Finland: Uncovering Nordic Myths of Homogeneity with Miika Tervonen

Listen to this podcast if you are interested in finding out more about:

• Minorities in Finland;
• Myths  of homogeneity in the Nordics;
• The politicising and categorising of minorities and migrants;
•  History-writing.

Miika Tervonen, Senior Research Fellow at the Migration Institute of Finland and Docent at the Centre for Nordic Studies at the University of Helsinki, helps editor of nordics.info Nicola Witcombe examine these issues, challenging commonly held assumptions about state, homogeneity and migration.

Learn more about the peoples, historians and other things mentioned this podcast by going to nordics.info.

This is the eighth virtual visit around the Nordic countries in the podcast series ’The Nordics Uncovered: Critical Voices from the Region’.

Sounds from freesound.org including big_lorry_engine.aif by jacobsteel.

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Chapters

• 0:45 Introduction to the Us and Them Paradigm
• 4:29 Early Nordic national myth-making
• 10:15 Heterogeneity in early 20th century Finland
• 12:25 Ways of talking about migrants
• 19:14 Whitewashing Finnish history
• 23:42 Nordic influence on the quasi-fictional idea of Finland as an homogeneous nation
• 25:10 Finland: colonised or coloniser?
• 28:52 Are the Nordic countries culturally homogeneous? And what does that even mean?