Conditional Moments in Asset Pricing

A better understanding of stock price changes is important in guiding many economic activities. Since prices often do not change without good reasons, searching for related explanatory variables has involved many enthusiasts. This book seeks answers from prices per se by relating price changes to their conditional moments. This is based on the belief that prices are the products of a complex psychological and economic process and their conditional moments derive ultimately from these psychological and economic shocks. Utilizing information about conditional moments hence makes it an attractive alternative to using other selective financial variables in explaining price changes. The first paper examines the relation between the conditional mean and the conditional variance using information about moments in three types of conditional distributions; it finds that the significance of the estimated mean and variance ratio can be affected by the assumed distributions and the time variations in skewness. The second paper decomposes the conditional industry volatility into a concurrent market component and an industry specific component; it finds that market volatility is on average responsible for a rather small share of total industry volatility — 6 to 9 percent in UK and 2 to 3 percent in Germany. The third paper looks at the heteroskedasticity in stock returns through an ARCH process supplemented with a set of conditioning information variables; it finds that the heteroskedasticity in stock returns allows for several forms of heteroskedasticity that include deterministic changes in variances due to seasonal factors, random adjustments in variances due to market and macro factors, and ARCH processes with past information. The fourth paper examines the role of higher moments — especially skewness and kurtosis — in determining the expected returns; it finds that total skewness and total kurtosis are more relevant non-beta risk measures and that they are costly to be diversified due either to the possible eliminations of their desirable parts or to the unsustainability of diversification strategies based on them.

Essays on the Modeling and Prediction of Volatility and Higher Moments of Stock Returns (summary section only)

One of the most fundamental and widely accepted ideas in finance is that investors are compensated through higher returns for taking on non-diversifiable risk. Hence the quantification, modeling and prediction of risk have been, and still are one of the most prolific research areas in financial economics. It was recognized early on that there are predictable patterns in the variance of speculative prices. Later research has shown that there may also be systematic variation in the skewness and kurtosis of financial returns. Lacking in the literature so far, is an out-of-sample forecast evaluation of the potential benefits of these new more complicated models with time-varying higher moments. Such an evaluation is the topic of this dissertation. Essay 1 investigates the forecast performance of the GARCH (1,1) model when estimated with 9 different error distributions on Standard and Poor’s 500 Index Future returns. By utilizing the theory of realized variance to construct an appropriate ex post measure of variance from intra-day data it is shown that allowing for a leptokurtic error distribution leads to significant improvements in variance forecasts compared to using the normal distribution. This result holds for daily, weekly as well as monthly forecast horizons. It is also found that allowing for skewness and time variation in the higher moments of the distribution does not further improve forecasts. In Essay 2, by using 20 years of daily Standard and Poor 500 index returns, it is found that density forecasts are much improved by allowing for constant excess kurtosis but not improved by allowing for skewness. By allowing the kurtosis and skewness to be time varying the density forecasts are not further improved but on the contrary made slightly worse. In Essay 3 a new model incorporating conditional variance, skewness and kurtosis based on the Normal Inverse Gaussian (NIG) distribution is proposed. The new model and two previously used NIG models are evaluated by their Value at Risk (VaR) forecasts on a long series of daily Standard and Poor’s 500 returns. The results show that only the new model produces satisfactory VaR forecasts for both 1% and 5% VaR Taken together the results of the thesis show that kurtosis appears not to exhibit predictable time variation, whereas there is found some predictability in the skewness. However, the dynamic properties of the skewness are not completely captured by any of the models.

