(De-)Bordering by Laughter. What Can Different Kinds of Laughter Reveal About the Experiences of Everyday Bordering Among Asylum Seekers and Refugees?

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a novel approach for analyzing the experiences of everyday bordering among people who have arrived in Finland as asylum seekers or refugees. Drawing on critical border studies, the study of laughter and the methodology of drifting, we conceptualize laughter as indicative of, and contributing to, the practices of bordering and de-bordering in the domain of everyday encounters. We ask, what different types of laughter reveal about the borders and bordering practices within Finnish society and in which ways laughter functions in the processes of (de-)bordering. We identify five types of laughter that make visible and challenge the borders that prevail in the lives of asylum seekers and refugees. These are softening, distancing, puzzling, criticizing and connecting laughter. We argue that placing focus on the non-verbal cues of laughter helps to identify new perspectives on bordering practices and suggest novel ways in which to research and analyze these.

KEYWORDS:

• Asylum seeker
• drifting
• everyday bordering
• laughter
• refugee

Prologue

As a part of one of our drifts, that is, collective walks, in a small Finnish city, we (three researchers and our guide, a young woman with an asylum-seeker background) visited the home of a young family, a mother, father and two children, who had arrived in Finland as asylum seekers a few years ago and who had since received their residence permit. Their home was located on the top floor of a block of flats in an immigrant-rich suburban neighborhood. When we were leaving the apartment after a lengthy discussion with the mother, she decided to leave with us, to run errands nearby. In the corridor, we passed some information leaflets on the noticeboard, announcing, for instance, the necessity to mark one’s bicycle with the apartment number as winter was coming. Unmarked bicycles would be collected for recycling after the given period. Our attention was caught by the fact that all the leaflets were only in Finnish, despite a considerable number of non-Finnish speakers living in the area and in that particular building (as we were informed by our guide). We asked the mother whether she had read and understood the information about the bicycles, as the deadline was approaching. She said no, amazed, and started to tell us how the family had, in the previous year, lost two bicycles in the bicycle shed, thinking that they had been stolen and completely unaware of the common Finnish practice described in the information leaflet in Finnish. There was a moment of collective laughter by us researchers, with one of us saying that she cannot believe the logic of the housing association – that they only inform the residents in Finnish, knowing well that many of them have moved to Finland only recently and are native speakers of other languages and not yet fluent in Finnish. The discussion soon moved to other issues as we proceeded into the yard. (Field notes, Drift 4, December 2019)

This incident occurred as part of our ongoing research, which explores the experiences of everyday bordering among people who have arrived in Finland as asylum seekers or refugees. Both authors were present at that moment in the capacity of researcher. Afterwards, when we started to discuss our findings with the colleagues, one thought kept lingering in our minds: why did we laugh in this situation? Were we unkind or inconsiderate when we reacted with laughter when another person told us about their family’s misfortune? Or was it a sense of confusion that we could not manage in any other way? Voicing these questions together led us to reflect on the purposes of laughter during research process. We started pondering what this, and other laughs we identified in our research data, tell us about asylum seekers and refugees’ experiences of everyday bordering. In this paper, we engage with that question.

Introduction

When people from conflict-torn regions arrive in Finland and apply for asylum, they are usually settled in communal reception centers, or sometimes at home accommodation, where they begin the long wait for an asylum decision. During this time, some applicants are assisted by civic activists, who work alongside them, supporting them in fighting legal battles (Bodström 2020; Näre 2020), organizing demonstrations (Pellander and Horsti 2018; Pirkkalainen 2021), finding decent accommodation and work (Merikoski 2021), and various other everyday conundrums. Since 2018, we have researched the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees as members of the Breaking Borders collective, organizing drifts with civic activists and people from asylum-seeker and refugee backgrounds.¹ The aim of our research collective has been to make visible bordering practices that exclude and marginalize asylum seekers and refugees in Finnish society, as well as to identify and participate in activities of de-bordering in order to challenge and remove such borders.

Drifting (in French dérive, in Spanish la deriva) is a participatory and mobile action research approach based on the work of the International Situationist movement (Debord [1956] 1958) and its more recent feminist adaptation by the Spanish research collective, Precarias a la deriva (2009). It contains individual drifts during which a group of people moves in a space visiting places that are significant to the research topic, observing and being affected by the immediate social and physical environment, collecting experiences, making notes and debating the research topic (Sotkasiira et al. 2021). Drifting as a methodological approach combines one or numerous drifts with other activities. In our view, the essence of drifting is in the collective and processual exploration of, and engagement with, the everyday reality that combines data production and joint processing of the data with seeking possibilities for collective, transformative action (Sotkasiira et al. 2020).

In this paper, we focus on occurrences of laughter during the research encounters of drifting. Going through our recordings and field notes of drifts we noticed there were different kinds of laughter in the data. When we paid more attention to how and when the researchers and others laugh, we started to review laughter as an expressive feature of research interaction that revealed something significant about the positioning of asylum seekers and refugees within Finnish society. Through laughter, people shape displays of alignment, affiliation, intimacy and resistance (Glenn and Holt 2013, 5). The laughter came to represent emotive articulations of everyday borders that prevail in the lives of asylum seekers and refugees (for comparison, see Franck 2022). They also mark the separation between them and those who have a history of living in Finland as recognized citizens.

