Abstract
‘Arctic Childhoods’ and mobilized differences—the mattering of skis and skates is a chapter by Zsuzsa Millei, Riikka Korkiamäki and Mervi Kaukko. The focus is on the role of skating and skiing, especially through the role they play as material in Finnish schools. In their chapter, Millei, Korkiamäki and Kaukko engage the idea of ethnopoetry, where they combine their own memories and Finnish storybook in dialogue with two research projects focusing on children who have recently arrived in Finland as refugees. In the processes of negotiating their belonging to a new nation everyday objects such as skates or skis have an important role. Because skating and skiing are so central in Finnish schools, newly arrived children must negotiate part of their belonging through this equipment—to figure out how to be a child in the Arctic.
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Preparatory education is a targeted program for recently arrived migrant students, aiming at providing them with sufficient level of Finnish or Swedish language and other necessary skills while studying in small groups before entering the mainstream education. This research was carried out with two groups participating in preparatory education. All the 19 children attending these groups were boys aged 13–17.
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The poems are created from the field notes and interviews of the two studies. The poem on the left is from the study that Riikka conducted with the preparatory class boys, and the one in the middle is from Mervi’s study with Lilith. The lines in italics are quotations from child participants extracted from the transcripts of Lilith’s interview, or from Riikka’s field notes. All the other lines (not in italics) are from Mervi’s and Riikka’s field notes or other participants’ words. The column on the right side of our poems represents the quotes from Moominland midwinter (Jansson 1958).
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Millei, Z., Korkiamäki, R., Kaukko, M. (2019). Skates and Skis. In: Rautio, P., Stenvall, E. (eds) Social, Material and Political Constructs of Arctic Childhoods. Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3161-9_4
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