Trust is widely recognised as important for migrants’ experiences of integration, shaping relationships with institutions, communities, and wider society. Yet research often examines trust primarily through migrants’ post-arrival encounters in receiving countries. Trust however, does not begin at the border. Migrants arrive with prior experiences of institutions and authority, recognition and exclusion, solidarity and dependence, security and uncertainty. How these accumulated experiences matter for subsequent social and institutional relationships remains insufficiently understood.

Drawing on qualitative interviews with first-generation West African migrants in Finland conducted as part of the Forms of Resistance and Practices of Hope project, the paper explores how trust is narrated across migration trajectories. Rather than treating trust as a stable individual disposition or solely as a product of experiences in the receiving society, the analysis approaches trust as relational, biographical, and continually negotiated. It examines how participants connect past and present encounters with people and institutions, and how earlier experiences inform, complicate, or reshape experiences of belonging and integration in Finland.

The paper does not assume that trust or distrust is simply carried from one context to another. Migration may reinforce existing orientations, disrupt them, or create conditions in which trust is reconsidered and reconstructed through new relationships and institutional encounters. By tracing these processes across participants’ narratives, the paper examines how trust is negotiated across places, relationships, and different stages of migration.
Conceptually, the paper develops a biographical approach to trust in migration. It argues that understanding trust and integration requires moving beyond arrival-centred perspectives to examine the longer trajectories through which expectations of people, institutions, and social relations are formed, challenged, and transformed.

What happens when intercultural encounters are understood not as planned meetings, but as fleeting moments produced through movement, infrastructure, technology, and everyday urban life? This paper explores this question through the experiences of food delivery riders navigating Helsinki. It examines how encounters emerge along the routes, pauses, platforms, streets, and shared spaces that shape riders’ everyday mobilities, bringing people and urban environments into constantly shifting relations.

Drawing on migration studies, urban theory, and post-humanist perspectives, the research approaches interculturality as something that is continuously made and unmade through encounters between people, places, technologies, and material environments. Rather than asking simply who meets whom, it asks what makes an encounter possible, how it is experienced, and how its traces linger in the city.

At the centre of the project is the documentary film Streets of Strangers, created as part of the research. Combining loosely structured interviews with documentary filmmaking, the project uses film not merely to illustrate research findings, but as a way of following, sensing, and thinking through the everyday worlds of food delivery riders. The film foregrounds the embodied, affective, and sensory dimensions of urban mobility that can remain elusive in conventional textual accounts.

By bringing Streets of Strangers into dialogue with written analysis, the paper proposes a multimodal approach to researching everyday intercultural encounters. It argues that the seemingly ordinary movements of delivery riders can reveal new forms of urban interculturality, while documentary filmmaking can create space for attending to the fleeting, unfinished, and relational nature of encounter in the contemporary city

This paper draws on my ongoing research on experiences of forced displacement and emplacement of the Lapland War (1944-1945) evacuees and contemporary refugees in Finland. It contributes to bridging the gap between history and refugee studies that have traditionally been separate fields, affording only scant attention to forced migrants’ mnemonic agency. The source material consists of Lapland War evacuees’ written narratives, together with thematic interviews and writing competition texts by people who have come to Finland as forced migrants between the 1990s and the 2020s.

Methodologically, I draw from oral history research and qualitative content analysis, applying social philosopher Axel Honneth’s (1995) recognition theory. According to Honneth, mutual recognition – as love in primary relations, rights in legal relations and solidarity in community of value – is an essential precondition for personal integrity and social justice, but vulnerable to three corresponding forms of disrespect: abuse, exclusion and denigration.

Similarly to trust, recognition is relational, dynamic and context-dependent, as well as closely linked to senses of safety, equity and belonging. Forced displacement disrupts established relations of recognition, necessitating their renegotiation in new contexts. Distinguishing between vertical (institutional) and horizontal (interpersonal) recognition, this paper focuses on the latter by exploring forced migrants’ meaningful relationships. How do these relations affect experiences and processes of forced displacement and emplacement, and vice versa? How do experiences of Finnish wartime evacuees and contemporary refugees compare with each other? Based on my analysis, significant others with whom experiences, memories and narratives are shared, span a wide range of social associations from families and friendships to immediate and imagined communities. These relations and their transformation are central to dis-/emplacement, albeit in complex ways. Furthermore, vertical recognition is inseparable from the horizontal sphere, playing a crucial role in shaping forced migrants’ everyday lives, other relations of recognition and sense of belonging.

Trust is often analyzed as a purely human, psychological, or institutional phenomenon. Drawing on a chapter from my monograph “Koti keskuksella” (Home at the Center), I offer a methodological and theoretical intervention rooted in feminist new materialisms and assemblage thinking. I argue that trust, mistrust, and the sense of belonging are fundamentally socio-material practices, continuously co-constituted by human bodies, institutional spaces, and everyday objects within asylum reception centers.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with refugee families living in cramped institutional quarters in Finland, I try to think how the material environment facilitates the negotiations of trust. I demonstrate how children and families actively use space and furniture, such as sofas, large armchairs, and low coffee tables, to regulate bodily distance, seek protection, and autonomously initiate contact with peers and, for example, researchers. Here, trust is not merely spoken; it is embodied and mediated through material configurations that allow for the shifting dynamics of proximity and withdrawal.

