The idea of culture as a sense-making tool when individuals account for how they have integrated into Finnish society: Nationalist and cosmopolitan views attached to culture in international students’ integration accounts

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate in what ways international students use culture as a sense-making tool when they account for their ability to integrate into Finnish society. Culture as a sense-making tool is a phrase used to describe the purpose of this study, which is to identify what meanings international students attach to culture and how they construct it. Current studies surrounding social integration focus on issues of cultural ‘othering’, although previous integration studies have mainly focused on marginalized migrant groups. There has been a lack of research done specifically on those classified as highly skilled migrants when concerning their experience with othering and social integration in general. International students are considered highly skilled migrants, and previous research regarding how they account for their ability to integrate into Finnish society is lacking. This thesis aims to fill the gap in existing social integration literature. I observe if international students place importance on differences between the culture that they are familiar with and the Finnish culture. If they do create differences, I aim to discover if these differences impact how they account their experiences of integration into Finnish society. In order to investigate these aims, this thesis draws upon nationalism and cosmopolitanism theories. The data used in this thesis consists of qualitative interviews conducted with six international students. The interviews are semi-structured and have open-ended questions, which attempt to lead the participants into discussion about culture and cultural integration. The interviews were then transcribed using content analysis. The main findings showed that international students also suffer from ‘othering’ in similar ways to how marginalized migrant groups do during social and cultural integration. Findings showed that international students invoked both cosmopolitan and nationalist identities when discussing culture, however, the contexts varied. In some contexts, it was difficult to categorize what meanings the international students had attached to culture; therefore, some contexts were not identified as invoking specifically cosmopolitan or nationalist identities.