Exciting Moments - Reval Hotels ja mainonnan merkitykset

Pro gradu työni käsittelee virolaisia mainoksia ja niiden kohderyhmiä. Tutkimusaihe on erityisen mielenkiintoinen, sillä virolaisesta mainonnasta on tehty kansainvälisellä tasolla varsin vähän tutkimuksia. Halusin pro gradu -työssäni selvittää, mitä analysoimillani mainoksilla halutaan viestiä, kenelle ne suunnataan sekä millaisin kielellisin ja kuvallisin keinoin niitä tuotetaan. Käytin tutkimuksen materiaalina kuutta Reval Hotels ketjun mainosta, jotka ovat ilmestyneet viron- ja/tai englanninkielisinä viimeisen kahden vuoden aikana lehdissä, esitteissä tai hotellissa pöytä- tai seinämainoksina. Tutkimukseni teoreettinen viitekehys perustui kolmeen erilaiseen näkökulmaan: mainostekstien tutkimukseen, semiotiikkaan sekä Pierre Bourdieun teoriaan symbolisesta pääomasta ja sosiaalisten luokkien eroista. Sosiologisen näkökulman käyttö oli perusteltua erityisesti sen uutuusarvon vuoksi, sillä Bourdieun teoriaa ei ole aikaisemmin hyödynnetty virolaisten mainosten tutkimuksessa. Mainosten kuvien ja tekstien analyysi osoitti, että mainokset olivat rakenteellisesti oikeaoppisesti laadittuja. Mainoksista löytyi lukuisia symbolisen pääoman elementtejä, kuten englannin kieli, raha, aika, tehokkuus ja eurooppalaisuus. Mainokset olivat samalla varsin konservatiivisia ja yllätyksettömiä. Materiaalin joukosta erottui kuitenkin yksi mainos, jolla rikottiin perinteisen mainostamisen kaavaa ja josta avautui paljon erilaisia merkityksiä. Johtopäätöksenä voitiin muun muassa todeta, että Reval Hotels voi markkinointistrategiaansa kehittämällä hankkia itselleen uusia tuottavia kohderyhmiä. Pro gradu työtäni voi myöhemmin laajentaa esimerkiksi vertailevaksi jatkotutkimukseksi, jossa tarkastellaan useampien Virossa toimivien hotellien mainontaa.

Novel conditional mouse models for targeted kidney research : Emphasis on the analysis of the biological function of nephrin

Nephrin is a transmembrane protein belonging to the immunoglobulin superfamily and is expressed primarily in the podocytes, which are highly differentiated epithelial cells needed for primary urine formation in the kidney. Mutations leading to nephrin loss abrogate podocyte morphology, and result in massive protein loss into urine and consequent early death in humans carrying specific mutations in this gene. The disease phenotype is closely replicated in respective mouse models. The purpose of this thesis was to generate novel inducible mouse-lines, which allow targeted gene deletion in a time and tissue-specific manner. A proof of principle model for succesful gene therapy for this disease was generated, which allowed podocyte specific transgene replacement to rescue gene deficient mice from perinatal lethality. Furthermore, the phenotypic consequences of nephrin restoration in the kidney and nephrin deficiency in the testis, brain and pancreas in rescued mice were investigated. A novel podocyte-specific construct was achieved by using standard cloning techniques to provide an inducible tool for in vitro and in vivo gene targeting. Using modified constructs and microinjection procedures two novel transgenic mouse-lines were generated. First, a mouse-line with doxycycline inducible expression of Cre recombinase that allows podocyte-specific gene deletion was generated. Second, a mouse-line with doxycycline inducible expression of rat nephrin, which allows podocyte-specific nephrin over-expression was made. Furthermore, it was possible to rescue nephrin deficient mice from perinatal lethality by cross-breeding them with a mouse-line with inducible rat nephrin expression that restored the missing endogenous nephrin only in the kidney after doxycycline treatment. The rescued mice were smaller, infertile, showed genital malformations and developed distinct histological abnormalities in the kidney with an altered molecular composition of the podocytes. Histological changes were also found in the testis, cerebellum and pancreas. The expression of another molecule with limited tissue expression, densin, was localized to the plasma membranes of Sertoli cells in the testis by immunofluorescence staining. Densin may be an essential adherens junction protein between Sertoli cells and developing germ cells and these junctions share similar protein assembly with kidney podocytes. This single, binary conditional construct serves as a cost- and time-efficient tool to increase the understanding of podocyte-specific key proteins in health and disease. The results verified a tightly controlled inducible podocyte-specific transgene expression in vitro and in vivo as expected. These novel mouse-lines with doxycycline inducible Cre recombinase and with rat nephrin expression will be useful for conditional gene targeting of essential podocyte proteins and to study in detail their functions in the adult mice. This is important for future diagnostic and pharmacologic development platforms.