In what follows, we pay specific attention to the types of laughter that make visible and challenge the borders that prevail in the lives of asylum seekers when they live in Finland waiting for a decision on their asylum application. Among the drifters there have also been individuals who have been granted refugee status in Finland. We ask, first, what laughter reveals about borders and bordering practices within Finnish society, and second, in which ways laughter functions within border work (see Rumford 2012, 2013). Our research interest is both substantive and methodological. Our aim is to identify new perspectives on borders and bordering practices and suggest novel ways in which to research and analyze them. We will start by introducing the theoretical framework of everyday bordering, drawing on the literature of critical border studies and connecting this with previous research on laughter and its social functions. We will then offer an overview of the methodology adopted, including the approach of drifting. Finally, we present the findings from our analytical reflections on the research data, focusing on the connections between laughter and bordering. We outline the different kinds of laughter that we have identified in our data in more detail as they occurred during the drifts, and then discuss them in relation to the processes of everyday bordering.

Asylum Seeking, Bordering and Laughter

Borderwork and Everyday Bordering

Previous research has discussed how asylum seekers and refugees experience and negotiate borders as part of their everyday lives (Tervonen, Pellander and Yuval-Davis 2018; Walsh, Khoo and Nygren 2022). For example, Haverinen (2018) has argued that the positioning of asylum seekers within Finnish society is ambiguous and insecure. On the one hand, asylum seekers are expected to adopt societal norms and local customs, make themselves useful by finding employment, and learn the Finnish language in courses organized in reception centers (Haverinen 2018). On the other hand, they are subjected to exclusionary and oppressive practices and they face numerous obstacles in the organization of their everyday lives (Könönen 2018a). For example, their rights to social services, healthcare, and employment are limited in comparison to permanent residents (Könönen 2018b).

The extract from our field notes that started our paper contains clues to the theoretical insights that we identify as relevant to the topic of our research. For example, our communication in that situation makes visible the language barrier that non-Finnish speakers struggle with on a daily basis in their immediate environments. This observation links our work to critical border studies, which perceives borders as multi-layered, dispersed into societies, and occurring in a variety of political and everyday arenas (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012). Furthermore, it reminds us that bordering may take place “everywhere” (Balibar 2002) and is carried out by state actors and non-state actors, including citizens, private companies, and many others who are engaged in the conduct of borderwork. Rumford (2012, 2013) defines borderwork as the various activities of ordinary people leading to the construction (bordering) or dissolution (de-bordering) of borders that are driven by their own grassroots agendas rather than those of the state. In our case, it is highly likely that the housing company acted out of inconsideration or was merely intending to save money by cutting corners in translation, and yet it created a bordering experience and an everyday reality in which bikes “disappear,” causing financial strain and limiting the local mobility of the non-Finnish speaking families living in their premises.

The analysis of bordering practices in critical border studies are not limited to the workings of geographic and political state borders but rather considers a whole range of borders, including symbolic, cultural and others (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012). Such focus on bordering practices entails a sociological line of enquiry, which emphasizes attention to the everyday. It highlights the importance of the processes through which governance over asylum seekers’ positioning in and beyond Finnish society are attempted and enacted – and the effects of those controls in their lives and in social positioning more widely (Tervonen, Pellander, and Yuval-Davis 2018). We are interested in borders that have moved from the fringes of nation states into migrants’ lives and everyday experiences, following the thinking of Tervonen, Pellander and Yuval-Davis (2018), who write about the ways in which administrative and street-level bordering practices regulate migrants’ residence permits and their access to healthcare, schooling, accommodation and so forth. Also, Meier’s (2020) account of the emotional work of borders involved in the endless waiting for their claim to be processed, other bureaucracy with the migration governance, but also in their homes, relationships and friendships, contains examples of the multi-layered affective precarities that asylum seekers have to navigate to live on, which are part of a constant process in which people seeking asylum are bordered.

The field-note excerpt on disappearing bikes also reminds us that the presence of everyday borders is not equally visible or comprehensible to all members of society (Tervonen, Pellander and Yuval-Davis 2018). Despite our subject knowledge and familiarity with civic activism, neither author has personal experience of extreme precarity or the violence connected with the experience of asylum-seeking (Hultin et al. 2021; Meier 2020; Näre 2020). While acknowledging the intersectionality of our lived experiences, we are aware that our personal encounters with borders are very different from those of migrants who face an extremely hostile social and political climate. In the most subtle cases, however, not even those who are subject to bordering are consciously aware of the borders (see Essed 1991 on everyday racism). The bikes of the family had gone missing, but it was only through our encounter that the mother learned that they had unknowingly overlooked the housing rules, leading to their property being repossessed by the housing association, due to their linguistically exclusive practices. Moreover, it was our laughter that underlined the existence of a border that did not apply to us Finnish-speakers. It is essential to look for methods and means that allow especially those who hold the positions of power within any given context to become aware of and recognize the processes of bordering that those in minoritized positions are subjected to.

Laughter and Its Social Functions

Laughter is often characterized as an expression that belongs to the family of affects, without being an affect as such (Heller 2005). There are at least two types of laughter that need to be distinguished when laughter is approached analytically. Laughter in its so-called elementary form is a spontaneous, purely expressive reaction – an outburst – that “seizes the whole person” and entangles “body, soul, and spirit,” according to Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller (2005, 18–9). However, laughter can also present itself in the form of a more controlled expression that considers the situation at hand. In the latter case, learning through acculturation plays a major role: one takes into account whether it is considered appropriate or relevant to laugh in a certain situation by at least trying to suppress the spontaneous outburst of laughter into a more controlled laugh or to make a gesture of laughing in a more deliberate manner. In the latter sense particularly, laughter is far from being a random act. Some scholars even claim it is never really uncontrollable; instead, “people laugh in systematic, sequentially, and socially organized patterns” (Glenn 2003, 2). Indeed, there are several functions that can be attributed to the effects of laughter. Laughter can, for instance, reassure, alleviate sadness and grief, make people aware of their own foolishness, loosen tensions, or sanction (Heller 2005).

