The INDEFI Project
The project examines how immigration control influences the intimate sphere and how the intimate features in immigration control. The negative effects of living with the threat of deportation go beyond the directly affected foreign citizen. They also influence the potential deportees’ Finnish partners as well their extended family and friends. The study provides unique insight into the ways in which immigration control and the intimate sphere are connected.
What do we do?
Through ethnographic fieldwork in private networks of foreign citizens whose immigration status is insecure, alongside with studying immigration authorities, the proposed project will yield unique insight into the ways in which borders and immigration control have moved from state borders to the intimate sphere. By examining what we call ‘intimate geographies of bordering’, we show how immigration control applies selective recognition of close ties while, simultaneously, intimate ties can be mobilised to challenge decisions on residence permits and deportation. We highlight the resonance of borders in the everyday of transnational intimacies, but also how these intimacies feed into authorities' decisions.
Team members
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Saara Pellander
Saara Pellander is a Doctor of Social Sciences and Associate Professor (Title of Docent) at the University of Helsinki. She is the Director of the Migration Institute of Finland. In addition to being PI of the INDEFI project, she is the leader of the work package on interaction and steering group member of Mobile Futures, a consortium funded by the Strategic Research Council of the Academy of Finland.
She previously held a post-doctoral position at the Tampere Collegium (Institute for Advanced Social Research).
Pellander has worked and published on issues related to the regulation of cross-border intimacies and family reunification especially from the perspectives of policies and their implementation, as well as media representations of (forced) migration.
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Eveliina Lyytinen
Dr Eveliina Lyytinen works in INDEFI project as a senior researcher (24 months, June 2022-August 2024). She earned her doctorate from the Department of Geography of the University of Oxford in 2014, with her study on urban refugee protection in Uganda. As a postdoctoral researcher, she has examined employment of young people with refugee background (Coming of Age in Exile project 2015-2018) and the removal of asylum seekers (Action-oriented research on asylum seekers' deportability project 2018-2022).
Lyytinen also leads a research-art project “Endings – Refuge, Time, and Space” (2023-2026, funded by Kone Foundation). As of September 2024, she will conduct research on elderly and stay-at-home parents, and their perceptions of two-way integration and trust as part of Mobile Futures consortium. She has co-edited an anthology on deportations in Finland and co-leads a Finnish deportation scholars' network. Dr. Lyytinen is particularly interested in the integration of concepts of human geography into refugee studies, in qualitative research, and in research ethics.
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Jaana Palander
Jaana Palander is a Doctor in Administrative Sciences (Public Law) at the Tampere University, Finland. Her doctoral thesis dealt with the role of human rights in family reunification. In the INDEFI-project, she will analyse family reunification decisions and interviews with decision-makers. Palander also teaches Migration Law at University of Eastern Finland and at Åbo Akademi University. Recently, she has been a researcher at Åbo Akademi University in the consortium “Mobile Futures”, funded by the Strategic Research Council. Earlier, Palander has done research at the Migration Institute of Finland in the project “Family Separation, Migration Status, and Everyday Security: Experiences and Strategies of Vulnerable Migrants”, funded by the Research Council of Finland.
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Pihla Siim
Pihla Maria Siim holds a PhD in Folklore Studies from the University of Eastern Finland. Her research interests are related to narrative research, migration, family storytelling and to children’s experiences of mobility. Her doctoral thesis was based on multi-sited fieldwork (in-depth interviews) and concentrated on questions of identity and belonging among transnational families living in the area of Estonia, Finland and North-West-Russia.
Siim has long-term affiliation to the University of Tartu, and she has studied transnational families and return migration in many international projects. Her recent publications have touched “doing families” through practices of silence, storycrafting method, intergenerational care and family mobilities in the Estonian-Finnish transnational space. Siim works in INDEFI project 30 months as of January 2023. She is also an editor-in-chief for Elore, an electronic journal in folklore and related fields.
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Mimosa Suontama
Mimosa Suontama holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from the University of Turku. She works as a research assistant in the INDEFI project in the fall of 2024 and will also be conducting her Master’s thesis within the project. Her thesis focuses on the development of belonging and trust among mixed-citizenship couples through experiences of everyday bordering. Her research interests include bordering, the governance of migrants, and politics of belonging. She has completed her Bachelor’s thesis on the securitization of immigrants in presidential speeches.