Normative whiteness in Finnish university education

ABSTRACT

As a Nordic welfare state, Finland shares a collective self-image as a forerunner of equality and democracy. Education is seen as a key instrument for social justice, and higher education policy in Finland largely reflects this principle. Still, university education is a site of privilege, where student composition mainly represents individuals from white ethnicities and middle-class backgrounds, who speak one of the national languages as their first language. This is the context in which we ask, ‘How does whiteness “matter” in Finnish university education?’ Drawing on interviews with university students racialised as non-white, our study demonstrates first how the norm of whiteness is manifested both in the official and informal university spaces, thus operating a racialised touchstone for belonging. Second, our study shows how the practices of white ignorance among other students and teaching staff prevent the recognition and dismantling of racialised power relations. Thus, we argue that the process of tackling racial inequalities in university education is still in its infancy in Finland. Changing this situation would require, first and foremost, the critical reflection and dismantling of normative whiteness within the Academy.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• racialisation
• higher education
• university students
• university
• sociology of education
• equity
• critical race studies
• social justice
• Nordic countries

Introduction

It’s just that, well, or I mean, it feels terrible to say this out loud, but when this is so commonplace in a way that you come across that, your face cannot be Maria Nieminen. You really, really come across this kind of thing a lot in teacher training at university.

In the quotation above, a Finnish university student in the teacher education programme reflects on the question of whether race matters at university. In her answer, Maria describes how her family name, which indicates Finnish heritage, is often met with disbelief due to her non-white skin colour. This quotation highlights how whiteness in the Finnish context is entangled with Finnishness in a self-evident manner. As a result of geographical location, a history of relatively strict migration policies, and limited prospects in the labour market, Finland has retained a predominantly white ethnic composition longer than its Nordic neighbours. Therefore, university students, such as Maria in the quotation above, still find themselves usually ‘the only ones’ in study programmes run in Finnish.

So far, research on minoritised groups at university has mainly focused on admission to university, whereas racialised power relations in higher education have remained a relatively unexplored field (as an exception, see Aminkeng Atabong & Seikkula, 2018; Molander & Souto, 2022). Previous research has shown that individuals of white ethnicities and middle-class backgrounds, who speak a national language as their first language, are the most likely to pursue university education in Finland (Nori et al., 2020). In our study, we turn our focus to the university as a space where racial power relations take place. Following Ladson-Billings and Tate’s (1995) seminal argument, we posit that understanding educational inequality necessitates placing race at the forefront of our theoretical framework to examine disparities and power relations, paying particular attention to the narratives of those subjected to racialization.

We approach racial power relations through the concept of whiteness. Our study conceptualises whiteness as a normativity that acts invisibly, still constantly operating as a racialised touchstone for belonging in Finnish society, including universities (see Keskinen et al., 2021). In this article, we draw upon on the experiences of students subjected to racialisation (hereafter referred to as students racialised as non-white) to analyse white racial domination at university settings. Our analysis is based on interviews with university students who have all grown up in Finland. Still, their belonging to the circle of Finnishness is continuously questioned due to racialisation based on their skin colour and/or other physical features. We use critical race and whiteness studies as our main theoretical frameworks (i.e. Ahmed, 2012; Arday & Mirza, 2018; Keskinen & Andreassen, 2017; Tate & Page, 2018; Twine & Gallagher, 2008). We also contextualise our analysis within sociological debates on higher education and its equity.

The socio-cultural context of the research

As a Nordic welfare state, Finland shares a collective self-image as a forerunner 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, academia. State-funded university education has been seen as an instrument for promoting social mobility (e.g. Lund, 2020). However, at the same time, the Finnish HE (higher education) system is one of the most competitive in the OECD countries (OECD, 2019). As the most competitive and stratified educational institution, the university is a site of privilege, and previous research has pointed out groups that are statistically under-represented, such as students with migrant or working-class backgrounds (Nori et al., 2020). National education statistics do not provide figures on racialised minorities, such as students of colour or the national minority of Finnish Roma. However, as these groups enter university, they share positions that are marked by differences in relation to normative expectations concerning university students.

