 The project title and its content are a work in progress ...

1. Peter HolleyThe Nation (Re)Imagined: National Belonging amongst Immigrant ‘Activists’in Finland and Finnish Expatriates in the UK • Aim: To understand how migrants construct an image of a Finnish ‘nation’ and how they position themselves in relation to an imagined Finnish ‘national community’. (Anderson 1991; Billig 1995) • I understand the ‘nation’ (like ethnicity and ‘race’) as a basic unit of social classification. (Brubaker, Loveman & Stamotov2004) • This approach does not uphold (methodological) nationalism’s belief that the social world is “‘naturally’ divided into [national] communities” (Billig 1995: 63). • Rather the ‘nation’ is comprehend as a cognitive category – the ‘nation’ is “fundamentally not a thing in the world, but a perspective on the world.” (Brubaker, Loveman & Stamotov2004: 32. See also DiMaggio 1997) • The following research questions guide my research: • How is the Finnish ‘nation’ constructed by those studied? • And how do those studied position themselves in relation to a perceived Finnish ‘national community’? • Two ethnographic case studies: • Immigrant ‘activists’ in Finland – those active in immigrant NGOs and/or social networks. • Finnish expatriates in the UK – within ‘Finnish’ social networks/cultural institutions. • Dual Migrant Perspective: immigrant ‘activists’ in Finland and Finnish expatriates abroad. • Both ‘groups’ studied present a challenge to homogeneous, territorially bound imaging of the Finnish nation-state. • The first represents the ‘immigrant Other’ within the sovereign borders of the Finnish state, whilst the second symbolizes an extension of the ‘national community’ beyond the state’s territorial limits. • Current status: I am now beginning to collect fieldwork data, tentatively entering the field and continuing to locate/contact potential participants in Finland. The project title and its content are a work in progress... all suggestions for improvement are most welcome! Doctoral Student Department of Social Research (Sociology)/ CEREN, Swedish School of Social Science