During the past two years, I have been a lot more involved in the minority politics of the national minority language of Finnish in Sweden than I had ever imagined.

I had been attending the meetings of a group of people monitoring cultural issues at the local level in Gothenburg for more than a year, when I was suddenly asked to become the chair of a group monitoring and discussing minority-language education. Since then, it has been rather intensive: I have acted as the vice-chair of the Sweden-Finnish Council of the City of Gothenburg, and as the chair of its reference group Language and education. These have been positions detached from the party politics, representing civil society.

There have been at least four major municipality meetings per year, which all require at least three separate preparatory meetings with minority members, and I have definitely lost the count for the hours dedicated evenings and weekends to planning and thinking together. I have also been involved in arranging workshops for solving conflicts at the local level, which has been an interesting experience.

Moreover, during the past two years I have co-founded a national audience network focusing on research related to the national minority of Sweden-Finns, the Sweden-Finnish Research Network, started running a series of webinars presenting recent research conducted by Swedish and Finnish scholars on Sweden-Finnishness, and become part of a researcher’s network for the study of the national minority languages in Sweden coordinated by Dalarna University. I was also invited to the steering group of the newly established Language Centre for the National Minority Language Finnish, part of the government’s language revitalization efforts in Sweden.

Right now, the mandate period for the local (non-)political positions has expired. As my last tasks I had the possibility to moderate the festivities of the national Sweden-Finns day at the City Library of Gothenburg with literary author Rosa Liksom, musician Sonja Skibdahl, illustrator Sanna Laakso and politician Blerta Hoti as invited guests (see the photo above), meet the expert committee for the protection of national minority language rights of the European Council, and meet the Swedish Minister of Culture at the Archives of the Finnish Minority in Sweden in Eskilstuna.

I will continue to coordinate the Sweden-Finnish Research Network together with its co-founder Leena Huss – who is, by the way, the first female professor in Finnish language in Sweden who recently received a prize for her accomplishments for the national minority – and produce the monthly webinars focusing on research. To which extent I will be available for the national-minority issues in future, remains to be seen.