Students racialised as non-white are a group whose belonging to the circle of Finnishness is questioned by racialisation based on alleged biological differences, skin colour, and/or cultural differences, often combining elements of these (Keskinen & Andreassen, 2017). As the history of Finland as a country of immigration is short – covering roughly three decades – students racialised as non-white in most cases represent the first generation that has grown up in Finland and/or speaks Finnish as their first language. Due to this relatively short history, many scholars have pointed to a lack of established vocabulary for racialised and ethnicised identities in Finland (see, e.g. Aminkeng Atabong & Seikkula, 2018; Rastas, 2014). The identity categories of ‘blackness’, ‘brownness’, and ‘people of colour’ have been relatively recently adopted among young people, and there are regional differences in how these categories have been taken up. For example, the term ‘students of colour’ is a divisive one in our data: some of the students we interviewed used it as a self-descriptive identity category, while others strongly associated it with student activism, from which they wanted to distance themselves. Therefore, we emphasise that our use of the concept ‘racialised as non-white’ does not refer to an identity category but rather to racialising practices that normalise whiteness (see Keskinen et al., 2021). Furthermore, we use the term ‘racialised’ in a broad sense to capture the variety of experiences and practices that racialisation produces for different groups of students.

Finland is a country where racialisation in education has long been an unrecognised and even silenced issue (see, Kurki, 2019; Mikander, 2016; Souto 2022). It has been argued that the country’s collective national self-image as a forerunner of equality and democracy has rendered it difficult to address issues of racism in education (Aminkeng Atabong, 2016; Rastas, 2012). Moreover, the Finnish education system has historically been engaged in a national project which aimed to assimilate minority ethnicities into the hegemonic culture and language community, resulting in generations of Finnish Roma and Sami people losing their own languages (e.g. Helakorpi, 2020; Lehtola, 2014). Finland’s carefully established self-image as a monocultural society turned out to be challenged in the 1990s, when, due to changes in the geopolitical situation, a peak in immigration was seen (Lepola, 2000). In 2022, migrants accounted for 11% of the total population in Finland (Official Statistics Finland, 2022). It is noteworthy that more than half of this population is under 30 years of age. Notably, the number of children and young people is particularly high among immigrants from non-European countries, including Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. These demographic changes mean that Finnish educational institutions, including universities are no longer entirely white spaces, as they used to be. In this specific context, we ask, ‘Where and how does whiteness “matter”?’

Whiteness as a conceptual starting point

Finland, as well as other Nordic countries, is often perceived as having been an outsider and innocent to the colonial project (Ipsen & Fur, 2009; Keskinen, 2018). Over the past decade, several studies (largely influenced by the extensive research tradition of critical race theory (CRT), black feminism, and postcolonial feminist studies) have revealed Nordic countries’ continued participation in the (post)colonial economic, cultural, and scientific processes, which portray Europe, together with the Western world as a whole, as a cradle of civilisation and thus superior to the non-Western world (Buettner, 2022; Keskinen et al., 2009; Loftsdottir and Jensen, 2012). These studies have highlighted the role of Nordic countries, including Finland, in the colonisation of the Sami, marked by racial discrimination, a ‘civilising’ mission, and the exploitation of natural resources and land. The research has also pointed out Finland’s ambivalent position in colonial projects. At the same time, when indigenous peoples were colonised, Finland’s belonging to the West was scrutinised, employing pseudoscientific race theories that categorised Finns as ‘less white’, using racial categories such as ‘Mongol’ or ‘Asiatic’. Thus, drawing clear distinctions from racialised ‘others’ has been interpreted as a strategy to assert and affirm belonging to the West (Keskinen, 2018). The concept of ‘colonial complicity’ (Vuorela, 2009) has been used to capture Nordic countries’ ties to colonial histories and their contemporary effects while recognising the specificities of the Nordic context. This strand of literature also demonstrates how racial categories (e.g. whiteness) are not fixed and stable but vary with time and place, despite being rooted in the historical trajectories of colonialism and imperialism (see also Essed & Goldberg, 2002). These Nordic studies – as well as the quote at the beginning of this article – underline how racial categories and the ideals of Western-ness and whiteness remain central to Nordic countries’ national identities and self-perceptions as rational and egalitarian (Engh, 2009; Keskinen, 2018; see also Lappalainen 2006). These historical, social, and cultural categories and ideals function both as desired objects of identification within the nation and as normative claims directed at those who wish to belong to it.