Hard Custom, Hard Dance : Social Organisation, (Un)Differentiation and Notions of Power in a Tabiteuean Community, Southern Kiribati

Hard Custom, Hard Dance: Social Organisation, (Un)Differentiation and Notions of Power in a Tabiteuean Community, Southern Kiribati is an ethnographic study of a village community. This work analyses social organisation on the island of Tabiteuea in the Micronesian state of Kiribati, examining the intertwining of hierarchical and egalitarian traits, meanwhile bringing a new perspective to scholarly discussions of social differentiation by introducing the concept of undifferentiation to describe non-hierarchical social forms and practices. Particular attention is paid to local ideas concerning symbolic power, abstractly understood as the potency for social reproduction, but also examined in one of its forms; authority understood as the right to speak. The workings of social differentiation and undifferentiation in the village are specifically studied in two contexts connected by local notions of power: the meetinghouse institution (te maneaba) and traditional dancing (te mwaie). This dissertation is based on 11 months of anthropological fieldwork in 1999‒2000 in Kiribati and Fiji, with an emphasis on participant observation and the collection of oral tradition (narratives and songs). The questions are approached through three distinct but interrelated topics: (i) A key narrative of the community ‒ the story of an ancestor without descendants ‒ is presented and discussed, along with other narratives. (ii) The Kiribati meetinghouse institution, te maneaba, is considered in terms of oral tradition as well as present-day practices and customs. (iii) Kiribati dancing (te mwaie) is examined through a discussion of competing dance groups, followed by an extended case study of four dance events. In the course of this work the community of close to four hundred inhabitants is depicted as constructed primarily of clans and households, but also of churches, work co-operatives and dance groups, but also as a significant and valued social unit in itself, and a part of the wider island district. In these partly cross-cutting and overlapping social matrices, people are alternatingly organised by the distinct values and logic of differentiation and undifferentiation. At different levels of social integration and in different modes of social and discursive practice, there are heightened moments of differentiation, followed by active undifferentiation. The central notions concerning power and authority to emerge are, firstly, that in order to be valued and utilised, power needs to be controlled. Secondly, power is not allowed to centralize in the hands of one person or group for any long period of time. Thirdly, out of the permanent reach of people, power/authority is always, on the one hand, left outside the factual community and, on the other, vested in community, the social whole. Several forms of differentiation and undifferentiation emerge, but these appear to be systematically related. Social differentiation building on typically Austronesian complementary differences (such as male:female, elder:younger, autochtonous:allotochtonous) is valued, even if eventually restricted, whereas differentiation based on non-complementary differences (such as monetary wealth or level of education) is generally resisted, and/or is subsumed by the complementary distinctions. The concomitant forms of undifferentiation are likewise hierarchically organised. On the level of the society as a whole, undifferentiation means circumscribing and ultimately withholding social hierarchy. Potential hierarchy is both based on a combination of valued complementary differences between social groups and individuals, but also limited by virtue of the undoing of these differences; for example, in the dissolution of seniority (elder-younger) and gender (male-female) into sameness. Like the suspension of hierarchy, undifferentiation as transformation requires the recognition of pre-existing difference and does not mean devaluing the difference. This form of undifferentiation is ultimately encompassed by the first one, as the processes of the differentiation, whether transformed or not, are always halted. Finally, undifferentiation can mean the prevention of non-complementary differences between social groups or individuals. This form of undifferentiation, like the differentiation it works on, takes place on a lower level of societal ideology, as both the differences and their prevention are always encompassed by the complementary differences and their undoing. It is concluded that Southern Kiribati society be seen as a combination of a severely limited and decentralised hierarchy (differentiation) and of a tightly conditional and contextual (intra-category) equality (undifferentiation), and that it is distinctly characterised by an enduring tension between these contradicting social forms and cultural notions. With reference to the local notion of hardness used to characterise custom on this particular island as well as dance in general, it is argued in this work that in this Tabiteuean community some forms of differentiation are valued though strictly delimited or even undone, whereas other forms of differentiation are a perceived as a threat to community, necessitating pre-emptive imposition of undifferentiation. Power, though sought after and displayed - particularly in dancing - must always remain controlled.

