Chinese immigrants to Finland: A qualitative study of housing, employment, access to health care and child care as sociological dimensions in their settlement process

The Master’s thesis is qualitative research based on interviews of 15 Chinese immigrants to Finland in order to provide a sociological perspective of the migration experience through the eyes of Chinese immigrants in the Finnish social welfare context. This research is mainly focused upon four crucial aspects of life in the settlement process: housing, employment, access to health care and child care. Inspired by Allardt’s theoretical framework ‘Having, Loving and Being’, social relationships and individual satisfaction are examined in the case of Chinese interviewees dealing with the four life aspects. Finland was not perceived as an attractive migration destination for most Chinese interviewees in the beginning. However, with longer residence in Finland, the Finnish social welfare system gradually became a crucial appealing factor in their permanent settlement in Finland. And meanwhile, social responsibility of attending their old parents in China, strong feelings of being isolated in Finland, and insufficient integration into the Finnish society were influential factors for their decision of returning to China. Social relationships with personal friends, migration brokers, schools, employers and family relatives had great influences in the four life aspects of Chinese immigrants in Finland. The social relationship with the Finnish social welfare sector is supportive to Chinese immigrants, but Chinese immigrants do not heavily rely on Finnish social protection. The housing conditions were greatly improved over time while the upward mobility in the Finnish labour market was not significant among Chinese immigrants. All Chinese immigrants were satisfied with their current housing by the time I interviewed them while most of them had subjective feelings of being alienated in the Finnish labour market, which seriously prevented them from integrating into the Finnish society. In general, Chinese immigrants were satisfied with the low cost of accessing the Finnish public health care services and affordable Finnish child day care services and financial subsidies for children from the Finnish social welfare sector. This research also suggests that employment is the central basis in well-being. Support from the Finnish social welfare sector can improve the satisfaction levels among immigrants, especially when it mitigates the effects of low-paid employment. As well, my empirical study of Chinese immigrants in Finland shows that Having (needs for materials), Loving (needs for social relations) and Being (needs for social integration) are all involved in the four concrete aspects (housing, employment, access to health care and child care).

Tiedostumaton nykytaiteessa : Katse, ääni ja aika vuosituhannen taitteen suomalaisessa nykytaiteessa