The starting point for our research is that racism as a power structure and race as a socio-cultural category (Essed & Goldberg, 2002; Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995) continue to hierarchically frame all aspects of life in Finland and its universities, affecting not only who can belong to the circle of Finnishness but also what one can be and achieve and how far they can go in life (Aminkeng Atabong & Seikkula, 2018, p. 173). By racialisation we refer to the meaning-making processes and socio-cultural practices through which people are placed into hierarchical categories of race based on alleged biological differences, skin colour, and/or cultural differences, often combining elements of these (Keskinen & Andreassen, 2017; Miles, 1989). The notion of relationality in racialising processes (Miles, 1989) is essential to our study. Whiteness holds a particular position in hierarchies of race, as it marks a position of power and privilege and operates as the norm against which all other racialised positions are defined (Frankenberg, 1993). Thus, whiteness is conceptualised both as an embodied position/racialised identity and as a form of power (Twine & Gallagher, 2008).

In our locally specific analysis (Twine & Gallagher, 2008), the focus is on racialising practices that place whiteness at the centre, reproducing hierarchical power relations and positions. In our predominantly white research context, we approach whiteness as a normativity that acts invisibly but operates constantly as a racialised touchstone for belonging in Finnish universities. Thus, our study takes part in those critical discussions of whiteness that primarily focus on examining and exposing the often invisible or masked power relations and racialising practices within existing race hierarchies. 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. These practices occur through various encounters, procedures, conventions, routines, and meaning-making processes in the everyday life of educational institutions.

As previously mentioned, the norm of whiteness has not been recognised or questioned in educational contexts in Finland. Rather, the emphasis has been on the ideologies of cultural diversity and multiculturalism, which, while promoting tolerance, do not dismantle racialised power relations, preserving white Finnishness as the most respectable and privileged social position (e.g. Anthias & Lloyd, 2002; Hage, 2000; Hummelstedt, 2022). The failure to recognise and deal with racialised relations has been argued to be part of the Finnish exceptionalism that dismisses the history and presence of racism in Finland and can also be interpreted as a Finnish version of white innocence and ignorance (Peltola & Phoenix, 2022; Rastas, 2012; Wekker, 2016). Nevertheless, as Leonardo (2004) pointed out, these strategies of whiteness are neither innocent nor harmless; they only prevent whites from critically reflecting on and taking responsibility for how racism, as a societal structure, continues to be actively produced. In Finland, where discussions on racism have been scarce and predominantly framed in the context of migration, it has been stressed that examining and recognising racism as a societal structure requires critical discourse and research that ‘dismantle[s] the norm that protects whiteness as an invisible place of privilege’ (Aminkeng Atabong & Seikkula, 2018). Taking into account criticisms that whiteness studies risk downplaying the active role of whites in the reproduction of racial domination (Leonardo, 2004), we emphasise that our critical examination of whiteness is motivated by anti-racism and a commitment to changing the status quo. Our study contributes to this endeavour by engaging with the stories of students racialised as non-white and examining normative whiteness at universities, an area that remains largely unexplored in other Nordic countries (Khawaja, 2023). In addition to Nordic critical work on whiteness, our analyses are influenced by scholarly discussions from the US (DiAngelo, 2017; Tate & Page, 2018) and the UK (i.e. Arday & Mirza, 2018; Puwar, 2004), each with their well-established traditions of research in the fields of critical race and whiteness studies.

Analysing students’ stories

This article draws on 16 interviews with undergraduate university students from a variety of disciplines (i.e. social and educational sciences, medicine, natural sciences, and humanities) from five universities in different parts of Finland. All these universities represent academic higher education – as distinct from vocationally oriented universities of applied sciences, which represent another form of HE in Finland. Anne-Mari Souto conducted interviews either face-to-face or remotely during the years 2018–2022.¹ Students were invited to share their experiences of studying at the university from a minoritised position perspective. The call for interview participants was distributed through social media platforms targeting university students and personal contacts using the snowball method. Eleven women and five men, all under the age of 30, expressed their willingness to share their experiences with Anne-Mari. In addition to Finland, the interviewees have family ties in both southern and northern Africa, Central and North America, Asia, and the Middle East. Ten were born outside Finland, but all the participants had received their school education in Finland. Even though most of the research participants have Finnish citizenship and have all been raised in Finland, their belonging to the circle of Finnishness has continuously been questioned by racialisation on the basis of skin colour and/or other physical features. In Finnish universities, which are strikingly white even compared with other Nordic countries, these students never have the privilege of blending into the crowd (Puwar, 2004) – a privilege that was consistently reflected in interviews. This is why we most often anonymised the place of study or the main study discipline of the students – this information could disclose too much. In the interviews, students reflected on their school path to university and their experiences of studying in study programmes run in the national languages. All the interviews were recorded, transcribed, and anonymised by the first author of this article. The second author of this article worked with the anonymised data.