An Empirical Study of the Mixture of Time and Movements in Prices

This paper investigates the persistent pattern in the Helsinki Exchanges. The persistent pattern is analyzed using a time and a price approach. It is hypothesized that arrival times are related to movements in prices. Thus, the arrival times are defined as durations and formulated as an Autoregressive Conditional Duration (ACD) model as in Engle and Russell (1998). The prices are defined as price changes and formulated as a GARCH process including duration measures. The research question follows from market microstructure predictions about price intensities defined as time between price changes. The microstructure theory states that long transaction durations might be associated with both no news and bad news. Accordingly, short durations would be related to high volatility and long durations to low volatility. As a result, the spread will tend to be larger under intensive moments. The main findings of this study are 1) arrival times are positively autocorrelated and 2) long durations are associated with low volatility in the market.

Discriminative learning of Bayesian networks via factorized conditional log-likelihood

We propose an efficient and parameter-free scoring criterion, the factorized conditional log-likelihood (ˆfCLL), for learning Bayesian network classifiers. The proposed score is an approximation of the conditional log-likelihood criterion. The approximation is devised in order to guarantee decomposability over the network structure, as well as efficient estimation of the optimal parameters, achieving the same time and space complexity as the traditional log-likelihood scoring criterion. The resulting criterion has an information-theoretic interpretation based on interaction information, which exhibits its discriminative nature. To evaluate the performance of the proposed criterion, we present an empirical comparison with state-of-the-art classifiers. Results on a large suite of benchmark data sets from the UCI repository show that ˆfCLL-trained classifiers achieve at least as good accuracy as the best compared classifiers, using significantly less computational resources.

Playing "Nordic": The Women of Niskavuori, Agri/Culture, and Imagining Finland on the Third Reich Stage

The theatrical censorship of the Third Reich considered the playwright's race and politics alongside the content of the drama. Given the political stigma of its "leftist" author, it is rather surprising that Hella Wuolijoki's Niskavuoren naiset opened in 1938 at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. The play ran for fourteen performances before being closed by the Reichsdramaturgie, apparently at the instigation of Finnish critics. Yet this was not the end of the play's or its author's fortunes in the Third Reich, as the possibility of staging the play was raised several times over the next four years, coming to a close in 1942. Playing "Nordic" examines the ideological and theatrical background of this extended "cultural performance," as a means to reopening and reconstructing the work of the 1938 Die Frauen auf Niskavuori. Written by a Finnish, northern, "Nordic" author, and preoccupied with the dynamics of rural culture in an increasingly urbanized world, Niskavuoren naiset was understood in the Third Reich to illustrate and reinforce the racial, agri/cultural themes of Blut und Boden ("veri ja maa"). Playing "Nordic" examines this thematic relationship in three phases. The first phase uses archival materials to investigate the Reichsdramaturgie's understanding of the play and its author, and its ongoing discussion of Wuolijoki from 1937 to 1942. Play evaluator Sigmund Graff's description of Niskavuoren naiset as hamsunartig, or "Hamsun-esque," inspires the second phase of the dissertation, which first elaborates the meanings of Blut und Boden through a reading of contemporary "racial" theory and anthropology, and then assesses the representation of Finland within this discourse, one of the dominant cultural paradigms of the Third Reich. Imaging Finland for German audiences, the play stood among analogous, continued efforts to represent Finland and the rural life in the Third Reich, colored by Blut und Boden: art and agricultural exhibitions, essays and propaganda literature, mass demonstrations of the peasantry. This wider framework for the performance of "Finland" materializes the abstract or theoretical program of Blut und Boden in its everyday performed meanings; as such it provides the essential background for reading the Hamburg production of Die Frauen auf Niskavuori, which sustains the third and final phase. The German translation and the Hamburg photographic record are compared with the Helsinki premiere to assess the impact of Blut und Boden on the representation of Wuolijoki's play in the Third Reich. The journalistic critical response illuminates the effect that the dramatic complex of rural and racial values - generically identified as Bauerndrama in the Third Reich - had on the reception of the play; at the same time, both visual and critical documents also suggest possible moments of theatrical dissent in the Hamburg production. Playing "Nordic" undertakes a documentary and cultural reading of the changing theatrical meanings of Wuolijoki's Niskavuoren naiset as it crossed the frontier from Finland to the stage of the Third Reich. It also provides a model for the ways theatrical signification operates within a network of cultural and ideological meanings, suggesting the ideological work of theatrical production depends on, reinforces, and contests that tissue of values. Although Finnish criticism of Niskavuoren naiset has assumed the play's Blut und Boden resonance contributed to Wuolijoki's success in the Third Reich, this study shows a considerably more complex situation. This revealing production dramatizes the changing uses of plays in a politicized national and transnational context. As part of the framing of "Nordic" identity on the wider stage of the Third Reich, Die Frauen auf Niskavuori exemplifies the conjunction of concurrent - sometimes independent, sometimes interlocking - "racial" and national ideologies.

