This study examines how trust shapes professionals’ use of an anti‑racist approach in child welfare and what factors promote or challenge this work. The research is based on eleven thematic interviews conducted in 2025 with members of a multidisciplinary team that worked exclusively with children and families of migrant background. The interviewees included social and family instructors, nurses, and a coordinating social worker.

Across the interviews, trust emerged as the central condition enabling anti‑racist practice. Professionals described how trust between practitioners and families created the relational safety necessary for discussing experiences of rasism. This openness allowed practitioners to identify and adress racialised dynamics.

Trust within the multidisciplinary team also played a crucial role. Trust supported a shared commitment to anti‑racist practice rather than leaving it to individual motivation. Trust between professionals ”spilled over” to the client work also.

Overall, the findings show that trust is foundational for anti‑racist practice in child welfare. Trust enables honest dialogue, supports reflective collaboration, and strengthens professionals’ capacity to recognise and respond to racialised inequities. Anti‑racist work is thus inseparable from the structural and relational conditions that allow trust to develop.

The discourse of Ukrainians receiving a warmer welcome than other refugees in Europe, and in particular in Finland, has been prevalent in the aftermath of Russia’s war in Ukraine (Merikoski 2022; Frank 2025). The 2022 invasion provoked an unprecedented influx of forced migrants within Europe in terms of its scale and rapid temporal dimensions. The initial/continuous warm reception at scale is often attributed to a combination of demographics, cultural closeness, and eventually whiteness. But does it affect the sense of belonging among these refugees, and if so — how?

Multiple studies have been held on other forced migrants groups in Finland throughout the years, demonstrating that they face structural barriers and are racialized against the “white majority” (e.g., Ali 2024; Merikoski 2022). The aspect of Ukrainians’ visible whiteness and the uniqueness of their positioning as European refugees fleeing active war, hasn’t been yet in focus of any published studies. This study addresses this gap.

The initial qualitative analysis of 25 semi-structured interviews shows that whiteness played a significant role in participants’ meaning-making around adaptation and belonging. It emerged particularly through perceptions of cultural closeness to Finns or distance from other migrant groups, experiences of othering, and assessments of their progress toward belonging. I argue that while being positioned as “white” in Finnish society may facilitate initial adaptation and shape public perceptions, this privilege remains superficial. Ultimately, Ukrainian refugees face many of the same barriers to belonging as other refugee groups, while their whiteness can be experienced as “off-white” or second-tier.

Dual citizenship has become increasingly accepted globally, but at the same it is closely entangled with topical political and public debates about immigration, citizenship, and national belonging. Citizenship is commonly associated with obligations and loyalty towards the state, while dual citizenship implies multiple obligations and potentially competing loyalties, challenging conventional understandings of citizenship and belonging. In Finland, dual citizens, particularly Finnish-Russian dual citizens, have become subject to increasingly securitized debates and mistrust following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the subsequent transformation of Finland’s security environment.

At the same time, not all dual citizens are equally visible in these debates. Nordic dual citizens, for example, continue to have relatively easy access to Finnish citizenship and have largely remained outside securitized discussions. This relative invisibility is analytically significant as it points to underlying hierarchies of trust and belonging, revealing which combinations of citizenship are perceived as legitimate and unproblematic, and which are constructed as problematic.

In this paper, I present a preliminary analysis of media debates concerning dual citizens in the Finnish mainstream media in this millennium. I examine comparatively how different configurations of dual citizenship, such as Nordic–Nordic, Nordic–EU, and Nordic–non-Nordic/non-EU citizens, are represented in media discourse, looking particularly at how questions of trust and loyalty figure in these representations. By shifting attention from securitized groups to those dual citizens who remain largely invisible and unproblematic in public discourse, the paper highlights how media representations participate in producing hierarchies of belonging among formally equal citizens.

Finland is widely characterised as a high-trust society. Yet immigrant integration raises a theoretically and practically important question: to what extent does such trust extend across group boundaries, and what makes cross-group trust possible? Existing Finnish research finds favourable mutual attitudes between immigrants and Finns alongside reciprocal underestimation of the other group’s attitudes (Nshom, 2022), suggesting that reported attitudes may conceal important structures of social expectations. This paper argues that cross-group trust should be analysed through expectations of cross-group trustworthiness: whether others are expected to behave trustworthily, whether such conduct is socially expected, and whether these beliefs are aligned.

The framework is grounded in Bicchieri’s expectation-based account of social norms (2006, 2017). Bicchieri, Xiao, and Muldoon (2011) provide experimental evidence for an important asymmetry: trustworthy reciprocity can be norm-governed even where trusting itself is not. Composto et al. (2025) further conceptualise trust as informed by expectations concerning others’ actual and acceptable conduct. Together, these insights motivate shifting the explanatory focus from trust itself to the conditions under which others are expected to behave trustworthily. I develop this shift into the claim that trustworthiness is analytically prior to trust: in situations of voluntary vulnerable reliance, the expectation that another will respond trustworthily is part of the belief structure that makes trusting intelligible.

The paper develops a framework for identifying this expectation structure. Following Wang (2026), it distinguishes first- and higher-order descriptive and normative beliefs and examines both within-individual consistency and alignment within relevant reference networks. Extending Ross and Wang’s (2025) distinction between pluralistic ignorance and preference falsification, the framework compares belief consistency with reference-network alignment to distinguish inaccurate or inconsistent beliefs from strategically divergent preference expression across networks.

The framework thus aims to distinguish genuinely low expectations of out-group trustworthiness from misperceived, internally inconsistent, or cross-network belief configurations, offering a more diagnostic basis for future integration research and policy than aggregate trust measures alone.