BOMOCULT - Borders, Mobilities and Cultural Encounters research seminar

Warm welcome to an upcoming research seminar to be held on Thursday, 15 May at 12:15–1:30 pm at Karelian Institute, Aurora Entrance B, 1st floor.  We will hear from our wonderful colleague docent Olga Tkach about her work with the LIFEMAKE project. 

The seminar is organised by Department of Social Sciences, Karelian Institute and BOMOCULT research community.

Making homestay possible together: Volunteer mediation in accommodation sharing with war-displaced people 

This presentation is a work in progress analysing grassroots humanitarian responses to war-related displacement. It focuses on the practice of homesharing, in which residents of Finland – individuals and families – have offered their homes to people who have fled the military zones in Ukraine since 24 February 2022. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Helsinki metropolitan area, including 26 in-depth interviews with volunteer housing providers and volunteer mediators who connected them and facilitated the homesharing in various ways. Although the housing providers had the material resources to accommodate people who had fled the war-torn post-socialist space, many of them lacked the knowledge and skills to communicate with them and provide the necessary assistance. Therefore, residents of Finland with Ukrainian and Russian language skills and lived experience in the post-socialist countries acted as interpreters and caregivers, extending the homestay with other services, such as translation, paperwork, transport or institutional links to sustain the lives of displaced people. As part of their humanitarian convivial labour, the volunteers, lacking professional knowledge and institutional support, mediated interactions between Finns and Urkainians based on their habitual essentialist perceptions of cultural differences and/or on their understanding of the damaging influence of war. Looking through the lenses of collective action and social reproduction, I show that volunteer homesharing is a multitasking activity that is possible through synergies, collaborations and division of labour among multiple participants belonging to grassroots networks and chains with different expertise in the post-socialist context. 

Olga Tkach, Docent in Migration and Welfare Research (UEF), works as a grant‐funded researcher at the Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN), Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki. As part of the project “Life‐Breaking and Life‐Making: A Research Project on Social Reproduction and Survival in Times of Collapse” (LIFEMAKE, Kone Foundation, 2023–2026), she focuses on the homestay accommodation of displaced people in Finland. Her long-term research interests are migration and mobility, feminist and migration studies of home, housing and neighbour relations, family, life course and social inequality.  

This seminar will be onsite only. 

For further information, please contact Minna Piipponen, email minna.piipponen@uef.fi.