Idyll eller verklighet? : Albert Edelfelt och Gunnar Berndtson i det moderna genombrottets ambivalens

Idyll or Reality? Albert Edelfelt, Gunnar Berndtson and the ambivalent breakthrough of modernity Albert Edelfelt (1854-1905) and Gunnar Berndtson (1854-1895) have much in common. In this dissertation, I study their paintings of local peasants and fishermen and of the gentry’s summer in the county of Uusimaa in southern Finland, in the context of Nordic history of ideas. The breakthrough of modernity, with its attention on debating social problems, provides a novel angle into the oeuvres of the two artists. My focus is on the paintings which emerge in the collision of the public discussion of social matters and the values of the artists’ manorial milieu. The artists’ relation to the public discussion is scrutinized through two of the main topics: the question of the common people and democracy, and the question of equality between men and women. My dissertation is a contextual study which is based on the analysis of the artworks of Edelfelt and Berndtson, on their letters, and on the study of drama and fiction of their time. The notion “liberté, egalité, fraternité” is linked to the breakthrough of modernity. Both artists were aware of the ideal of equality. They used the means and the themes of contemporary art in their presentations, but their pictures contain the ideal of an earlier epoch: the hardworking, but still complacent common people. This conception of the common people is also reflected in the poems of J. L. Runeberg. Women of the late 19th century challenged woman’s primary role as wife and mother. In Edelfelt’s and Berndtson’s depictions of the gentry enjoying summer, women and children have the main role. Notwithstanding the debate of the breakthrough of modernity they depicted women almost without exception as good mothers. Their paintings often depict lazy days in the sunshine, which were, in reality, rare moments for the mistress of the house. Edelfelt’s and Berndtson’s subjects from the Uusimaa countryside coincide with the topics of the breakthrough of modernity, but both the pictures of the common people and the depictions of the gentry enjoying summer, are a retouched picture of reality, often an idyll, in which the public discussion of social matters is evident only materially or not at all.

Drag på parnassen. Två sextiotalsstudier. : Del I: Medelklass med mänskligt ansikte. Medelklassradikalism i fyra romaner av Christer Kihlman, Jarl Sjöblom, Marianne Alopaeus och Ulla-Lena Lundberg. Del II: Modernistdebatten. Sak, person och fält i en finlandssvensk litteraturdebatt år 1965.

