As a Nordic welfare state Finland shares a collective self-image as forerunners of equality, democracy, and social justice. Education is seen as a key instrument for social justice, and education policies in Finland still largely reflect this principle, also concerning the highest level of education, the academia. Historically, Finnish academic education has distinctively been a national project, aimed at educating Finnish citizens to work as professionals in the national labour market and promoting development of the welfare state (Buchardt, Markkola & Valtonen 2013). State-funded university education has been seen as an instrument for promoting social mobility and overcoming class conflict (Lund 2020; Kaarninen 2013). Still, as the Finnish Higher Education system is one of the most competitive in the OECD countries (OECE 2019) it can be regarded as a site of privilege. Admission to university is based on grades in matriculation exams and/or entrance exams. In a formally meritocratic admission system, there are groups that are statistically under-represented, such as students with migrant (FINEEC 2019) or working-class backgrounds (Nori 2011) or disabilities (Nurmi-Koikkalainen 2017). In addition, national education statistics do not provide figures on students of colour or oppressed national minorities (e.g., Finnish Roma). As these groups enter university, they share positions that are marked by differences in relation to normative expectations and structures that tend to prioritise whiteness, able-bodiedness, and middle-classness. Their lived realities and experiences in academia have been theorised as the examples of subjection to institutional violence or misrecognition (Burke 2018), which refers to processes of treating particular groups of students as “out of place”, potentially causing encounters that are disruptive, require negotiation, and invite complicity (Puwar 2004; Mirza 2018).

The aim of our study in progress is to analyse how normative whiteness is established and reproduced in Finnish university education. Within the tradition of Critical race and whiteness studies, it has been emphasised that the analyses of racialisation should not only be targeted to the processes of racial othering and exploitation, but also to the locus of hegemonic power and privileged positions in society (Keskinen et al. 2017). Our study conceptualises whiteness as a normativity that often acts invisibly but constantly operates as aracialised touchstone for belonging in Finnish universities.Whiteness is understood here as a hegemonic power structure and a set of norms against which ‘others’ are defined. (Keskinen & Andreassen 2017). This means that whiteness is approached as a structural position of privileges that is produced and reproduced through racialising practises that take place in various encounters, procedures, conventions, routines, and meaning-making processes, both in official and informal space in the university. Racialising practices do not necessarily manifest as explicit exclusion but as taken-of-granted expectations of the adequate student and ways of being, easily experienced as inadequacy and not belonging by those who do not effortlessly meet these expectations.

Our data consist of 16 interviews of university students, who represent various disciplines and several universities. They have all grown up in Finland, still their belonging to the hegemonic white, Finnish- or Swedish-speaking population majority is continuously questioned by racialisation on the basis of skin colour and/or other physical features. In Finnish university, which is strikingly white even compared with other Nordic countries, they never have privilege to bend into the crowd (Puwar 2004). In interviews, students reflect their experiences on studying in study programmes run in the national languages. We focus on those sections of data, where students describe the incidents in teaching and learning situations like lectures and seminars. The analysis included three different phases of reading the interviews. First Anne-Mari conducted overall reading, highlighting the descriptions of incidents, where colour did matter. The second phase was a thematic reading, where we divided these descriptions into the two layers of university space (Gordon, Holland, and Lahelma 2000). The official layer refers to pedagogical practices, learning materials, curriculum, teaching interaction etc. Informal layer refers for example to peer relations, leisure activities, and social gatherings such as student parties, coffee breaks etc. Based on the thematic reading, we chose data examples, which we recognised as ‘thickenings’ of shared experiences. The third phase was an analytical reading, in which we read the examples through the theoretical lenses provided by Critical race and whiteness studies (i.e., Ahmed 2012; Puwar 2004, Keskinen & Andreassen 2017). In our research, our ethical aim has been to commit to the anti-racist ethos that means to think and act in ways that confront and eradicate racial oppression (Lloyd 2002). It means also turning a critical lens on ourselves as researchers and on our positionality in the production of knowledge (Haraway, 1988). As researchers racialised as white, we do not have embodied experience on racism, However, research and activism in the field of anti-racist action and education have helped us in reaching students for the interviews and establishing trusting relations with them. We agree with Seikkula (2020, 42), who argues that the researcher’s position should not determine one’s capacity to produce critical work. It is our duty to conduct analysis that challenges hegemonic whiteness or, at the very least, recognises the existence of multiple perspectives.

According to our preliminary analysis, the normativity of whiteness manifests by treating interviewed students as exceptions, in Puwar’s (2004) terms as space invaders. For instance, they have frequently been asked to tell their personal narratives of their background: You must have your own story ready to justify your existence at the university, this is always asked. Standing out from the crowd is also produced in those recurring occasions in lectures where these students are offered to speak of diversity issues. These requests underline how they, unlike students racialised as whites, are mainly perceived to be representatives of their phenotype and skin colour: it is assumed that themes related to diversity are their main interests (see ibid). Furthermore, the normativity of whiteness is produced via the restricted perspectives of teaching, particularly by “the white gaze” (Yancy 2017) that ignores the influence of colonial history and Eurocentrism on the way different groups are presented or educational contents approached. It also means how “the audience”, here students in the lecture halls, are assumed to be white. For example, teaching staff do not seem to realize that there might be also other types of Finnish university students than those positioned as white and that the content of the teaching may touch some students personally. What is more, several students have encountered negative and even hostile reactions when they have raised these issues with teachers. These incidents also demonstrate how a critical discussion about racism easily evokes the affective side of race relations and how these “fragile reactions” are for white people a strategy for distancing themselves from confronting and eradicating the normativity of whiteness (Page & Tate 2018). Thus, the responsibility for questioning these norms seems to rest on students' shoulders.

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