The social character of laughter entangles it with the questions of power and domination that offer a perspective on laughter especially relevant to our research. On some occasions, we may laugh specifically from a position of superiority or moral power, passing, for instance, some kind of judgment (Heller 2005). Laughter can also be considered a kind of social privilege, that is, in a given situation, it might be more appropriate for some to laugh than for others – and for some, it might be even dangerous to laugh, or to respond to laughter with laughter. In other words, laughter can manifest or constitute role asymmetries (Glenn 2010). However, laughter does not automatically create hierarchy; it also creates and maintains interpersonal relationships, builds commonality, and binds communities (Glenn 2003; Monaghan 2020).

Regardless of the way in which laughter is comprehended, it is not possible to talk about laughter without a reference to something or someone we laugh at. When we laugh, we typically laugh at someone or something, or at ourselves (Heller 2005). The referent can also be another laugh – or basically anything at all – but laughter is always indexical. For instance, Heller (2005, 16) defines laughter as often “an adequate answer to an irrational, incomprehensible, absurd experience” that cannot be treated otherwise, or an expression of impotency. This is a perspective on laughter that seems especially relevant when considering our data. There are, however, a broad range of possible referents. In most cases, laughter is clearly a reaction or answer to something, but it can also occur before, or at the same time as, its referent (Attardo 2020). Although the sequences of conversation often clearly reveal what the referent of laughter is (Glenn and Holt 2013), this is not always the case (Attardo 2020).

In this article, our interest in laughter stems from the observations we made both in our research contexts and when reading the data. These were supported by Heller’s (2005, 26) notion that “laughter always has meaning; it always means something (…) one cannot laugh about nothing.” Our hypothesis has been that the moments of laughter reveal something specific about the subject matter, and that by concentrating on these in the data, it is possible to analytically grasp meanings that would not otherwise be discernible. In our analysis, we direct attention to the moments of laughter in order to highlight their significance for better understanding borders and bordering practices and to test the methodological potential of such analysis. Our focus on the moments of laughter during the drifts suggests a methodological approach that could both grasp the emotional dimension of the rich data and help us to focus on details that otherwise might be overlooked.

Drifting as a Method and Laughter as the Focus of Analysis

Drifting is a mobile research method which we classify as an activist research approach among, for instance, institutional ethnography and critical participatory action research. Its essence is the collective and processual intervention in everyday reality that combines data production and joint processing of the data with seeking possibilities for transformative action or collective means of struggle (Sotkasiira et al. 2021). Understood in this manner, drifting forms a continuum to the research experiments initiated by social movements (Casas-Cortés and Cobarrubias 2007). In practice, a core element of drifting is collective walks (or moving around by other means), or drifts, in an environment relevant to the research topic, with joint discussions before and after the drift. The discussion preceding a single drift is about getting to know each other and sharing initial thoughts about the topic, whereas the concluding discussion is a platform for collective, summarizing reflection on the issues covered during the drift. There is typically a core group drawn together by shared experience (Precarias a la deriva 2009) or joint interest (Sotkasiira et al. 2020) in a given issue; in our case, interest in the practices of bordering and de-bordering, and guests who are invited to take part in the single drifts as guides because of their expertise on the topic. In our case, the core group consists of academic researchers in the field of social sciences, activists who work with asylum seekers, and an artist with a background as an asylum seeker. The invited guests are current or former asylum seekers or refugees, some of whom also identify themselves as activists.

In drifts, the roles of the participants are not as clear-cut as in more traditional (mobile) research settings, such as in walking interviews. The core group collectively negotiates the objectives as well as the overall process, comes up with suggestions about possible guides to invite to lead the drifts, and has chief responsibility for the outcomes of the process, be they academic publications or activist interventions. However, in the single drifts, the guide or guides, who can be either “guests” or members of the core group or both, have the leading role. There is no interview guide or topic list to be repeated from one drift to another; there is just a broad theme to be approached by each guide from their specific perspective and to be collectively discussed.

For our current project, eight drifts were conducted in different parts of Finland, in three cities and in one rural town, between 2018 and 2020. One or both of the authors participated in each of the eight drifts, but otherwise the participants varied depending on the location and on the specific purpose set for the drift. In some drifts, the focus was on the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers, while other drifts centered on the ways in which civic activists had witnessed the borders crossing the lives of asylum seekers and assisted them in crossing/breaking/diverting/relocating these. The discussions during the drifts, as well as the conversations before and after each drift, were recorded and transcribed (total length of the recordings is 14 h), the routes saved with GPS-assisted mobile applications, and places stored in snapshots to enable us to remember them afterwards. Furthermore, after each drift, we made (auto)ethnographic field notes on our initial impressions, and within the whole core group, we practiced collective autoethnography by sharing and reflecting on our impressions, thoughts and experiences during the drifts together.

Drifting is a holistic method involving a whole range of feelings and (bodily) experiences that are not captured in the discussions during the drifts. Therefore, directing the analysis only to the discussion transcripts would omit dimensions that are an essential part of the method. There are different ways in which the corporeal dimensions of the data production processes can be taken into account in the analysis of the data. In our case, we have included a collective autoethnographic reflection in the analysis by, for instance, sharing impressions relating to the excerpts in transcripts that we find particularly pertinent to our topic.

