Paper short abstract:

My paper discusses how negotiations between lay knowledge (migrant workers) and expert knowledge (Finnish authorities) lead to intercultural co-existence between workers and Finns or social exclusion of workers.

Paper long abstract:

When a migrant worker settles in Finnish community, her everyday knowledge of issues such as work practices, law, and healthcare, meets the expert knowledge of local authorities such as employers, lawyers or medical specialists. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how lay and expert knowledge negotiations and contests lead to either intercultural co-existence between the locals and the migrant workers or social exclusion of the workers. The subjective experiences of inclusion and exclusion then have an effect on the migrant worker selfhood and her future. In my paper, I will focus on young women from Estonia, Russia and Belorussia, who come to Finnish countryside to work as seasonal farm workers. My study is based on ethnography, participant observation, individual in-depth interviews and group interviews. I will address the questions of hybridization of lay knowledge and expert knowledge and ask: In the case of decision making, how do people argue for the authority of their knowledge? How do people contest, resist and deny the opposing form of knowledge? How do people transmit, compromise and intertwine different forms of knowledge? These questions appear in real life situations such as if a worker has an accident and it needs to be decided who is called for help, who decides how to proceed, and how are the consequences of "who is right and who is wrong" debate dealt? In situations like this, it is decided what it is that matters the most: experience, age, gender, education, hierarchical position, nationality or something else.