by Ulla Buchert
Members of the research group from left to right: Vanessa May, Sirpa Wrede, Anastasia Asikainen, Laura Kemppainen, Anne Kouvonen, Anna-Leena Riitaoja, Nuriiar Safarov, Ulla Buchert, Veera Koskinen, Antero Olakivi.
A new Finnish research group ‘Migration, Care and Ageing’ (MICA) started its’ work in the beginning of the last year. The group is located in the faculty of social sciences at the University of Helsinki. As the name of the group points out, the group specializes in studying migration,
mobility and diversity in the context of ageing and care. As large scale immigration is a reasonably new phenomenon in Finland, little is known about how older people with a migrant background organize their lives and care in Finland. The main research themes of the group are care needs of older people with a migrant background and ethnic hierarchization of the care workforce. Care needs of older people with a migrant background are studied widely from the perspectives of health and wellbeing, social ties, technology use as well as citizenship and everyday life. Special attention is given to various forms of misrecognition and to the examination of the underlying causes for possibly differential access to care provisions. It is also scrutinized how existing asymmetries could be overcome. Ethnic hierarchies of the care workforce are examined in relation to changing conceptions of professionalism and professional knowledge in care work and the simultaneously growing importance of migrancy as a new category that organises the workforce in social and health care.
Both of the above mentioned research themes are studied by using qualitative and quantitative data.
Members of the research group have diverse competences and backgrounds in social sciences including for example health, ageing, well-being, social inequalities, migration, organizations and social policy. They include senior scholars, postdoctoral researchers as well as doctoral students. The group is directed by Docent Sirpa Wrede. The MICA group is one out of four research groups of the Centre of Excellence in Research on Ageing and Care (CoE AgeCare). Two other research groups ‘Ageing and Comparative Care Policy’ and ‘New Technologies, Ageing and Care’ are located at the University of Jyväskylä. Moreover, research group ‘Agency in Health, Well-being and Care in Old Age’ is located at the Tampere University. The CoE AgeCare is funded by the Academy of Finland during the period 2018-2025,
and directed by the Professor Teppo Kröger at the University of Jyväskylä.
More information about the research group Migration, Care and Ageing from the web page:
https://www.helsinki.fi/en/beta/migration-care-and-ageing
More information about the Centre of Excellence in Research on Ageing and Care from the web
page: https://www.jyu.fi/agecare
