Close

Refine your search

Transnational death: practices of death and remembrance in the transnational everyday on the Finnish-Russian border´s Profile image

Transnational death: practices of death and remembrance in the transnational everyday on the Finnish-Russian border

Project
01.09.2021 - 31.08.2025
Karelian Institute, Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies
Information People Publications

Funders

Main funder

Research Council

This interdisciplinary project combines the research traditions of transnational migration, everyday life, memory and death studies. As a fundamental event, death highlights those silenced and invisible cultural and social bonds and fractures that attach or separate people to and from places and communities. Through the prism of death the project explores how identities are negotiated in death practices and how different actors shape them through various regulations as well as by memory politics.
The case study examines the practicalities and meanings of death in the daily lives of Russian speakers in the border area between Finland and Russia. The materials consist of interviews with migrants and officials, participant observations and media materials, historical documents, popular culture artifacts and an inventory of public places of memory in border areas. The research contributes to the current debate on human worth, conviviality and belonging.

Leaders

In our group, we study death, which is the existential and inevitable event of life, in the context of immigration and transnationalism. We look at death from three perspectives. First, we focus on care practices and social policy, asking how immigrants die and how they care for the dying. What does actually happen in multicultural end-of-life care and what is required of it? Does care change in the context of immigration and transnationalism? Second, in terms of cultural research, death provides a fruitful basis for exploring the formation of identities in present-day Finland, where transnational networks and landscapes are common and mundane. Which deaths are considered relevant and remembered? Which deaths are forgotten and why? How are different deaths represented? Third, history research provides perspectives that allow us to question the nation-state’s heroic or sacrificial ways of remembering ”their own” and forgetting the deaths of “others”.

Keywords

border Finland immigration memory politics Russia Russian speakers transnational death

Leaders

Professors

Senior Researchers

Post-doctoral Researchers

Publications

24 items