Women Who Fled Ukraine: Gendered Educational and Occupational Paths in Finland

This paper presents spoken biographical narratives of three highly educated Ukrainian women on flee in Finland. Currently they all are the only guardians physically present in their children’s daily life, and they carry the main responsibility for earning living for the family. The aim is to find out what kind of gendered aspects there are to be observed in their narrated educational and occupational paths after migration.

The interview data come from the interdisciplinary project Language, engagement and belonging: Ukrainians accessing and transforming rural school and work communities (University of Jyväskylä, Finland, 2023-2027). The study is implemented in a nexus analytical framework (Scollon & Scollon 2003) which sees any social action as located in the intersection of individual life histories, situated interaction patterns and surrounding discourses. The social action initially focused on here is the Finnish language learning taking place in both formal education and informal social networks.

In migration contexts second language learning can be seen as an investment in new social capital (Bourdieu 1991; Darvin & Norton 2015) promoting the individual integration process and employment opportunities in the new living environment. Also the participants of this study seemed to expect such conscious investment to pave the way for a desired type of working life either directly or through vocational education. The findings show, however, that the dominant public discourse on lack of workforce in health sector is quite strongly guiding the decision-making, and the resulting, overtly gendered choices are enhanced by the tailored provision of study programmes in this particular field.

References:

Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and symbolic power. (Ed.) John B. Thompson. Polity Press.

Darvin, R., B. Norton 2015. Identity and a model of investment in applied linguistics. – ARAL 35, 36–56.

Scollon, R., R. Scollon 2003. Discourses in place. Language in a material world. Routledge.