Lena Näre is Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She holds a DPhil in Migration Studies from the University of Sussex, UK and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research focuses on migration, asylum, transnationalism, ageing, care work and precarity. Her research has been published in Sociology, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Citizenship Studies, Journal of European Social Policy, among others. She has recently co-edited a Special Issue for Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on Welfare state bordering as a form of mobility and migration control with Synnøve Bendixsen in 2024. She is currently co-editing a Special Issue on platform workers everyday experiences for the Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies with Bertil Rolandsson and Stine Jacobsen. In addition to leading Caring Labour -project, she is currently leading a research project ’Tackling Precarious and Informal Work in the Nordic countries’ (PrecaNord, 2022-2026) funded by Future Challenges in the Nordics programme. She is also a partner in a Horizon project ‘Improving the living and labour conditions of irregularised migrant households in Europe’ (I-Claim, 2023-2025) funded by the European Commission. She is currently serving as the chair of Nordic Sociological Association. She is an Associate Editor of Global Social Challenges Journal (Bristol University Press) and she is an academic board member of Helsinki University Press. She served as Editor-in-Chief of Nordic Journal of Migration Research in 2012-2022.
Dr. Anastasia Diatlova is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include migration studies, labour, gender and sexuality. She received her PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Helsinki in 2019. Her doctoral dissertation was "Between Visibility and Invisibility: Russian-speaking Women Engaged in Commercial Sex in Finland". She has previously worked as a researcher in the PrecaNord project. Dr. Diatlova examines the experience of migrant construction workers. She lectures on sociological theory and qualitative methods, and her work has been published in Gender, Place & Culture; Sexualities; Nordic Journal of Migration Research; Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics and elsewhere.
Elisabeth Wide is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on the reorganisation of social reproductive work and labour within contemporary capitalist societies. She also investigates forms of bonded and unfree labour as intertwined with the legal regulation of migrant work, and its entanglement with globalising class formations. In Elisabeth’s doctoral thesis, entitled Indebted labour: Migrant care and domestic work in the outsourcing of reproductive labour, she analysed the purchase of social reproductive work by private households. She demonstrated how the contradictory structures built around migrant care and domestic work infuse labour with meanings of debt and gratitude, referred to as indebted labour.
Matias Muuronen is a PHD researcher at the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. Muuronen is writing his doctoral dissertation on migrant workers in the construction sector, analysing how the organization of the construction sector transforms - and is transformed by - cyclical geographical movements of migrant workers. In particular, Muuronen examines how such mobilities affect the workers' relations of care, reproduction and production.
Noora Pohjanheimo is a communications specialist and journalist, working in the field of human rights and humanitarian work.
In CaringLabour -project she is working on a non-fiction book that covers themes of labour migration, care and parenthood together with the photographer Katja Tähjä.