In this presentation I aim to formulate a conceptualization of trust as an elusive, relational, and dynamic assemblage. I argue that this would help to recognize how non-human entities and spatial-temporal structures actively shape marginalized groups’ capacities for agency, safety, and a fractured sense of belonging.

Drawing on ethnographic research, I examine how Arab migrant mothers develop relationships with the Finnish welfare state through everyday experiences of care. I approach trust as a relational process that emerges through encounters with schools, healthcare and other services. I show how experiences of safety, fair treatment and institutional care contribute to feelings of belonging and reciprocal commitment towards Finnish society.

Especially participants with a refugee background expressed gratitude towards Finland for providing safety after experiences of war and displacement. They described Finland as a society where the state protects rather than threatens those living within it. Experiences such as giving birth in Finnish hospitals, raising children in safe neighbourhoods, and seeing schools provide both safety and meaningful learning fostered not only trust in public institutions but also a sense of belonging.
Many mothers viewed participation in paid work as a reciprocal moral commitment – a way of giving back to a society that had cared for them. Participants valued Finland’s commitment to gender equality, children’s rights and religious freedom, describing it as a society where they could practise their faith and values openly. Several associated the Finnish ideal of suvaitsevaisuus with the Islamic concept of tasāmuḥ (respectful coexistence), emphasising shared ethical commitments rather than cultural difference. Likewise, many identified honesty, modesty and trustworthiness as moral virtues they associated both with Finnish people and with Islam.

Trust, however, remained contingent rather than unconditional. Experiences of inadequate healthcare sometimes led women to disengage from public health services. Experiences of discrimination and suspicion – such as assumptions that migrants are unwilling to learn Finnish or contribute to society – generated pressure to succeed simultaneously as workers, mothers and “good migrants.” The presentation argues that trust is not simply confidence in institutions but a reciprocal moral relationship produced – and sometimes undermined – through everyday experiences of care.

Migration research has generated rich accounts of trust in relation to borders, institutions, humanitarian governance, and processes of belonging. Less attention has been paid to how trust becomes socially visible through the ordinary relationships that organise everyday urban life among migrant families. This paper argues that ethnography offers a distinctive lens through which trust can be understood not as an individual disposition or a condition for integration, but as a relational accomplishment emerging through everyday social practices.

Focusing on African families living in Rabat, Morocco, the paper examines how trust is continuously made, tested, and renegotiated through routine interactions with neighbours, schools, public administrations, civil society organisations, and other actors shaping everyday life. Rather than asking whether migrants trust institutions or communities, the analysis follows the everyday work through which families establish, maintain, suspend, and repair social relationships while navigating life in a context of South–South migration.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork based on participant observation, informal conversations, and sustained engagement with everyday practices, the paper argues that trust is better understood as an achievement of everyday social relations than as an individual disposition or an institutional resource. By treating trust as an ethnographic object rather than an explanatory variable, the paper shows how ethnography makes visible the gradual accomplishment of trust and belonging through the everyday work of sustaining social relations, thereby highlighting the analytical value of South–South migration for contemporary anthropological debates on trust, migration, and belonging.

Trust lies at the heart of forced migrant women’s ability to access support and build belonging in Finland. Social workers occupy a paradoxical position in this dynamic: if they pay attention to a client’s cultural background, they risk “othering” the family; yet if they adopt a colour-blind approach in the name of equal treatment, they fail to see the individual and her specific circumstances. This double bind shapes the conditions under which trust can or cannot form between forced migrant families and the welfare system.

This paper draws on a qualitative studies examining how Afghan women in Finland discuss their ideal child-family services. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with forced migrant Afghan women (n=13) in Finland.

Thematic analysis revealed that institutional mistrust, rooted in fear of child custody loss, cultural misunderstandings, and inadequate information, functions as a significant barrier to help-seeking. A recurring theme was the profound power imbalance participants experienced with social workers: professionals who hold authority over both their home and their children, leaving families feeling exposed and without recourse. This power imbalance led participants to hide struggles, avoid authorities, and self-censor parenting choices. Mistrust was further compounded by interpreter-related privacy concerns and the absence of culturally responsive professionals.

At the same time, trust, when it emerged, became a powerful protective factor. Supportive social worker relationships, community networks, and religious practices provided emotional anchoring. Language learning and employment functioned not only as coping strategies but as pathways to agency and institutional trust.

The paper argues that institutional mistrust is structurally produced, by legal precarity and low-quality communication with social workers, and that rebuilding it requires trauma-informed, gender-sensitive approaches that navigate the tension between cultural awareness and individual recognition.