With this in mind, we first started to analyze the laughter in our data by distinguishing the data excerpts that contained laughter into three categories: (re)bordering, de-bordering and other. However, we soon realized that this approach directed us to pay more attention to the verbal context of laughter rather than to the moments of laughter in relation to their verbal contexts; that is, we ended up doing more conventional content analysis that we had aimed to do. This realization made us change the focus of analysis: while listening to and reading our data, we started to pay closer attention to the laughs themselves and what they could reveal about the subject matter of borders and bordering. This led us to pay attention both to the purposes laughter served in narration about borders and bordering practices, and to the functions laughter served in the interaction.

In this kind of analysis, it is vital to listen to the recordings, not only rely on the transcripts. Moreover, we transcribed the data by ourselves, and developed and fine-tuned the descriptive style of transcribing the laughs. This is to say that, instead of making structured notation regarding the lengths of the laughs and so forth, as is customary to do in conversation and discourse analysis, for example, we traveled back in our memory to the social situations in which the moments of laughter occurred and made notes as well as descriptive remarks on the types of laughter (e.g. short laugh between words or sentences, bursting laughter), and nonverbal audible reactions to it. We also paid attention to each drift as its own, specific social situation, noting that some drifts were more “laughter-rich” and that there was a lot of joint laughter among all the participants. Notably, there were also differences between single drifters. We also paid close attention to the contextual factors of laughter, in order not to make over-interpretations about the types and functions of laughter.

When carefully reading and listening to our conversations on the move, it became evident that the drifters “did” and “used” laughter for several purposes. Therefore, the analysis process first led us towards recognizing the multiple functions of laughter, that is, the ways in which laughter did different things in different contexts. We also paid attention to who laughed in order to analyze the ways in which laughter connected to and made visible the power hierarchies between the drifters and within the wider structures of society.

After constructing different kinds of laughter according to their functions, we grouped them into five main categories according to different purposes: softening, distancing, puzzling, criticizing and connecting laughter. Finally, we returned to our main topic of borders and bordering and made note of the ways in which each type of laughter functioned in relation to bordering. In what follows, we will first outline the different kinds of laughter as they played out during the drifts and then present them in relation to the borders and processes of bordering which is the main topic of our research. Overall, our approach relied both on the systematic processing of the data and on intuitive and creative processing of that data. Throughout the analysis, we maintained a constant dialogue over our interpretations and “tested” them on each other.

Laughing During the Drifts

The five kinds of laughter we identified in our data all direct attention to borders and bordering practices in ways that would have not been apparent if attention had been only on the spoken words. First, we recognized a laughter that softens the critique towards, for example, Finnish society and its ways of life. Softening laughter re-framed the stories and anecdotes of personal and political distress as more lightweight and humorous and underlined the existence of certain types of borders and their absurdity. Similarly, the second, distancing laughter, created detachment between oneself and the difficult things or events that one remembered. This kind of laughter allowed a person to express these experiences despite their traumatizing or harmful connotations. Essentially, both softening and distancing laughter made it possible to express critique towards the power-holders without challenging the hierarchies so much that addressing the issue altogether would be too distressing or impossible. The third type of laughter expressed discomfort and puzzlement, usually in the face of the severity of bordering experiences among asylum seekers. This type of puzzling laughter we observed most frequently, but not exclusively, from the direction of us, researchers. It made visible the borders and accompanying power divides in wider society that also concerned the group of drifters by marking a divide between those who laughed and those whose narratives brought about discomfort and disbelief in others. In this manner, puzzling laughter helped researchers to recognize their own blind spots and raised questions about the involvement of drifters in border-making. Fourth, criticizing laughter presented or produced the narrated incidents as unjust and wrong and established a critical stand against them. For example, laughter-infested irony was used as a strategy to resist the unfair treatment of asylum seekers and to emphasize the absurdity and Kafkaesque nature of the situations that asylum seekers and activists go through during the asylum process. This type of laughter not only pointed out the borders but also brought them to the fore for critical evaluation and dismantling. Fifth, connecting laughter built and expressed solidarity among the drifters. It strengthened the existing bonds within the group of drifters, for example, by creating (an illusion of) a common enemy, the other, which was ridiculed or otherwise presented in a disparaging manner. Constructing an outside enemy possibly made it easier for the drifters to overlook their internal intersectional power hierarchies and exist as a congenial group of people. All these types of laughter are presented in Table 1. In what follows, we will discuss them in relation to the processes of (de-)bordering by focusing specifically on the categories of laughter that make visible and challenge the boundaries that apply to asylum seekers in Finnish society.

Table 1. Categories of Laughter in the Data and Their Relation to Borders and Bordering.

Main category of laughter	Subcategories of laughter	Who laughs	Laughter in relation to borders and bordering
Softening laughter	Laughter softens the critique of authorities, Finland or Finnish people, and research concepts	Asylum seeker	Laughter makes borders visible Laughter underlines the absurdity of borders
	Laughter softens questions and comments relating to difficult life situations of asylum seekers/refugees	Researcher Activist	Laughter makes borders visible Laughter aims to lower borders (within the group of drifters)
Distancing laughter	Laughter distances oneself from difficult issues or events	Activist Asylum seeker	Laughter makes borders visible
	Laughter distances oneself from unjust and racist logic	Activist	Laughter makes borders visible Laughter directs attention to the role of “common people” in reinforcing borders
Puzzling laughter	Laughter deals with one’s challenges as activist	Activist	Laughter makes the challenges of breaking borders visible
	Laughter deals with puzzlement or discomfort in the face of narrated unjust events/states of affairs	Researcher Activist	Laughter makes borders and related injustices visible Laughter facilitates awareness of borders Laughter (involuntarily) underlines borders (re-bordering)
Criticizing laughter	Laughter articulates one's own difficult experiences as asylum seeker and questions definitions of oneself or asylum seekers in general	Asylum seeker	Laughter makes borders detactable Laughter deals with injustices and takes a stand toward them Laughter symbolically crosses a border
	Laughter produces or presents events as absurd, wrong or irrational	Activist	Laughter underlines borders and injustices relating to them
Connecting laughter	Laughter builds solidarity	Researcher	Laughter tries to cross or lower borders (de-bordering) Laughter explicitly takes asylum seekers’ side
	Laughter creates (an illusion of) a common enemy	Asylum seeker Researcher	Laughter tries to relocate borders

