Room: Pinni B4117 or Zoom (Link). (Meeting ID: 668 4700 7494 Passcode: 045076)
Master Narratives and the ‘Ideal Immigrant Subject’: A Multimodal Narrative Positioning Approach
Authors: Annika Valtonen, Dorien Van De Mieroop & Melisa Stevanovic
Societally prevalent master narratives regarding immigration articulate features and forms of conduct that people moving across national borders are expected to embody in order to be constructed as ideal members of a society. These ideals are at the same time powerful and entrenched, yet also fluid and malleable, shifting with the zeitgeist and continually negotiated in interaction.
In this presentation, we study a corpus of narratives by people with migration background regarding their experiences of encounters with services, institutions and laypersons in Finland. These narratives originate from eleven video-recorded qualitative interviews with participants from heterogeneous migration backgrounds living in Finland. Drawing on narrative positioning analysis and multimodal discourse analysis, we analyse how the narrators multimodally position themselves vis-á-vis societally prevalent ideals attached to immigrants. In particular, we investigate how the narrators construct or subvert versions of what we term the ‘ideal immigrant subject’ – a normative set of ideal features attached to people with migration background that are produced and negotiated societally.
Our analysis demonstrates how the ideal subjectivity is oriented to as interactionally shared cultural knowledge. Conversely, challenging the ideal is treated as interactionally delicate, placing accountability on the narrator. Even in challenging the ideal subjectivity, elements of it are drawn on to position the self as morally competent. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for those who encounter people with migration background in their work, highlighting the importance of critical reflection in order to recognize and dismantle the unequal power structures embedded in these interactionally reproduced and negotiated ideals—both in interpersonal interactions and societally.
This talk is part of Research Centre Narrare’s Narrative Studies Seminar. The aim of the seminar is to allow for a multi- and interdisciplinary discussion on data, methods, theories, and the state of narrative research. Sessions consist of introductory presentations by researchers from different career-stages and different fields studying narratives at Tampere University (up to 20 min), and general discussion.
Narrare Seminar – Spring 2026 Programme:
17.2. Markus Laukkanen: News about future turmoil: how a hypothetical war is narrated on Finnish news-media websites
Room: Pinni B4117
3.3. Nanna Numento: From Speculation to Speculative Agency: The Intertwining of Speculative Worldbuilding and Interactive Game Mechanics in Digital Fantasy RPGs
Room: Pinni B4117
10.3. Annika Valtonen: Master Narratives and the ‘Ideal Immigrant Subject’: A Multimodal Narrative Positioning Approach (co-authored with Dorien Van De Mieroop & Melisa Stevanovic)
Room: Pinni B4117
24.3. Minna Harjula & Heikki Kokko: OTUDEM-hanke: Yhteiskuntahistoria 2020-luvun turvallistamispolitiikan vastakertomuksena
Room: Pinni B4117
14.4. Teemu Ikonen: Audionarratologia ja äänikielitaide
Room: Pinni B4113
28.4. Nanny Jolma & Anna Kuutsa: The afterlife of parliamentary storytelling in social media: The portability of narrative features in the Finnish border security debate
Room: Pinni B4113
5.5. Sari Kivistö et al.: The research group “Suffering and Meliorism in Literature and the Philosophy of Literature” within the Centre of Excellence on Meliorist Philosophy of Suffering (MePhiS)
Room: Pinni B4113
19.5. Sanna Turoma: Venäläinen imperialismi ja eurooppalaisen kolonialismin kritiikki: Nikolai Trubetzkoyn euraasialaisnarratiivit
Room: Pinni B4113
Updates and further information will be published on Narrare’s webpage.