The objective of my dissertation Pull (or Draught, or Moves) at the Parnassus , is to provide a deeper understanding of Nordic Middle Class radicalism of the 1960 s as featured in Finland-Swedish literature. My approach is cultural materialist in a broad sense; social class is regarded a crucial aspect of the contents and contexts of the novels and literary discussions explored. In the first volume, Middle Class With A Human Face , novels by Christer Kihlman, Jarl Sjöblom, Marianne Alopaeus, and Ulla-Lena Lundberg, respectively, are read from the points of view of place, emotion, and power. The term "cryptotope" is used to designate the hidden places found to play an important role in all of these four narratives. Also, the "chronotope of the provincial small town", described by Mikhail Bakhtin in 1938, is exemplified in Kihlman s satirical novel, as is the chronotope of of war (Algeria, Vietnam) in those of Alopaeus and Lundberg s. All the four novels signal changes in the way general "scripts of emotions", e.g. jealousy, are handled and described. The power relations in the novels are also read, with reference to Michel Foucault. As the protagonists in two of them work as journalists, a critical discussion about media and Bourgeois hegemony is found; the term "repressive legitimation" is created to grasp these patterns of manipulation. The Modernist Debate , part II of the study, concerns a literary discussion between mainly Finland-Swedish authors and critics. Essayist Johannes Salminen (40) provided much of the fuel for the debate in 1963, questioning the relevance to contemporary life of the Finland-Swedish modernist tradition of the 1910 s and 1920 s. In 1965, a group of younger authors and critics, including poet Claes Andersson (28), followed up this critique in a debate taking place mainly in the newspaper Vasabladet. Poets Rabbe Enckell (62), Bo Carpelan (39) and others defended a timeless poetry. This debate is contextualized and the changing literary field is analyzed using concepts provided by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In the thesis, the historical moment of Middle Class radicalism with a human face is regarded a temporary luxury that new social groups could afford themselves, as long as they were knocking over the statues and symbols of the Old Bourgeoisie. This is not to say that all components of the Sixties strategy have lost their power. Some of them have survived and even grown, others remain latent in the gene bank of utopias, waiting for new moments of change.

Tacit Pedagogical Knowing: At the Core of Teacher's Professionality

The purpose of this research was to examine class teachers' interactive pedagogical thinking and action, in other words their tacit pedagogical knowing. Tacit pedagogical knowing was defined as a process in interactive teaching situation, through which a teacher finds solutions to surprising and challenging situations, pedagogical moments, so that the lesson continues. Teachers are able to describe their tacit pedagogical knowing afterwards and also find some reasons for it as well. More specifically, the aim was to study, 1) how does a class teacher's tacit pedagogical knowing appear in teacher's actions, and 2) what kinds of contents include in class teacher's tacit pedagogical knowing. The research material was gathered from four class teachers by videotaping their lessons and by stimulated recall interviews. In addition to this, the researcher spent a relatively long time in the research participants' classrooms. She conducted initial interviews and orientating observations by means of participant observation in order to get to know the participants and their contexts better. A phenomenologically oriented approach, which proceeded by following abductive logic, was used in the analysis procedures of the videotaped and stimulated recall data. In addition to this, correlation examinations were used in the validation of stimulated recall data analyses. The appearance of the tacit pedagogical knowing was observed in the videotaped data. The contents of tacit pedagogical knowing were defined by the analyses of stimulated recall data. According to the research results, a class teacher's tacit pedagogical knowing appears in the maintenance of the pedagogical relation, the teacher's relation to content, and the didactical relation. The contents of class teacher's tacit pedagogical knowing were many sided. The maintenance of the pedagogical relation, the teacher's relation to content, and the didactical relation were elements of the contents as well. In addition to these, the maintenance of teacher's pedagogical authority, the maintenance of the student's role or pedagogical authority, and the awareness of the nature of the content of instruction are included in the contents of teacher's tacit pedagogical knowing. The phenomenon of tacit pedagogical knowing was observed to be clearly a process-like and relational phenomenon. Based on the research results, a model of teacher's tacit pedagogical knowing was developed. Using the model, it is possible to illustrate the factors that are at the core of teacher's professionality. This model could be used in the context of teacher education, supervision, or in-service training.