Based on the thematic reading (Braun & Clarke, 2012), the analysis included three different phases of reading the interviews. First, and particularly guided by research on everyday experiences of racism (i.e. Essed, 1991), Anne-Mari conducted an overall reading focused on identifying recurring, every day racialising incidents and encounters in the interviewees’ speech. These repeated occurrences indicate a power structure that privileges whiteness and not just a series of coincidences. The second phase consisted of a thematic reading, wherein descriptions of everyday occurrences were categorised into two dimensions of university space: official and informal (Gordon et al., 2000). Drawing from human geography (Massey, 1994; 2005), we conceptualise space as relational and political, continuously shaped by interactions with social and material relations. The official layer of space refers to pedagogical practices, learning materials, curricula, teaching interactions, etc. The informal layer of space refers, for example, to peer relations, leisure activities, and social gatherings – such as student parties, coffee breaks, etc. By making this analytical distinction, we highlight how racism is perpetuated through both institutional practices and informal encounters. In the third phase, we aligned our preliminary thematic categorisations of the data with the theoretical literature on critical race and whiteness studies (i.e. Ahmed, 2012; Arday & Mirza, 2018; Puwar, 2004). This analytical reading enabled us to outline and synthesise the primary interpretations of our research. To contest the normativity of whiteness, we paid particular attention to both the multiplicity and often unquestioned and invisible nature of the practices that reproduce white domination (Twine & Gallagher, 2008).

In this research, our ethical aim has been to commit to the anti-racist ethos, which means thinking and acting in ways that confront and eradicate racial oppression (Lloyd, 2012). Anti-racism also calls us to prioritise the experiences and knowledge of people subjected to racialising processes. It also means 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 an embodied experience of racism. Nonetheless, our engagement in anti-racist research and activism has enabled us to connect with students willing to entrust us with their stories. Our responsibility is to leverage our capabilities to conduct critical analysis, deconstruct normative whiteness and elucidate how it frames students’ experiences in university education (see Seikkula, 2020).

Normative whiteness in lecture halls and seminar rooms

Students’ recurring experiences of being singled out through remarks such as ‘You always stand out from the crowd’ and ‘You are the only one in the lecture’ underline white racial domination at the university. Students racialised as non-white rarely come across people like themselves, both among students and among teaching staff. The students interviewed also pointed out that the illustrations in course materials and official university marketing or other materials represent mostly white people (see also Molander & Souto 2022). In this ‘sea of whiteness’ (Ahmed, 2012, p. 42), students racialised as non-white stand out, and this is a visibility that comes from not being the norm (Puwar, 2004, p. 49).

In her book Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, Ahmed (2000) pointed out that strangers are not those who are unrecognised but rather those who are recognised as strangers. Being marked as a stranger was one of the students’ shared experiences which presented itself in pedagogical practices. Students shared how they had been asked to recount their personal stories of their background: ‘You must have your own story ready to justify your existence at the university; this is always asked. Or how you got here, or what are you doing here’. Ahmed (2007) identifies these as moments ‘of being stopped’ that reveal the racialised norms and prerequisites for belonging (p. 161). The sense of being marked was also produced by pedagogical practices, which the students found disturbing and offensive. These practices included being asked to comment on topics related to cultural diversity or to act as experience experts on diversity issues in lectures or during internships, often without any expressed interest in doing so. In the next quote, a student describes a situation, where they decide to be passive and silent in a lecture on multiculturalism, while at the same time knowing that the teacher will ask for their² opinion, as they typically did:

I’m usually the one who talks a lot in lectures and comments as much as possible. But then, in the lecture on multiculturalism, I wanted to keep my mouth shut so that I could see if it was happening. In a way, I knew that the lecturer was looking for a comment from me, and that’s what they did. At some point, they got to the point that when I didn’t comment enough or at all, they pointed and asked for my opinion.

