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

Abstract

Finland's integration system evaluates newcomers mainly through employment, language certification, and benefit dependency. These indicators define progress but do not capture belonging, religious practice, relational care, or the everyday work of sustaining life. This thesis examines what Arabic-speaking Muslim women in Finland sustain beyond what the system is built to register, how the system helps produce the estrangement it is meant to address, and how an Arabic diagnostic vocabulary and the framework of reception design can reorient integration research, practice, and policy.

The study is a multi-stream focused ethnography conducted by a Tunisian insider researcher during Ramadan 2026 with eight women across the full migrant arc. Data were collected through WhatsApp correspondence, live conversations, a collective workshop, and researcher autoethnography, with analysis conducted in Arabic before English rendering.

The study found that the system evaluates a composed, institutionally legible self as evidence of successful integration, while the everyday working self remained outside formal assessment. The analysis produced an Arabic diagnostic vocabulary naming a recurring sequence in which institutional promises of inclusion give way to prolonged depletion, which accumulates into structural estrangement. A related concept names the condition where welfare indicators are met but meaningful participation remains absent. The thesis identifies a closed loop in which the system produces conditions it then records as individual outcomes.

The thesis introduces reception design as a framework for shifting integration services from managing predefined categories to recognising the knowledge and infrastructures participants already sustain, supported by three design obligations and a reception audit instrument.