-image as a forerunner of educational equality (Rastas 2012). It also highlights how tightly whiteness and Finnishness are still intertwined.

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