These examples of how the students racialised as non-white are prompted to speak of diversity issues underline how they are first and foremost perceived to be representatives of their phenotype and skin colour in the official academic space: it is assumed that diversity-marked themes are their main interest (see Puwar, 2004, p. 69). In addition, in these requests, it becomes evident what Sara Ahmed (2000, pp. 96–97; 2012, pp. 42–43) pointed out: under these circumstances, students racialised as non-white are included by being labelled not as the standard or the typical student but in terms of their racial difference. Ahmed (2012) calls this phenomenon ‘conditional hospitality’ – the ‘other/stranger’ is welcomed on the condition that the act of inclusion maintains the racial norm and the form of exclusion (pp. 42–43).

At the same time, however, it is equally essential to acknowledge that teachers often miss opportunities to diversify the perspectives and knowledge production foundational to university teaching. Recent years have seen decolonial /post-colonial approaches urging educators and researchers to confront Eurocentrism, the coloniality of knowledge, and methodological nationalism/whiteness in knowledge production and pedagogical practices (e.g. Aminkeng Atabong, 2016; Shahjahan et al., 2021). The push for decolonisation and associated calls for change, while not entirely new, demand critical attention to the deep-seated colonial worldview that still informs academic canons and universities as institutions, including teaching methodologies (e.g. Mbembe, 2016; Rai & Campion, 2022; Scheurich & Young, 1997). This worldview has historically marginalised academic and other forms of knowledge, especially those rooted in the perspectives of women, indigenous peoples and racialised power relations. However, revisiting our earlier point, the way teachers engage with students – often characterised by a ‘conditional hospitality’ – does not encourage the sharing of knowledge and experiences derived from diverse racialised social realities.

The following story told by a student with family ties in Southern Africa provides an example of how Eurocentrism and the colonial worldview in pedagogical practices overlook and invalidate the lived experiences of students racialised as non-white while reinforcing white racial domination. In the next quote, a student recounts how, during a lecture, a teacher showed a video containing material that shocked the student interviewed. The student described how they sent a message to the teacher after the lecture, criticising the teacher for not providing a content warning in advance about a sensitive topic. The student was sure that Finnish white deceased children would not have been presented in the same insensitive and unproblematic way as were the African children. The teacher responded with expression of anger and refused to consider the student’s point of view.

We go to a lecture, it’s like let’s watch this video, or movie. I was like, okay, sure. Then, in the first two minutes, the teacher shows this horrible, miserable imagery of the people X (names the country in Africa). I mean, some horrible hospital … stuff and then taking video of dead bodies, children, and I was like…WHAT? Well, I put in an email, that hey, couldn’t you give a content warning in advance? My day was messed up afterwards, but the teacher seemed kind of pissed off. No one has ever told me that this is problematic. Then I’m like, I guess you can’t compare it since … would you show killed Finnish kids just like that? Then, nothing came of it now, except I’m pretty sure it impacted my course grade. [laughs]

You’re supposed to be, like professors or lecturers or whatever and then you talk like … really problematically, but … so yeah they don’t even see the possibility of there being others, not just white students in class. So everything that’s being discussed is as if it’s something the students don’t really concern the students on an emotional level.

I feel like overall everything, all discussions really are about how white people see it, how they speak something X. And they treat it as some kind of interesting phenomenon, so yeah let’s discuss it, and they don’t even think it could be personal to anybody, and maybe it isn’t, but they somehow don’t understand that it like, could, touch someone.

This account reflects the unquestionable and self-evident standpoints of white normativity in university teaching. In concrete terms, the teacher’s failure to facilitate discussion, provide context, or issue a content warning before showing video material not only perpetuates but also legitimises the racialised and stereotypical depictions of African children in need (Aminkeng Atabong, 2016). In the research literature (i.e. Frankenberg, 1993; Yancy, 2017), these standpoints of white normativity are also conceptualised as the ‘white gaze’, which draws attention to how ‘the audience’ (here students in the lecture) are assumed to be white and how non-whiteness is presented as an exception – to quote the previous example – as an interesting and impersonal phenomenon that happens somewhere outside the West. The story also crystallises how the ability to ignore one’s own racialised position is a manifestation of white privilege (Ahmed, 2007) in the official university space. This overlooks the expectations students have of their university education. A critical reflection on whites’ positionality and a responsibility to dismantle racialising power relations are aspects the storyteller expected from the university teaching staff. The disappointment – which in this quotation is expressed in the comment ‘You’re supposed to be, like professors or lecturers or whatever and then you talk like…’ – has even led to one of our research participants abandoning their university studies.

