I am Saara Pellander and I am currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Social Research at Tampere University. I live in Turku, and thus spend a lot of time on trains, commuting from there to either Helsinki (where I did my doctoral thesis) or Tampere.
My background is in political history and gender studies, and I work on questions related to borders, migration, and families. Since finishing my doctoral thesis on Finnish family reunification policies and their implementation I have among others worked on visual representation of refugees in the media, migrant protests, everyday security in the lives of refugees, the securitization of migration in law and parliament, and how the bodies of elderly migrants become subject to everyday bordering processes.
This is my third year on the board of ETMU, where I now have the honor of acting as chair since the beginning of 2019. Among other things, I am involved with planning the upcoming ETMU Conference, which will take place in Tampere in 2019.