Conference Agenda

This study examines the challenges of recruiting “hard-to-reach” populations in qualitative research and explores how these challenges can themselves generate knowledge. The research focuses on Russian-speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union (FSU) in Israel who care for a family member with a severe mental illness.

Participants were recruited using purposive and snowball sampling. Data collection included in-depth semi-structured interviews, with reflexive attention to the researcher’s positionality as both a social worker and cultural insider. Recruitment difficulties, refusals, and ambivalent responses were systematically recorded and analyzed alongside the interview narratives to reveal the broader social meanings embedded in participation and non-participation.

Recruitment was shaped by cultural and institutional factors, including mistrust of authorities, prior experiences with mental health systems, and concerns about privacy and exposure. Gendered caregiving norms were evident: most participants were women, often mothers, while fathers and other family caregivers were largely absent, reflecting broader socio-cultural patterns. The researcher’s professional identity facilitated access but also introduced ethical and reflexive complexities, as participants navigated the tension between researcher, helper, and cultural peer. Engaging participants in culturally adapted settings, such as Russian-speaking family psychoeducational groups, increased participation and strengthened immigrant caregivers’ sense of empowerment and inclusion.

The study demonstrates that recruitment processes can serve as a source of epistemic insight, revealing participants’ lived experiences, relational strategies, and negotiations of power and trust. Recruitment challenges should not be regarded merely as methodological obstacles but as an integral component of relational and cultural knowledge. Insights elicited during the recruitment process can be treated as an independent source of data and as a potential means of triangulating the findings derived from the research interviews.

The political climate in Finland regarding immigration is polarised. The country needs labour migration to address future demographic changes and labour shortages in key sectors. At the same time, many immigrants do not feel welcome. This tension raises a key question: how do highly educated immigrants, who are both wanted and unwanted, navigate their position in Finnish society and working life?

This question is not only rhetorical but also shapes immigrants’ everyday realities. Public discourse and policy increasingly present immigrants’ inclusion as requiring individuals to take more responsibility for their work and life. Yet these demands collide with immigrants’ experience that, however hard they try, it may have little effect on feeling included. This individually experienced dilemma is acutely affective: immigrants often live within a rollercoaster of suspicion, frustration, hope and recognition.

Our study is situated at this intersection of polarisation, responsibilisation and affective climates. We examine how highly educated immigrants navigate of work and life in Finland by mobilising or abandoning narrative resources in order to sustain work careers and personal lives that matter to them.

In our study, we analyse in-depth interviews thematically and comparatively, while also tracing the narrative undercurrents of hope, frustration, exhaustion and resilience. Particular attention is paid to similarities and variations within and across the professional fields of health and business. Our study demonstrates how political and labour market discourses resonate in everyday immigrant experiences, shaping these through affective conditions.

Abstract

Well-being is a critical aspect of human experience, particularly in the context of geographic mobility. This qualitative study, which was funded by the Hellenic Foundation of Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.), explores the lived experiences and conceptualizations of well-being in relation to mobility. We conducted 80 biographical narrative interviews and used visual methods (photovoice) to explore how well-being is constructed, challenged, and prioritized across four groups: students in Greece contemplating moving abroad, postgraduate students studying abroad, professionals settled abroad, and returnees to Greece. The findings reveal a dynamic interplay of individual, relational, environmental, and cultural factors, with professionals abroad highlighting the dichotomy between professional advantages and social ties in Greece. Additionally, an ecological dimension of wellbeing emerges, as participants emphasize the role of sustainable environments, access to natural spaces, and balanced lifestyles in mitigating the psychological challenges associated with brain drain. These findings underscore the centrality of well-being in life decisions and the need for holistic, context-sensitive approaches in policy and practice. The study offers novel insights into the psychosocial dynamics of mobility, proposing targeted interventions to enhance well-being.

The adverse effects of globalization in education are cruelly felt in both South and North countries. They are experienced in extended neo-liberal policies and privatization or weakened care and welfare for the most disadvantaged. The spread of capitalism accelerates technical and managerial modernizing processes, with profitable investments in human capital using neuroscience, digitalization and AI as a source of legitimation. This intensified international competition strengthens inequalities and discriminations, while fostering feelings of humiliation and injustice for those who are not considered of as "talented" of “gifted” and being excluded, despite inclusive policies, from paths to “meritocratic” excellence and cosmopolitan elite. But social barriers are even higher for those who are far from big cities where education and employment are being redefined to meet globalizing and digitalizing standards. The quest for modernity in China leads to numerous social gaps and pathologies: suffering, burn-out and stress, often described as psychosocial risks, but also imposed migration due to urbanization, rural exodus and work uberization; competition in accessing educational resources as such as diplomas and certifications. These new impoverishing and marginalizing conditions, as the contribution shows, distort people lives and experiences by promoting individualistic interests, destroying not only traditional modes of solidarity, but also local cultures on behalf of rationalization, effectiveness and performance. At the same time, Chinese cultural modes of existence and moral commitments are denied. These social pathologies give rise to growing claims for recognition and justice, while new kinds of alienation and dependence are developing, with Chinese minorities, particularly gender diverse individuals, facing increased victimization, racialization and stigmatization. This adds a focus on gender alongside the existing issues of race and minority status.

In a context of increasing international migration, new forms of family organization emerge, acting as desiring machines that reconfigure emotional bonds and care arrangements beyond physical borders. These transnational families generate new flows of affection, responsibility, and support that challenge the traditional notion of the nuclear family. This study explored the perceptions and experiences of psychologists in a rural community in Honduras regarding transnational families. The methodology employed was schizoanalytic cartography, conceived as a mapping of affective flows, care relationships, and desiring assemblages, inspired by the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari. Rather than producing a static or hierarchical description, this cartography traces the movements, connections, and transformations of desire and care within and across family networks. Data were collected through 15 in-depth interviews and one focus group. Analyses drew on schizoanalysis to examine how professional discourses articulate desire, social control, and representations of the family. Preliminary results reveal two main findings. The first is the psychologists’ persistent desire to maintain a family structure that keeps both parents present, interpreting the absence of migrant mothers and fathers as an affective lack. In many cases, this emphasis on “absence” may reflect the professional’s social expectations, which do not always fully capture the diverse experiences of children. From a schizoanalytic perspective, children can engage in processes of affective deterritorialization and experiment with new ways of assembling care. Similarly, the second theme highlights a predominantly negative view of parental migration, often focusing on potential challenges for children, which can contribute to a normative desiring framework centered on the nuclear family, but these interpretations coexist with other, more flexible and creative family arrangements. Understanding these families through schizoanalytic cartography makes visible the multiple care arrangements, creative strategies for maintaining connections, and ways in which affections are reorganized beyond the normative frameworks of the traditional family.