This example shows how addressing racism and the normativity of whiteness often evokes the affective dimensions of race relations (Arday, 2018; Keskinen et al., 2021). Discussions about racism and efforts to change related practices can trigger discomfort, denial, and resistance within academia, phenomena Shirley Ann Tate and Damien Page (2018) have theorised as manifestations of white innocence and ignorance (see also Orozco, 2019; Wekker, 2016). These concepts refer to whiteness both as an epistemic viewpoint and an unwillingness and even reluctance to acknowledge racialised power relations – and here concretely, the experiences and viewpoints of students racialised as non-white. Tate and Page (2018) wrote, referring to Robin de Angelo (2011), that these ‘fragile reactions’ are for white people a strategy to distance themselves from the charge of racism and its reproduction (see also Leonardo, 2004). From the students’ perspective, these affective reactions make it difficult to talk about racism or racist practices. ‘You must think very carefully how and when you can talk about it’, as one student highlighted in the interview (see also Arday, 2018, p. 164). Even though equity planning is mandated by law in educational institutions (Non-discrimination act 1325/2014), the experiences of the students we interviewed highlight the contradiction between equity policies and aims and current practises (Ray, 2019), as explained by one student: ‘The university says it is equal and takes even anti-racism seriously. There have been no channels to deal with this kind of discrimination, no support network, everything is fine on paper and then, it stays hidden’. In critical discussions of whiteness, practices which only seemingly (on paper) or symbolically make efforts for diversity and inclusion are called ‘tokenism’ (Arday, 2018, p. 164) or ‘non-performative institutional speech acts’ (Ahmed, 2012, pp. 116–117): they help organisations to improve their diversity images rather than combat racism – or more broadly, to legitimise rather than recognise and challenge the practises that privilege whiteness in the organisation and its culture (Patel, 2015; Ray, 2019). As Ahmed (2012) argues, equality policies and diversity documents alone cannot remove racism from institutions, if they do not aim at structural and cultural change.

Normative whiteness in informal social encounters at cafeterias and student parties

Beyond pedagogical contexts, the university also emerges as a site of white privilege in informal social settings, including cafeterias, peer interactions, and student events. In the next quotation, one female student explains how she stands out, both through her physical appearance and her name. In addition, she recounts how she is often spoken to in English and mistakenly perceived as an international exchange student, even when she is among other local Finnish students and is dressed like them, in the attire of the same student organisation.

Well, every time I go to the lecture hall, I get the feeling that everyone is staring at me because I look different. That I’ll be remembered, and my name will be remembered, and the cleaners will talk to me and ask me out on a date, and in this way, the cooks and such will get something like that, a peer image. At student parties, they always speak English to me, and the security guards will say to me in English that here, you can’t go here, and you can’t go there, and this way, at student parties, not so much in my free time. Even though I have the overalls, and I’m with the whole Finnish group, people have always thought that I’m a foreigner. Then again, it’s just because you’re so special.

The students underlined that these encounters are mostly positive in nature, with people just mistaking them for exchange students. However, this quotation highlights how ‘well-intentioned acts’ can have othering and exclusionary consequences when repeated. In the literature, these acts are called racial microaggressions and are utilised as ‘tools of whiteness’ (Arday, 2018, p. 167) that question the presence and belonging of those racialised as non-white. At the same time, the quote also demonstrates how Finnishness is still heavily associated with whiteness and people who do not fit the norm are interpreted as foreigners (Keskinen, 2018). As a consequence of not being recognised as Finns, these students encounter stereotyping perceptions and inappropriate treatment to which those categorised as foreigners in Finland are often subjected. An example of this, as seen in the previous quotation, is how security guards restrict these students’ freedom of movement at student parties. These discriminatory practices not only separate these students from the crowd but also bring into question these students’ equal treatment as university students.

The previous citation reveals another dimension that questions these students’ equal and authentic positioning as students in academia. This indicates that the norm of whiteness is perpetuated not only by the white majority but also by individuals positioned in racialised groups. In the same context in which the student talked about distinctive and othering experiences she had encountered in the university, she brought up occasions in which people racialised as non-white who work in positions of manual labour (such as cleaners and kitchen staff) perceived her as one of them. She interpreted the requests for dates as a sign that she had not been identified as a university student. These everyday encounters illustrate the presence of structural racism in the Finnish education and labour market and how racialising imaginaries and practices affect people’s perceptions of what is possible for people like them in Finland (Souto and Sotkasiira 2022; see also Patel, 2015, p. 671). As argued by Reay et al. (2005), processes of exclusion work through having ‘a sense of one’s place that leads one to exclude from places from which one is excluded’. As a consequence of these normative white – and, therefore, Western – notions of people’s educational and vocational places and capacities, the students interviewed are forced to challenge the images of whom academia is thought to be open to and who it is thought to represent. In other words, these students have to be and act like space invaders – to disrupt the norm and invite negotiation and complicity (Puwar, 2004).