Softening Laughter

During drifts, softening laughter was observed amongst asylum seekers, activists and researchers where it challenged borders in subtle but important ways. Softening laughter allowed people to speak their mind and comment on their experiences of bordering, while ensuring that the atmosphere remained amicable. We identified two slightly different types of softening laughter in the data. Among asylum seekers and activists, the softening of one’s message through laughter was frequent in relation to voicing criticism of immigration authorities, Finland and Finnish people, or the concepts we researchers used to describe our work, which some participants made fun of as being too academic. The narratives that dealt with the racist or odd behavior of drunken Finns were often told with laughter in the voice, as were other stories that presented Finns as curious and silent folk. Asylum seekers also laughed to soften their message when they voiced their criticism towards Finnish society and Finns who had either treated them with disrespect or whose strange habits they found hard to understand or adhere to. In the following quote, the guide, who is of refugee background, has just told us that he struggles with learning Finnish. He first explained why he chose to learn Swedish (the second official language in Finland) instead of Finnish, and continued:

Guide:

No-one [would] even wanna speak to me here so – [laughs] where would I use it [Finnish] [the researchers join in the laughter], to learn this extremely difficult language -

Researcher:

- to be silent with it.

Guide:

Yeah. [all laugh together] (Drift 5, January 2020)

We believe that laughing together on this occasion derived from our shared understanding of Finnish people as silent and reticent. In the literature and everyday interaction, there exists the stereotype of an unemotional Finn, who “never talks or kisses.” However, the laughter also had another purpose. In the quote, the speaker expressed his experience of othering and loneliness and in doing so criticized Finnish-speaking Finns for excluding people like him. The other drifters in that situation were Finnish-speaking Finns, which made us realize that softening laughter occurred specifically in situations when there were people present who were identified as those who may take offense or become upset by something that was being said. The speaker, with his laughter, voiced his criticism in a way that was not confrontational, but easy-going and amicable. By laughing he skillfully managed the line between provocative and cordial behavior and made it easy for us “silent Finns” to join in his narrative.

Sara Carlbaum (2021) has noted that in research contexts migrants might feel the need to emphasize what is good and express gratitude to the receiving country, while researchers come to be defined as the representatives of this country. In our view, the softening laughter revealed the complexity of the positionality of researchers. The need to soften the message for us indicates that the speaker identified us as part of the group he criticized. Indeed, we were all born in Finland and live there as citizens, with considerably more rights than refugees or asylum seekers. We realize that without these boundaries between us, there would have been no need for the softening laughter. This said, the laughter also tells that borders between us are not perceived as impermeable. If they were, we most likely would not be talking about this experience in such a lightweight manner.

Banter of this kind is not radical or provocative, and yet it is important and indicative of power relations. From the perspective of bordering, softening laughter works in subtle ways. It may be used, for example, to challenge the logic and discourse of the “grateful refugee” (Nayeri 2019), who exists within the “host” society at the mercy of the locals and is thus unable to voice their critical opinions in front of them. We argue that particularly for those who are societally positioned as being in possession of less power, softening laughter makes it possible to express criticism, and possibly to inspire and bring to the fore alternative critical subjectivities. In the context of our research, softening laughter made space for the group to identify social boundaries and explore the role of individuals, including ourselves, in reinforcing borders and excluding asylum seekers from everyday interaction. There were also occasions when activists or we researchers softened with laughter the questions or comments that related to asylum seekers’ difficult life situations. Those laughs made it clear that we were dealing with something that belonged to a different reality to ours, and that we were aware of it. The softening laughter thus underlined the boundaries between us, but at times it also appeared to be a tentative attempt to lower the borders within the research situation by showing solidarity with softening tones.

Distancing Laughter

Distancing laughter shares many of the same qualities as softening laughter. In essence, it allowed guides to create distance between themselves and the memories that walking together in a city or rural space brought to the surface. However, if the aim of softening laughter was to ease the tone of conversation to accommodate the needs of listeners, distancing laughter operated to make it easier for the speaker to narrate their hurtful or distressing experiences, which usually revealed something about everyday borders and bordering.

Sharing stories and anecdotes of felt injustice and misconduct was a regular feature of our drifts. We found that distancing laughter helped participants to reflect on topics, which were considered sensitive and thus difficult to share. During drifts, participants performed “emotion work” (Hochschild 1979) to calm down or protect their emotions from entering the research setting too forcefully. Laughter, together with sarcastic humor, was used to come to terms with stressful situations. For example, an activist-guide referred, with a laugh, to a man who was handcuffed during a dentist’s appointment in the style of Hannibal Lecter, a character in the 1990s blockbuster The Silence of Lambs. The intention of our guide was not to portray the man as a dangerous criminal, but to reference what she felt was an absurd experience of witnessing “an ordinary guy and a family man,” as she put it, being heavily guarded and handcuffed in a dentist’s chair. In the following quote, the same guide reminisces about a family that she tried to help with their application for residence. As we walked by the day-care center the child of the family used to attend, she said:

I was really close to this really great boy who was eventually deported to [a country in Africa]. He was disabled, four years old, deaf and his development was slow in many areas. His mother was 32 weeks pregnant [laughs]. (D2, March 2019)

We argue that distancing laughter is particularly poignant in a research setting, where the occurrence of emotional distress is expected and it is important to stay in control of one’s emotions in front of other drifters, especially in front of the researchers. On the other hand, these moments were crucial because sharing distressing anecdotes gave activists a chance to make visible the hardships they had encountered when working with asylum seekers with the intention of breaking the borders within Finnish society. The mood of interaction when sharing stories of oppression and injustice, was typically either sad or sarcastic. While sad stories were often shared in silence, on the occasions of distancing laughter, there was an expectation that other participants would join in the exchange of witty and sarcastic criticism. In a similar vein, asylum seekers laughed, for example, when reminiscing about experiences of being humiliated by the police or immigration authorities.

