Miserable or Golden Karelia? Interpreting a Cross-border Excursion of Students from Finland to Russia

Abstract

Two border towns, Joensuu in Finland and Sortavala in Russia, are situated on different sides of the border which cuts across the peripheral region Karelia. A group of 40 Finnish students from the University of Joensuu went on a 2-day excursion to Sortavala in March 2007, being curious to see the anticipated and imagined place of others. During this 2-day excursion, these Finnish students, who had recently started studying Social Policy, were instructed to make notes on everything that they experienced as being different from their own living milieu. The notes made on this excursion give us a snapshot of what it is like to cross a border between familiar and unfamiliar societies. A phenomenological interpretation of the students' travelogs tells us how they carried their previous knowledge as well as all their assumptions and prejudices with them. It can be seen how even a short border-crossing experience influences perceptions of young people about otherness in confusing or reflexive ways. On returning from the trip, many of them found that they looked at their own situation differently than what they had done earlier.

Acknowledgments

I thank Professor Maunu Häyrynen and his doctoral school for inspiration and comments. I am grateful to Mr Tatu Ahponen (MA) for the translation of citations and other parts of the earlier version, as well as for improving the language of the manuscript.

Notes

According to the 2002 Census, about 10% of the population of Russian Karelia was calculated to belong to this group.

The University of Eastern Finland was formed in 2010 when the University of Joensuu and the University of Kuopio united. The number of students in the four faculties of this new university is nearly 14,000.

The contents of the class were the responsibility of the tutor students. The course had a teacher in charge of the group, but during this trip, the teacher did not have any role.

Visits to Joensuu and its environs offered possibilities to see how local businesses operated and to become acquainted with civic institutes and some administration services.

Ethnography refers usually to participant observations of the researcher. Here, the reporters of travelogues applied auto-ethnographical writing in their learning diaries, which were used here as the research data. An ethnographic aspect in the analysis is that the experiences of both the researcher and the researched group were included in the validation of the remarked experiences. In more general terms, we can speak of participatory action research (Ackerley and True 2010, 202, 214–15; Scott 1990).

The pronouns she and he are used at random when needed as markers of the sex of the students.

The name of the student organization of the social policy students is Praxis.

Other elements of alienation, as defined by Seeman (1976), are meaninglessness, lack of contents, instrumentalism and powerlessness.