Paper short abstract:

How do the possibilities of people with migrant background influence their feeling of belonging and life-course they chose? On what grounds do they decide to move to one country or the other, and how do the experiences they have shape them?

Paper long abstract:

Mobility and migration do not end with people moving from one country to the other. One of the results of such movements is an increasing number of people with migrant family background. Those people often grow up with the influence of two or more cultural frameworks and experience a high amount of mobility from the day of their birth. This mobility can be both physical, for instance visits of the parent(s) home country, as well as mental, in the shape of a mobile mindset and an awareness of one's ethnicity.

This is where this presentation on descendants of Germans in contemporary Helsinki, Finland, links to. Based on material of her dissertation project, D. Breier analyses how the possibilities those people have influence their feeling of belonging and the decisions they make. How did the knowledge of being part of both cultures shape them, their thoughts and wishes? What were the personal consequences arising from their families' constitutions and the (mobile) strategies and life-courses they chose for finding their spot in life? How do they reflect upon themselves and the experiences they had while being on the move?

By connecting her case-study with results from other research and reflections on topical issues of our societies, the aim of this presentation is to emphasise the importance of putting qualitative research into a larger context for being able to understand its deeper meaning, in this case the impact of a particular setting on the experiences, thoughts and feelings of people involved.