Family and friend relations can be vital sources of practical, emotional, intellectual and psychological support, as well as providing a sense of safety and belonging. For young refugees, forced migration and the need to build new lives in new places tend to strain and sometimes break such relations.
In his study, Nick Haswell investigates how unaccompanied young people in Finland repair and maintain their existing relations with family and friends, while developing new friendships within the shifting conditions and circumstances that they face after forced migration. The study contributes new knowledge about how young refugees adapt their ways of participation within, and in response to, changing conditions, which remains understudied in current scholarship.
In his study, Haswell worked with 17 young refugees who had arrived as unaccompanied minors in Finland and who, after receiving permission to stay, had begun building independent lives as young adults there. He conducted the study as part of the international Drawing Together Project, which investigated relational wellbeing in the lives of young refugees in Finland, Norway and Scotland.
Geographical distance and the need to learn new languages created barriers
Haswell framed his study within a practice theory perspective, which sees all social life occurring through practices. This view allowed Haswell to explore how participation, as a set of everyday practices, is influenced by the material-economic, cultural-discursive and social-political conditions surrounding it.
“Then, looking at how these practices and conditions changed from the past to the present, I was able to understand how the new conditions that young refugees encountered in Finland created new opportunities or challenges to their participation,” Haswell explains.
Haswell found that key conditions that created barriers young refugees’ participation in Finland included geographical distance and a need to learn new languages. While other conditions, such as new gender norms and mobile phone technology, offered new possibilities for participation, it was not always easy or straightforward to adjust to them.
“By drawing on existing and new skills and knowledge, participants were often, but not always, able to overcome these barriers by engaging in new practices or adapting old ones to new conditions,” Haswell says.
What conditions can be changed to better support young refugees?
Haswell’s study adds nuance to current discussions about refugee integration and inclusion, which are often framed around questions of how refugees should adjust to the host society, with less emphasis on how host societies should respond and adjust to them.
“Instead, this study asks us to consider what conditions in Finland can be changed to better enable young refugees, with the needs, experiences and know-how that they bring with them, to build their own supportive networks within, as part of, and alongside others,” Haswell ends.
Nick Haswell is based at Tampere University in the Faculty of Education and Culture. He is currently working in the Kone Foundation funded project, From emergency responses to sustainable refugee education (KOTI), which investigates what effective refugee education looks like in the everyday reality of Finnish classrooms.
Public defence 31 October 2025
The doctoral dissertation of MAEd Nick Haswell in the fields of education and refugee studies titled Nurturing Relations after Forced Migration: A Practice-Theory Perspective on Participation, Inclusion and Belonging in the Lives of Unaccompanied Young People will be publicly examined at the Faculty of Education and Culture at Tampere University at 12 o’clock on Friday 31.10.2025 at City centre campus, Linna building in the Auditorium K103 (Kalevantie 5, Tampere).
The Opponent will be Professor Cathrine Brun from Oxford Brookes University. The Custos will be Professor Mervi Kaukko from the Faculty of Education and Culture.
The doctoral dissertation is available online.
The public defence can be followed via remote connection.