In the informal university space, whiteness manifests as partly contradictory. These contradictions remind us that racial categorisations and demarcations are not stable and immutable, and that even within the same social space, practices can both dismantle and reproduce racialisation (Peltola & Phoenix, 2022). This is demonstrated in our data: on one hand, racially diverse friendships were established, and the interviewed students had an active role in student organisations, which can be interpreted as a sign of a certain level of openness and inclusiveness of the student community. On the other hand, the most blatant forms of racism were encountered in informal spaces. The students described how, in group work related to their studies, at events organised by student organisations or even in close relationships with fellow students, white Finnish students may use derogatory remarks or tell racist jokes about certain groups of people. In the following quotation, a teacher education student describes a party where they had fun until an n-word joke was told by a peer from the same student group. The joke was not directly aimed at the student interviewed, but both the student and others present knew that the student could have been a potential target of that racialising practice.

A: I remember one student party, the student parties were really fun, until one student, the theme was still Finland! And it was probably a nice theme, but I wondered beforehand what some people were coming up with. And then the fun ended when some bright guy, who was still in my year and was studying to be a teacher, made a n-joke at the party, so it was a bit of a situation that made me feel like, okay, everyone is probably looking at me and, like.

Q: How did the situation continue?

A: Well, my closest friends who were just sitting there, they were like, what am I supposed to do when it came so unexpectedly, but… Then I just kind of, no, I never really talked to the person who told this joke [laughs] after that.

This example highlights how, within student culture, humour operates as a legitimation for derogatory remarks and racialising terms. What is more, these practices of joking also include the expectation of being able to ‘take a joke’: expressing offence would be interpreted as ‘whining’, lacking a sense of humour, or being overly serious (see also Peltola & Phoenix, 2022): ‘I didn’t mean it like that, it was just a joke, hey, relax’, as one student was told by a fellow student. The previous example also shows how the closest friends of the student we interviewed did not know what they could or should have done or how they could have supported their friend. This indicates that students racialised as white, such as the teachers discussed in the previous chapter, are not used to reflecting on their own position in racial hierarchies and the ways in which they may perpetuate, dismantle, or tackle racialising practices and privileges. This ‘white silence’ (DiAngelo, 2017), however, is not a stance of neutrality but is a practice that allows individuals racialised as white to avoid confronting the harm of racism, and thus, it keeps whiteness in place as the status quo. As a result of these practices, students are left to navigate these situations on their own without receiving the support to handle and cope with them.

Dismantling normative whiteness as a prerequisite for change in Finnish university education

In this paper, we have demonstrated how normative whiteness is manifested both in the official and informal spaces of universities and how it operates as a racialised touchstone for belonging in Finnish academia. Whiteness is not only a taken-for-granted expectation of the typical university student but also the epistemological framework and perspective that guide knowledge production, institutional practices, conventions, and everyday encounters and meaning-making processes. In our data, in the official university space, these racialising practices are often relatively hidden and subtle, whereas in informal spaces, they might be unconcealed and even blatant. A common feature of these practices is their ability to mark racial differences on non-white bodies, making them visible and stand out. At the same time, however, these practices silence and exclude the viewpoints and experiences of students racialised as non-white, thus making them invisible. This dual status of being both visible and invisible crystallises the normative role of whiteness and its power to organise the social structure of university environments, further entrenching racism (Ahmed, 2007; Puwar, 2004; Yancy, 2017).

