Between law and practice: Profiling and professional ideals in Finnish border control

Through this talk hosted by the Équipe de recherche sur l'immigration au Québec et ailleurs (ERIQA) and the Institute for Research on Migration and Society (IRMS), you’ll gain insight into the lived realities of border guards working at the external Schengen border in Finland, based on in-depth research into their daily practices and professional values. You'll explore how they navigate the legal and moral complexities of traveller profiling — including the often-unspoken dynamics of ethnic profiling. Through this lens, the talk reveals how official narratives, shaped by legal frameworks, can obscure the more ambiguous human aspects of border control. You’ll come away with a deeper understanding of how profiling operates in practice, its implications for discrimination, and why these insights matter for ongoing debates about legislation and public accountability.

Nora Fabritius is a doctoral researcher in sociology at the Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN) at the University of Helsinki. Her research employs ethnographic methods to examine decision-making practices, professional ideals, and narratives of security and law within the Finnish Border Guard. She has previously worked as a project planner at the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives (Eurostorie) at the University of Helsinki, focusing on topics related to Indigenous, cultural, and linguistic rights in northern Finland and Norway.