In Hochschild’s (1983) terminology, softening laughter hits the mark as emotional labor, i.e. a behavioral manifestation that manages the responses of others, while distancing laughter comes closer to emotion work (Hochschild 1979) as an internal process of working on one’s own emotions. The ability to distance oneself from events that have occurred in the past has important consequences for how honestly and openly the group can share their experiences of bordering. Both softening and distancing laughter make it possible to talk about things that people would not talk about normally.

Puzzling Laughter

When listening to the recordings of the drifts, we recognized that the researchers’ laughter was often heard during the most inappropriate times, as discussed in the opening section of the article. Furthermore, while discussing such reactions during the analysis, we found it difficult to understand the purpose of the laughter, even when it was us who laughed. Examples of such seemingly inappropriate laughs include, for instance, the following:

Guide (asylum seeker):

It is seven kilometers from the reception center to the town center.

Researcher:

Good sports [laughs]. (D1, March 2019)

Guide (activist):

There are so many passports police or MIGRI have lost [chuckles] because … (…) And now they have lost many passports [researcher laughs] like “oops.” (D6, January 2020)

In the first instance, the guide was telling us about the hardship she experienced due to being placed in a reception center that was situated far away from the municipal center, and out of the reach of public transport. Often the only means for her to get out of the reception center was to walk the distance of seven kilometers, and as the mother of a small child, this was not possible during the cold and dark winter months. The second instance concerns a discussion about the work of police and Finnish Migration Services (MIGRI), in particular the difficulties asylum seekers face during the application process. In the same instance, we also discussed the problems faced by refugees who have to take their passports to the police station for renewal or change of permit type. In the quote, the activist and researcher laughed at situations where applicants’ documents had gone missing during the application process, which placed them in a very difficult position.

At first, we felt that the laughter of us, researchers, and perhaps also activists, could be interpreted as nothing more than a cruel or insensitive response to what was just told to us. However, when diving deeper into our memories of those “puzzling” moments we realized that we had been equally perplexed during those instances of laughter as we were when doing the analysis. This insight led us to consider that perhaps these puzzling laughs were our affective reactions to something that appeared to be surprising, absurd or totally wrong in the situation, and an expression of our experienced impotence and helplessness during these occasions (see Heller 2005). We suggest they indicate our failing attempts to come to terms with our own discomfort or even feelings of guilt. During analysis, puzzling laughter helped us to become more aware of borders and made the challenges of breaking borders visible. Activists occasionally laughed when talking about the demanding situations they had faced and witnessed as activists working alongside asylum seekers.

From a bordering perspective, the moments of puzzling laughter come across in the data as an affective stance that points towards the borders that prevail between privileged life situations and the lives of asylum seekers and other non-citizens. They are a reminder of asylum seekers being subjected to continuous anxiety and precarity, which Meier (2020) discusses as a form of border violence. Furthermore, such laughter reminds that as researchers, we are not able to position ourselves as outsiders or consider our inquiry as separate from our own background and positioning (Dwyer and Buckle 2009). Puzzling laughter makes visible borders that were not even articulated as such in the narration, but which become identifiable by paying attention to the discomfort of the privileged expressed in laughter.

Criticizing Laughter

We also identified two types of criticizing laughter in the data, with various functions in relation to bordering. In the first instance, asylum seekers laughed, intentionally or unintentionally, to underline the absurdity of existing assumptions or definitions about themselves personally or asylum seekers in general, and to question these. On these occasions, laughter not only illustrated and underlined the existence of borders but also marked, in our view, a symbolic act of resistance. We interpret them as attempts to escape existing definitions and emphasize the right to define oneself differently. The data also includes many laughter-rich narratives, mostly told by activists, that are seemingly innocent in the sense that they appear to be told mainly for the purposes of amusement and socializing. However, these funny stories often had a deeper undertone and a critical meaning to them. They questioned the treatment of asylum seekers in Finnish society and taught important lessons for scholars interested in bordering processes. An example of a funny, yet focused, storyline is the following conversation concerning the use of sugar in a reception center. On the one hand, the narrative depicts cultural and culinary differences between what were understood as Finnish and Middle Eastern tastes for sweetness. On the other hand, it brings to the fore the lack of rights and hierarchical differences that exist within Finnish society, and which are replicated in reception centers:

Guide 1 (activist, addressing a fellow activist):

Do you remember this story of the guy who was in [a reception center]? He had a habit that he would make himself tea in the evening before he sleeps, and he always took sugar, and he was not allowed to take the sugar, it was prohibited to take the sugar, and he got into huge trouble because one night he took the sugar. He got into trouble with the security guard, a lot of police came, and he went to the station. I think he had to go to hospital as well because the fight was so big. It was about sugar. It was his evening habit to make himself tea and go to sleep. But it was forbidden to take the sugar because the sugar is the property of the reception center [laughs].

