Worlds Beyond the Metric: Arabic-Speaking Muslim Women and the Finnish Integration System

Author:
Nada Jouibli
Supervisor:
Kiwoong Nam
University:
ULAP

The Finnish integration system monitors employment, language certification, and benefit dependency. It has no instrument for what a woman calls disappearing. This thesis investigates what Arabic-speaking Muslim women in Finland sustain beyond what the integration system is built to register, and what that gap obliges of design practice, research method, and policy architecture.The study is a multi-stream focused ethnography conducted by a Tunisian insider researcher during Ramadan 2026. Eight women across the full migrant arc, from recently arrived to born in Finland, participated through sustained WhatsApp correspondence, live conversations, and a collective workshop. The researcher's autoethnography runs as a fourth stream beneath all three. Analysis was Arabic-first: coding and interpretation were carried out in Arabic before English rendering.The dual-channel method produced a structural finding: integration monitoring reads a composed self (the resolved, legible account women learn to present) and has no channel for the working self (the conditions that persist beneath it). The data produced a diagnostic vocabulary in Arabic, including an estrangement sequence التغرير (broken promise) → تفريغ(hollowing) → غرب ة (structural estrangement) and the concept أمان بلا حياة (safety without life), naming the condition of welfare metrics succeeding while life is withheld.The thesis identifies a closed loop in which the system produces conditions it then reads as personal failure. It names the framework that follows as reception design: the reorientation from moving people toward the system's categories to receiving what people already know and carry. Three design obligations specify what reception design requires of the Finnish integration system.

Link to full thesis