Dr Erle Rikmann (University of Jyväskylä, Finland / IASH Fellow): Transnational civic activity online and offline: young Russian-speakers in Finland and Estonia
My research interests draw on both the social sciences and internet- based studies as they can be applied to evaluate and interpret relationships between people, their social and political environments, transnationalism and changing discourses on civil society. Currently, my research involves work on the project financed by the 7th framework programme of the European Commission „"Transnational Youth in Civic Action: Young Russian-speakers as Agents of Domestication in Finnish and Estonian Civil Societies" (shortly, TRANSDOM). The key research question of the TRANSDOM has been the impact of the discursive activities happening in a transnational communicative information space on the civic identity and participative behaviour of young people with migration background. I have focused on young people speaking Russian as their native language, and primarily on the question of how their internet-based communication is related to the ways of being a citizen in their countries of location, Finland and Estonia.
The research methodology includes: a) secondary analysis of the existing data and research reports; b) collection of new data through qualitative interviews; c) collection of new data using online methods (mixed approach).