Whiteness creates a reality which can easily go unnoticed by those racialised as white (Ahmed, 2000). Students shared stories illustrating how both teaching staff and students racialised as white are not only reluctant but also refuse to reflect on the existing racialised power relations. In Finland, this tendency towards white ignorance is supported by the exceptional image of Finnish society as a country without a history of racism, coupled with an apparent disregard for the presence and welfare of individuals racialised as non-white (Peltola & Phoenix, 2022; Rastas, 2012). Rastas (2012, pp. 95–101) argued that the discourse of exceptionalism not only helps to disregard the existence of non-white individuals, thereby separate ‘them’ from ‘us’, but also acts as a strategy to avoid the moral and ethical scrutiny necessary for fostering and demanding change. All this is displayed in the loneliness that students racialised as non-white report in the face of these practices which produce and reinforce hegemonic whiteness in the university. According to our analyses, despite their claimed diversity and accessibility policies, Finnish universities do not offer the necessary support for tackling racism and, overall, for problematising racialising structures and practices inside the institution. Rather, the responsibility for the questioning and problematising of these practices and power relations seems to rest on the shoulders of the students racialised as non-white. We concur with Mirza (2018), who notes that those who do not (quite) inhabit the norms of an institution are often given the task of transforming these norms (p. 18).

Our analysis shows that Finnish universities need a ‘Decolonise Academy’ movement (Keskinen et al., 2021; Rai & Campion, 2022; Shahjahan et al., 2021) to confront Eurocentrism, the coloniality of knowledge, and methodological nationalism/whiteness in knowledge production and pedagogical practices. Finland’s image as a beacon of equality does not extend to acknowledging and addressing racism; instead, it continues to situate the examination of racial power relations and white dominance outside of itself. This is evident in incidents in which students not only stand out but are mistaken for foreign students or manual workers. These examples underline for whom the privileges and societal positions that university education affords are imagined and reserved in Finland. Moreover, they demonstrate that racial plurality is more closely linked to international rather than intranational contexts. This reveals how university education still works as a national project imagined and built based on the myth of a white monocultural society that ignores the histories and presence of cultures and ethnicities other than white Finns (Lappalainen 2009; Peltola & Phoenix, 2022). For university education to become more racially inclusive and develop its decolonial practices and epistemologies, acknowledging that the university setting is not racially neutral is the first step. Race matters in establishing and perpetuating the structures of white dominance in the Academy. Moreover, transformation requires active anti-racist action and accountability from all of us in academia, especially those racialised as white.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Due to the nature of this research, the participants of this study did not provide consent for the public sharing of their data. Therefore, supporting data are not available.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne-Mari Souto

Anne-Mari Souto (PhD in Social Sciences) works as a senior university lecturer in career guidance and counselling at University of Eastern Finland. Her expertise is in the sociology of education, youth studies, critical race and whiteness studies, anti-racism in education, and participatory methods in qualitative research. She is particularly interested how racialisation and racism shapes educational pathways and how to dismantle racial differences in career guidance and counselling processes.

Sirpa Lappalainen

Sirpa Lappalainen is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Eastern Finland. Her expertise lies in the feminist sociology of education and qualitative methodology. Her recent publications contribute to the fields of feminist ethnography, minority policies, critical disability studies and qualitative methodology. At the University of Eastern Finland, she co-leads the Research Community of Learning, Work and Everyday Life in Digitalized Society.

Notes

1. In this research, the ethical principles defined by the Finnish National Board of Research Integrity were followed Finnish National Board on Research Integrity TENK, 2019).

According to Finnish National Board of Research Integrity (2019, 19) an ethical review statement from a human sciences ethics committee is required, if the research contains any of the following:

a) Participation in the research deviates from the principle of informed consent,

b) the research involves intervening in the physical integrity of research participants,

c) the focus of the research is on minors under the age of 15, without separate consent from a parent or carer or without informing a parent or carer in a way that would enable them to prevent the child’s participation in the research,

d) research that exposes participants to exceptionally strong stimuli,

e) research that involves a risk of causing mental harm that exceeds the limits of normal daily life to the research participants or their family members or others closest to them or

f) conducting the research could involve a threat to the safety of participants or researchers or their family members or others closest to them.

All the persons involved in this research volunteered to participate and provided their consent. The Ethics Committee of the University of Eastern Finland has been consulted before the data collection. As the target group to be interviewed is over 16 years age university students, who are familiar with the ethical principles of the research work the chairman of the Ethics Committee stated that ethical review statement from a human sciences ethics committee is not required.

The chairman of the Ethics committee reviewed and approved the research design and the scientific protection statement, particularly how the vulnerability of minority status was taken into account in the ethical commitments of the study and the protection of the anonymity of the subjects.

2. In Finnish, personal pronouns do not indicate gender. Thus, and also for better anonymity and as a sign of inclusive language, we use instead the singular, gender-neutral they/their.