Main interest:
There are similar regional centres funded by the International Association of Schools of Social Work RRCs in other regions of the world such as China, Oceania and Eastern Africa. Our network of university partners is committed to exchange and communication across participating countries for the promotion of global social work education (including fieldwork) and the recognition of best examples of innovative and transformative social work research and practice.
We seek to create new opportunities for active partnership in teaching and research on the contemporary issues such as sustainability, diversity, inequality, migration and promote the regional professional profile of social work education and research. The centre is coordinated by the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Germany and University of Eastern Finland, Finland, higher education institutions with a longstanding commitment to global social work education and scholarship. The current coordinators of this centre are Professors Chaitali Das, (FUAS), Janet Carter Anand (UEF).
I work as an Associate Professor in Social Psychology at the University of Eastern Finland. In addition, I hold the title of Docent in Social Psychology at the University of Helsinki. My interdisciplinary research focuses on the theory of social representations, discursive approaches, visual and social representations of teachership and leadership, migration politics, populist communication as well as visual, multimodal and arts-based research methods. Currently, I lead a 4-year research projected Intergroup relations and local encounters – Immigrant and Finnish young people’s perceptions of each other, their lives and future in multicultural Savo (funded by Kone Foundation).
Joni Virkkunen (PhD, title of docent) works as a Research Manager at the Karelian Institute. He is also the Director of the VERA Centre for Russian and Border Studies, a member of the executive board of the UEF’s top-level research area Borders, Mobilities and Cultural Encounters (BOMOCULT) and of the cross-faculty Doctoral Programme in Social and Cultural Encounters. His research relates to borders, border governance, cross-border cooperation, EU-Russian relations, regional and cross-border cooperation and transnational migration in Russian and post-Soviet contexts. He has been recently studying, for example, the Northern Dimension policy and the regional impacts of EU-Russia relations, local meanings of the border and cross-border cooperation, the 2015-2016 Arctic migration route through/from Russia to Finland and, recently, temporary protection holders from Ukraine. The latter he has been studying through Finnish and Russian migration and border policies, publicity and public debates, migrants’ everyday insecurities, and informal practices.
Dr Jussi P. Laine is a professor of multidisciplinary border studies at the Karelian Institute of the University of Eastern Finland, holding the title of Docent of Human Geography at the University of Oulu, Finland. From 2013 to 2021 he led the Association for Borderlands Studies, the leading international scholarly association dedicated exclusively to the systematic interchange of ideas and information relating to international border areas. By background, Dr. Laine is a human geographer, yet in his approach to borders, he combines influences from international relations and geopolitics, political sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology. His research explores the multiscalar production of borders and critically examines the relationship between state, territory, citizenship, and identity construction. His work extends to borderland resilience and comprehensive security, addressing the vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities of border regions in the face of geopolitical shifts, migration dynamics, and hybrid security threats. Most recently, Dr. Laine has published works on border mobility, migration, the ethics of borders, and ontological (in)security.
At the moment, I am working on my research project funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation: Precarious Intimate Networks of Migration and Work – Intimate and Intersectional Infrastructures of Low-Wage Migrants (PRECAINFRA). In the project, I examine migrants’ housing-related experiences
Previously I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in a research project funded by the Kone Foundation on Formations of hybrid manhood in the experience economy (EXMEN 2022-2025) in which I study the “new work” of male influencers and in particular the relationship between dogs and men.
In 2013-2017, I worked at the University of Jyväskylä as a PhD student in the project Industrial Citizenship and Labour Mobility in the EU funded by the Academy of Finland, and then at the University of Eastern Finland as a university teacher in the Department of Social Sciences (2017-2019), and as a junior researcher in the project Lean production model in public services: new formations of work and gender (LEWOGE 2018-2022) funded by the Academy of Finland. In the LEWOGE project, led by Professor Eeva Jokinen, we studied the effects of the Lean management model in public health care organisations.
In my PhD research (2024), I investigated the struggles of migrants working in low-wage sectors as part of the (re)production of the Finnish welfare state https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/95524.
The EU-funded MATILDE project is based on the hypothesis that non-EU immigrants represent a challenge for rural and mountain areas in Europe. However, these third-country nationals (TCNs) could contribute to the local economic and social development. In addition, TCNs affect the relationship between urban areas and rural and mountain zones. As a result, the project will estimate the dimensions of the economic and social impacts of TCNs on European, national and local levels. The project intends to engage local stakeholders and elaborate proposals concerning the redistribution of resources in the EU rural and mountain areas as well as recommendations concerning government policies. The project will offer policymakers and stakeholders a better understanding of the migrant integration process.
I am generally interested in migration and mobility and experiences that define belonging to the community of citizens. I investigate currently Spanish speaking women’s experiences of the welfare state.
Dr Barzoki currently foucese on the sexual objectification among Muslim immigrant women in Europe as a vulnerable group who suffer from serious psychological trauma raises from difficult time of immigration and resettlement in Europe.
This project is on-going ethnographic research of migrants in North Karelia. Since the beginning of the 2000s, I have been carrying on my research among Russian migrants from the everyday ethnographic perspective, in the border areas of North Karelia. The theoretical framework of the project lies in the intersection of welfare politics, transnational everyday life, rural border areas and everyday geopolitics (see e.g. Pöllänen & Davydova-Minguet 2017). Methodologically the study continues the border ethnography tradition (Davydova & Pöllänen 2010, 2011; Vila 2003). This project conducts research on migration and transnationalism in the contexts of border areas in the era of austerity policy and politics.
