Former unaccompanied minors and the transition to adulthood: Perspectives and insights from the lived experience in Finland

Hello. I am a researcher originally from Australia and am currently working as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tampere University. My research interests include working with refugee youth to better understand their settlement experiences and the transition to adulthood – especially regarding their sense of belonging and construction of identity. As a researcher, I value interdisciplinary and novel approaches to research including arts-based methods exploring poetry. In this project I hope to learn more about artistic research co-collaboration with refugee youth and to better understand their experiences of becoming adults in Finland.

Hi! I am originally a primary school teacher, but now work as a professor at Tampere University. In my current and past research projects, I have worked with different groups of refugees and migrants, for example with unaccompanied asylum-seeking girls who lived in a reception centre in Finland, with refugee students in Finnish and Australian schools, and with university students from an asylum-seeking background in Australia. What has intrigued me in these studies is how creative newly arrived children and young people are as they start building their lives in a new country. I’m looking forward to working with Luke in his MSCA-project.