Leevi Haapala explores moving image works, sculptures and installations from a psychoanalytic perspective in his study The Unconscious in Contemporary Art. The Gaze, Voice and Time in Finnish Contemporary Art at the Turn of the Millennium . The artists included in the study are Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Hans-Christian Berg, Markus Copper, Liisa Lounila and Salla Tykkä. The theoretical framework includes different psychoanalytic readings of the concepts of the gaze, voice and temporality. The installations are based on spatiality and temporality, and their detailed reading emphasizes the medium-specific features of the works as well as their fragmentary nature, heterogeneity and affectivity. The study is cross-disciplinary in that it connects perspectives from the visual culture, new art history and theory to the interpretation of contemporary art. The most important concepts from psychoanalysis, affect theory and trauma discourse used in the study include affect, object a (objet petit a) as articulated by Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud s uncanny (das Unheimliche) and trauma. Das Unheimliche has been translated as uncanny in art history under the influence of Rosalind Krauss. The object of the study, the unconscious in contemporary art, is approached through these concepts. The study focuses on Lacan s additions to the list of partial drives: the gaze and voice as scopic and invocative drives and their interpretations in the studies of the moving image. The texts by the American film theorist and art historian Kaja Silverman are in crucial role. The study locates contemporary art as part of trauma culture, which has a tendency to define individual and historical experiences through trauma. Some of the art works point towards trauma, which may appear as a theoretic or fictitious construction. The study presents a comprehensive collection of different kinds of trauma discourse in the field of art research through the texts of Hal Foster, Cathy Caruth, Ruth Leys and Shoshana Felman. The study connects trauma theory with the theoretical analysis of the interference and discontinuity of the moving image in the readings by Susan Buck-Morss, Mary Ann Doane and Peter Osborn among others. The analysis emphasizes different ways of seeing and multisensoriality in the reception of contemporary art. With their reflections and inverse projections, the surprising mechanisms of Hans-Christian Berg s sculptures are connected with Lacan s views on the early mirroring and imitation attempts of the individual s body image. Salla Tykkä s film trilogy Cave invites one to contemplate the Lacanian theory of the gaze in relation to the experiences of being seen. The three oceanic sculpture installations by Markus Copper are studied through the vocality they create, often through an aggressive way of acting, as well as from the point of view of the functioning of an invocative drive. The study compares the work of fiction and Freud s texts on paranoia and psychosis to Eija-Liisa Ahtila s manuscripts and moving image installations about the same topic. The cinematic time in Liisa Lounila s time-slice video installations is approached through the theoretical study of the unconscious temporal structure. The viewer of the moving image is inside the work in an in-between state: in a space produced by the contents of the work and its technology. The installations of the moving image enable us to inhabit different kinds of virtual bodies or spaces, which do not correspond with our everyday experiences. Nevertheless, the works of art often try to deconstruct the identification to what has been shown on screen. This way, the viewer s attention can be fixed on his own unconscious experiences in parallel with the work s deconstructed nature as representation. The study shows that contemporary art is a central cultural practice, which allows us to discuss the unconscious in a meaningful way. The study suggests that the agency that is discursively diffuse and consists of several different praxes should be called the unconscious. The emergence of the unconscious can happen in two areas: in contemporary art through different senses and discursive elements, and in the study of contemporary art, which, being a linguistic activity is sensitive to the movements of the unconscious. One of the missions of art research is to build different kinds of articulated constructs and to open an interpretative space for the nature of art as an event.

Behavioural responses to anthropogenic disturbances

When a habitat undergoes change, the first response of an individual is often behavioural adjustment. This immediate response can determine whether the population will survive or not, as behavioural flexibility gives time for genetic changes to arise later on. Habitat changes that alter reproductive behaviours can have long-lasting effects on populations. If the selective regime has changed under the new conditions, mate choice cues may no longer reliably reflect an individual s quality. Thus, animals have to be able to adjust their reproductive behaviours to the local conditions. The aim of my thesis was to discuss if and how animals are able to respond to rapid anthropogenic environmental change, and to study the mechanisms of the responses and the evolutionary consequences. The main focus was on the effects of human-induced eutrophication on the reproductive behaviour of fishes. Eutrophication is the result of increased nutrient input and can cause dense underwater vegetation and algal blooms. I used fishes from two very different ecosystems as model species, the Baltic Sea threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) and the desert goby (Chlamydogobius eremius), an endemic species of the Lake Eyre region in Central Australia. I investigated the effects of increased habitat complexity on courtship behaviour and the possibility of local differentiation in courtship and nest building behaviour depending on the level eutrophication in the habitat of origin. Furthermore, I observed the effect of turbidity on stickleback nest building behaviour. The results show that threespine stickleback males, which were born in areas that have been eutrophied for decades, court females at a higher intensity than males from clear water areas. Similarly, male desert gobies increased their courtship effort in dense vegetation. Intense courtship could be an adjustment to reduced visibility and lowered predation risk in the densely vegetated sites. However, there were no clear differences in nest building between males from clear and eutrophied areas under standardized conditions. This was expected as Baltic Sea sticklebacks prefer to nest under vegetation cover and are fairly rigid in adjusting their nest characteristics. Nest building was affected by increased turbidity: males built smaller nests with a larger nest entrance in turbid water. The large variation in the magnitude of phytoplankton blooms may require a rapid adjustment of the optimal nest structure to the current conditions. This thesis highlights the complex interactions that are set- off by human-induced changes in habitats and are followed by the immediate behavioural responses. It also encourages more research to tease apart the phenotypic and genetic components of the observed behavioural differences.