People

CAMILLA NORDBERG (Docent, Dr. Soc.Sc.) is a university lecturer in social work and social policy at the Swedish School of Social Science. She holds a Finnish Academy research fellowship for a study on “Citizenization in the local welfare state: migrant mothers' everyday life in restructuring urban settings” (2013-2019). She is a researcher in the Centre of Excellence on Care and Ageing (2018-2026, CoE AgeCare). Her research has revolved around the migration welfare-state nexus, focusing on issues of citizenship, power, political discourse and street-level bureaucratic encounters. She is the Principal Investigator of the project and will particularly analyze how public discourse culturally scripts social work practice and the social positioning of migrant families in a context of citizenization.

MAIJA JÄPPINEN (Dr. Soc.Sc.) works as a university lecturer in social work in the University of Helsinki. Her earlier research experience locates to the areas of gender violence, social services, human rights and welfare, and Russian studies. She has often conducted her research using ethnographic methodology and in transnational settings. In this project, she is responsible for the ethnographic fieldwork in adult social services and child welfare services. Her main research question in this project is: How are power asymmetries enacted and made sense of in professional social work encounters between social workers and migrant family members and how do they link to citizenisation? Moreover, her analytical interests include rights-based practice in social work with migrants, and the role of language interpreters in street-level encounters between migrant service-users and social workers.

HANNA KARA (Dr. Soc.Sc.) has previously conducted research on women’s transnational migration in Latin America and Spain. She has studied the everyday consequences of migration status and irregularity, transnational family relations, and emotions and meaning-making in transnational migration. Her conceptual interest areas have been time and temporality in migration, intersectionality, (in)visibility and belonging. Methodologically her interests lie in collaborative and creative research methods, negotiations around access and consent in qualitative empirical research as well as language difference and translation in research. In this project she is responsible for the ethnographic substudy in immigrant services. She will focus on the understandings and presence of the 'migrat family' in immigrant services, multilingual communication, and the analytical use of time and temporal parameters in studying power and positionalities in street-level social work encounters between professionals and migrant service-users.

ANNA-LEENA RIITAOJA (Ph.D.) works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Swedish School of Social Science in the area of social work and is also affiliated with the CEREN research centre. Her background is in education. Her previous research has focused on the processes of interculturality, othering, marginalisation and belonging in educational institutions and pedagogical encounters. She has also studied teacher’s professionalism and professional knowledge building. She is interested in cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral perspectives related to professional knowledge and professionalism. In this project her focus is on social workers’ professional knowledge base and in asymmetric power relations. She examines the discourses of migrants and migrant family in social workers’ professional education, professional literature and professional magazines in Finland. She is also a researcher in the Centre of Excellence on Care and Ageing (2018-2026, CoE AgeCare).