Guide 2 (activist):

But that has been an issue in many reception centers because Iraqis and also Afghans use lots of sugar in their tea, and in the Finnish system they have like a certain amount for certain amount of people, this sugar, and these people use more sugar than they should be!

Researcher 1:

Oh, my, outrageous! [Guide 1 (activist) and Guide 3 (asylum seeker) laugh]

Guide 2:

Because it is not the same amount that Finnish [people] would put in tea.

Guide 3:

Like six times more.

Guide 2:

It is too much. The reception center gets bankrupt because this amount of sugar [laughs and others join the laughter].

Researcher 2:

Because it is expensive! [laughter]

Guide 2:

Exactly! [laughter]

Guide 1:

We take our sugar very seriously. [laughter] (D6, January 2020)

During analysis, we concluded that laughter on this occasion was partly due to the perplexing observation that no “regular” Finn would be taken to the police station for putting (too much) sugar in their tea. So, in part this category of laughter is similar to what we described above as puzzling laughter, which stems from the realization that for an asylum seeker, having a sweet tooth may result in a night at the police station. It is a real-life possibility, as absurd it may sound. We were told the worst-case scenario is that these kinds of occurrences of being in the wrong place at the wrong time may lead to a negative decision on a residence application.

However, on the above occasion, laughter introduced a specific critical or sarcastic tone into the conversation. In particular, the exclamation “Oh, my, outrageous!” and the exchange of words that followed were said in an exaggerated and overly cautious tone that informed the listeners that the speakers were not quite serious in their outrage. We believe that such laughter may also mark resistance and make visible the injustices by laughing at them. The activists, for example, laughed loudly when they told us about their adventures with medical professionals to locate an ocular prosthesis, i.e. a glass eye, for a man who had previously lost his eye and was at the time experiencing serious pain. We interpreted their laughter as a sign of confusion and bafflement that was caused by finding themselves in a situation that they could not have foreseen. It was also perhaps a marker of surprise in a situation where the activists understood that the Nordic welfare system, such as that of Finland, is not prepared to meet the very basic needs of asylum seekers with severe physical restrictions. In one of the world’s wealthiest countries, a man would be left without an eye if there were no civic activists who would go to the trouble of locating one. But at the same time, laughter had a critical undertone reflecting resistance in the face of inequality. On another occasion, the activists laughed when they explained to us the situation of a man whose asylum process ended in a negative decision and who was now under threat of being cut off from all public services:

Guide 1 (activist):

We are getting close to a nursing home, where our client who is in a wheelchair lives – he is now in the situation that his process is over. He is undocumented, but what shall we do with him? Even the wheelchair, in which he sits, is state property [laughs]. So, how shall we resolve this?

Guide 2 (activist):

Shall we just dump him somewhere? [laughs] (D2, March 2019)

The stories including criticizing laughter would, if told without a humorous tone, have been simply distressing and saddening, but when accompanied by laughter, they turned into critical observations of Finnish society and its bordering practices. By laughing, the guides demonstrated and made known the ridiculousness – and unfairness – of the conditions Finnish immigration law creates for activists and their asylum-seeker friends and clients. Exaggerating laughter made visible the inhumane face of the system that has left a man with a mobility disability without a wheelchair and another man without an eye. It also exposed the logic that creates borders and bewilderment among activists who witness situations where morality and the law conflict. Criticizing laughter took a stand on the issue at hand. It named the border, pointed it out as unjust and invited the audience to take action to dismantle it.

Connecting Laughter

Also, connecting laughter has multiple functions in relation to bordering. For example, it makes it easier to pinpoint moments during which the borders between drifters or between migrants and wider society became more permeable. In the data we recognized instances of spontaneous joy during which the whole group giggled together or had smiles in their voices. Fun was created, for example, around the babies and younger children who accompanied their parents to a drift, or at other funny incidents that occurred during the drift. For example, at one point all the participants laughed together when we entered an outdoor ice rink. This was a new experience for one of the guides, who mistook the ice rink for a lake. The transcript begins by a researcher almost falling down on a slippery surface, which then sparked the following exchange of words:

Researcher 1:

There is no lake here. [laughs]

Guide 1 (activist):

Don’t fall. [laughs]

Researcher 2:

No lake. [laughs]

Guide 2 (asylum seeker, referring to ice skaters):

It is amazing how they keep balance. [laughs]

Researcher 2:

It is easier when you have skates, than shoes, on ice. [laughs] (D1, March 2019)

This excerpt is included as an example of a moment where laughter marked an opportunity to “peek over” the boundary between drifters as we shared a moment of happiness by slipping on ice. Such moments are crucial for creating the sense of togetherness among drifters. On the other hand, we also identified a different type of connecting laughter that went beyond the drifting context into creating a momentary feeling of shared experience of borders within Finnish society. The following quote is an example of a situation where the sarcastic tone of the narrator works like an invitation to joint laughter over an issue that (almost) everybody living in Finland recognizes as difficult or burdening. Here the joint referent was the experience of struggling with bureaucracy:

Guide (asylum seeker):

You know when you go meet the people in Public Employment Office, like, you meet the person we all love [all rapidly laugh together] (D5, January 2020)

In that moment, laughter created a feeling of a common enemy, state bureaucracy, and a sense shared bordering experience, which, upon closer reflection, was an illusion. The bordering practices with consequences on residence permit, which the employment office represents to migrants, do not extend to employed Finnish citizens, but we may recognize the hardships relating to the said office through other types of personal experience there. Nevertheless, paying attention to the connecting laughter helped to identify the moments that lowered everyday borders between the drifters and strengthened solidarity between them. We argue that such moments of shared understanding are needed for creating community action to mobilize and dismantle the borders that prevail in wider society. These kinds of moments have the potential to create, albeit momentarily, shared visions of society where borders and bordering practices do not differentiate people by their nationality or residence status.