Matkalla suomalaiseksi ja hoiva-alan ammattilaiseksi? : Venäläis- ja virolaistaustaisten naisten ja suomalaisuuden kohtaamiset kuulumista rakentamassa

The research examines the process by which a sense of belonging to Finnish society is constructed among women of Russian and Estonian background who are multiply marginalised in Finnish society. It does so by analysing the encounters between their nationality and 'being Finnis'. Attention is focused on the question of what kind of "journey" they take after moving to Finland, how a sense of belonging is constructed especially along the paths followed in education and at work, and what kind of agency is available to them. The thesis is connected with post-colonial research and also draws from studies on citizenship and nationality as well as the social structures of interaction, when analysing careers. As the educational system forms the most central context of the research, the work is also focused on educational sociology. The research methodology includes life history and a narrative approach. The raw data is from thematic interviews concerning the life experiences of women of immigrant backgrounds. They were studying in Finland to be practical nurses or to complete Bachelor of Social Service degree. According to the study, the women had been encountered as alien, strange, and carrying a shade of "otherness". The experience of inclusion in Finnish communities and society turned out to be conditional, an inclusion based on the notion of a citizen worker, which is defined by national needs. The person from abroad is placed in the position of someone who fills gaps in the services of the welfare state. The choice of education in the care sector and the overall necessity of obtaining Finnish education turned out to be socially directed. Gendered structures of education and working life were found to act as a frame in which the decisions of the immigrant women were made. Although national education policy emphasis as an orientation to global labour markets, the immigrant student is placed above all in the position of an object to be made suitable for the Finnish labour market. Citizenship, a goal of education, requires consent to being "socialised" into Finnish society as well as learning to be Finnish. One s only option to negotiate appearing suitable as a member is to construct oneself into someone who adopts Finnish and Western cultural values, values which favour individuality. However, Finnish education is a resource to Finnishness. Finnish education enables a sense of being Finnish, and empowers the job applicant for example, and in addition to providing cultural, human and social capital strengthen inclusion as well. The study confirms the view that the encounter of an immigrant is still characterised by its colonial nature. It shows that encounters with Finns and Finnish society place the person of immigrant background, even one receiving a Finnish education, in the position of "the other". The journey as an immigrant continues. The immigrant has access only to certain predefined subject positions, which limits agency. When categorised as an immigrant, one becomes a per-son who is different and "other", while the sense of belonging as a member of Finnish society without conditions appears to be somewhat unreachable. Yet, new arrivals are capable of acting change. An immigrant woman can challenge the positions offered to her and present herself as strong. Her life story has often included struggle, and she has the fortitude strength to change her circumstances. Key words: life story, post-colonial encounter, nationality, citizenship, the career of immi-grant, position, agency

Gone with the Wind? : Immigrant Women and Transnational Everyday Life in Finland

Increased mass migration, as a result of economic hardship, natural disasters and wars, forces many people to arrive on the shores of cultures very different from those they left. How do they manage the legacy of the past and the challenges of their new everyday life? This is a study of immigrant women living in transnational families that act and communicate across national borders on a near-daily basis. The research was carried out amongst immigrant women who were currently living in Finland. The research asks how transnational everyday life is constructed. As everyday life, due to its mundane nature, is difficult to operationalise for research purposes, mixed data collection methods were needed to capture the passing moments that easily become invisible. Thus, the data were obtained from photographic diaries (459 photographs) taken by the research participants themselves. Additionally, stimulated recall discussions, structured questionnaires and participant observation notes were used to complement the photographic data. A tool for analysing the activities devealed in the data was created on the assumption that a family is an active unit that accommodates the current situation in which it is embedded. Everyday life activities were analysed emphasizing social, modal and spatial dimensions. Important daily moments were placed on a continuum: for me , for immediate others and with immediate others . They portrayed everyday routines and exceptions to it. The data matrix was developed as part of this study. The spatial dimensions formed seven units of activity settings: space for friendship, food, resting, childhood, caring, space to learn and an orderly space. Attention was also paid to the accommodative nature of activities; how women maintain traditions and adapt to Finnish life or re-create new activity patterns. Women s narrations revealed the importance of everyday life. The transnational chain of women across generations and countries, comprised of the daughters, mothers and grandmothers was important. The women showed the need for information technology in their transnational lives. They had an active relationship to religion; the denial or importance of it was obvious. Also arranging one s life in Finnish society was central to their narrations. The analysis exposed everyday activities, showed the importance of social networks and the uniqueness of each woman and family. It revealed everyday life in a structured way. The method of analysis that evolved in this study together with the research findings are of potential use to professionals, allowing the targeting of interventions to improve the everyday lives of immigrants.