Conclusions

In this paper, we have presented a joint account of our experiences and impressions as researchers who have conducted drifting together with civic activists and people who live in Finland as asylum seekers or with refugee status. We have used the theoretical concept of borderwork (Rumford 2012, 2013) in our discussion of what different kinds of laughter can reveal about the bordering asylum seekers experience as part of their everyday lives. In addition, we discussed the practices of (de-)bordering that particularly the guides, but also us researchers, engage in when examining everyday borders together. We reconceptualized what has traditionally been disregarded in the analysis of everyday bordering, specifically the non-verbal communication of laughter, as border work that could make it easier for researchers to recognize, approach and familiarize themselves with borders that are embedded in everyday life and beyond their own lived experience. Furthermore, through analyzing laughter we became aware of how our own positionality is persistently referred to and negotiated during the research process.

Paying attention to laughter brings to the fore the various experiences of (de-)bordering that may stay under the surface if it is not possible for researchers and participants to laugh together. While softening laughter eases the tone of conversation to accommodate the emotions of listeners, distancing laughter operates most often to make it easier for the speaker to narrate their hurtful or distressing experiences of bordering. Puzzling laughter, on the other hand, both underlines the borders that prevail in the group of drifters and provides cues for tracking and challenging similar power hierarchies in wider society. Attending to the moments of puzzlement highlights the relations of power and allows engagement with the questions of compliance (Keskinen et al. 2009) that have been discussed in post-colonial and critical race studies and are now entering the field of border studies (Andersson 2014; Kristensen 2020; Krivonos 2019). Criticizing laughter most visibly brings to the fore the theme of de-bordering by underlining the borders and airing an act of resistance by presenting a vision of how things could be different. Finally, the connecting laughter directs attention to the moments that lowered boundaries between the drifters and strengthened solidarity between them. Analyzing connecting laughter may also provide researchers with knowledge of shared “enemies” and experiences within the group.

In this paper, we decided to focus on the bordering processes that mostly related to the experiences of asylum seekers outside the group of drifters. However, the analysis of laughter made us realize that the bordering processes within and beyond our research activities are closely intertwined. In our view, laughter and bordering are intrinsically connected (Franck 2022). Laughter in itself can both build and lower boundaries within a group of drifters, for instance. Moreover, borders are not always verbalised and yet we become aware of their existence. Researchers studying border work may find themselves in situations where borders appear to lower, or they may realise research interaction has outlined or strengthened borders, even though their intention was something completely different. A focus on non-verbal cues and expressions prevents us from falling into the illusion that our own expressions, giggles or guffaws can be detached from the phenomenon under scrutiny.

In the conduct of research with asylum seekers issues of trust are fundamental (Essex et al. 2022). Trust, expressed in shared laughter, enables communication even when bordering occurs unintentionally. We have partly dealt with the lack of trust between asylum seekers and ourselves by collaborating with activists who often have a long-term working relationship with migrants through which they have gained their trust and valuable insights into everyday border struggles and negotiations to overcome them (Sotkasiira et al. 2020). This said, the analysis undertaken for this paper has clearly outlined that the questions around complicity require our attention. These are not adequately dealt with by stating our position as researchers, who do not work as part of migration governance (Carlbaum 2021). During the research we were recurrently positioned as citizens and Finns, who are collectively complicit in everyday border violence against asylum seekers, which is a position we need to acknowledge and work on, not deny.

Adopting methodologies with political goals and ambitions, such as drifting, requires long-term collaboration with participants, which does not stop when the data collection is over, but must carry on into the world of activism. Furthermore, in the future, we wish to explore further the moments during which laughter seemed to break down the barriers between drifters, creating a shared space where we could release our emotions and “feel together.” We thus argue for consideration of laughter as a modality in which researchers, and those who are researched owing to the borders and barriers they face, can convey the emotional and affective experience of witnessing pain and suffering in themselves and others.

Methodologically, this paper has contributed to the literature on border studies, as we have promoted the under-utilized approach of focusing on and analyzing laughter and argued for its usefulness in attempting to identify borders that lie beyond a person’s lived experience. We do not wish to downplay the fact that writing this paper has at times felt like analyzing our own impressions rather than data in itself. Indeed, it has brought to the fore a number of questions about what we can know of the experiences of others if understanding our own reactions is already quite difficult. Nonetheless, going through our materials collaboratively, and the process of choosing what to focus on here, has enabled us to think through the emotive experiences associated with borders that asylum seekers and refugees face in Finland, and beyond. Furthermore, we hope our paper reaches other scholars and activists who struggle to come to terms with experiences of inequality and compliance. At the core of drifting is the aim to unite those who work to challenge the observed injustices with research-based interventions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Eastern Finland.

Notes

1 According to the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity, a researcher is not required to obtain an ethical review statement from a human sciences ethics committee, if (a) participation in the research is based on the principle of informed consent, (b) research does not intervene in the physical integrity of research participants, (c) the focus of the research is on participants over the age of 15, (d) research does not expose participants to exceptionally strong stimuli, (e) involve a risk of causing mental harm that exceeds the limits of normal daily life to the research participants or their family members or others closest to them, or (f) threaten the safety of participants or researchers or their family members or others closest to them. Our study was conducted according to these guidelines. All participants were adults over the age of 18. The issues of consent and risk were carefully discussed with them and evaluated by researchers at all times.