Uneasy laughter: encountering the anti-immigration debate

Affective responses and emotional reflexivity in doing research

Influential theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Brian Massumi value affect as a force of capacity that is uniquely situated to transform the world we live in because of its fundamental autonomy from social meaning-making. In this vain, Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (2010: 3) site Spinoza (1963: 87): ‘No one has yet determined what the body can do.’ Affect thus comes to signal endless possibilities of ‘forces of encounter’, and accounting for these forces will put in question ‘almost all of the tried-and-true handholds and footholds for so much critical-cultural-philosophical inquiry and for theory’ (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 4). While recognizing this value and force of affect, however, I rather side with theorists such as Clare Hemmings (2005) and Sara Ahmed (2010, 2004a, 2004b) who question uncritical notions of affect’s liberating potential. Instead of celebrating affect’s capacity to restructure social meaning in itself, they have directed attention to the ways in which affects – surprising as they can be – are intrinsically embedded in power relations and should be studied in the context of social narratives (Hemmings, 2005: 562). Affect is thus not critically useful because of its autonomy, as Massumi (1995) for instance claims, but precisely because our affective reactions and emotions that are entangled with these reactions provide cues into social relations – and if ambivalence is at the centre of affective attachments, it is at least partly social ambivalence. It is this insight to affect and social relations that will guide my theoretical take on affects and emotions in the face of the anti-immigration debate. ²

While I discuss affects and emotions as a part of the research process, I also wish to address the proliferation of methodological accounts based on rapport and empathy (Carroll, 2013; Dickson-Swift et al., 2009). These accounts are often concerned about asymmetrical power relations in which the investigator is thought to have both more power and more to gain in doing research than those who are investigated (Boellstorff et al., 2012: 129) and which thus risk the exploitation or colonization of informants or respondents (Sampson et al., 2008, 923–924; Watson, 2009: 107). Indeed, when searching for resources for both ethical and emotional reflexivity, I have repeatedly come across the assumption that the communities or cultures that one is studying should be not only protected but ‘cared for’ (Boellstorff et al., 2012: 130). Similarly, the emotional hardships in research are usually discussed in relation to empathy. The researcher is expected to be in ‘emotional risk’ when she is not able to protect the research participants in a sufficient way, or when she suffers from ‘compassion stress’ when researching sensitive topics (Sampson et al., 2008). Dickson-Swift et al. (2009), for example, claim that the ability to be empathetic is one of the main skills needed to undertake qualitative research. However, as Cate Watson (2009: 114) suggests, empathy in research is not a straightforwardly ‘good thing’ and we should rather be suspicious of empathy and subject our empathetic responses to a rigorous scrutiny. Furthermore, Kathleen M. Blee (1998) notes that empathetic connections and trust in research practices become problematic when scholars are studying ‘unloved’ or actively hostile or frightening groups. Taking up laughter as an affective reaction, then, also serves as a means to suggest alternative approaches to discussing emotions and ethical considerations in situations in which rapport, authenticity, empathy and truthfulness are hard or even dangerous to achieve (see Blee, 1998).

Researching the Finnish anti-immigration debate

Around the year 2008, Finnish mainstream politics shifted towards populism, nationalism and racism (Keskinen, 2009; Maasilta, 2012: 8–9). Racism and anti-immigration politics were of course nothing new in themselves in Finland (Förbom, 2010) but the year 2008 marked a particular change as the topic of immigration was brought to the centre of everyday politics and articulated in a new way. This change was directly visible in that year’s municipal elections, in which control and management of immigration emerged as a newly relevant political question and the Finns party (previously known as the True Finns) gained popularity and visibility. The shift towards newly articulated populist and racist anti-immigration politics culminated in the parliamentary elections of 2011, in which the Finns party became the third biggest party in the Finnish parliament, and continued in the elections of 2015, in which the Finns party gained another victory. They are now one of the three governing parties in Finland.

Anti-immigration arguments and calls for stricter immigration policies have been typical for the members of the Finns party, but these kind of claims have received support also from a range of politicians from other parties, notably the National Coalition party, the Finnish Centre party and the Finnish Social Democratic party (Keskinen, 2009, 2013). Moreover, accompanying the shift in mainstream politics has been a change in media which has meant that certain racist and nationalist discourses have been normalized or at least tolerated in a new manner (Maasilta, 2012: 8).

The shift in Finnish politics and also in the Finnish society at large can be placed alongside similar developments elsewhere in Europe in the last two decades – for example in Sweden, France and Britain. Furthermore, similar to for instance Britain (Atton, 2006: 574), the emergence of nationalist anti-immigration politics in the political mainstream in Finland has been at least partly a product of internet activism (Lentin and Titley, 2011: 152). It was through participating in internet discussion and blogging that several of the Finns party candidates gathered their votes both in the elections of 2008 and 2011 (Keskinen, 2013). What is more, internet discussions have served as the ground for inventing and normalizing new phrases and words as well as arguments concerning race and immigration (Koivulaakso et al., 2012). ³ The internet discussions have thus participated effectively in the change that happened in mainstream media by introducing new concepts and discourses.

In particular, an internet discussion forum called Homma (hommaforum.org) has played a crucial role as a forum for mainstreaming certain discourses and opinions and for gathering support for anti-immigration politics. It is this forum that my research focuses on. Established in 2008, Hommaforum originally developed from a guest book in Jussi Halla-aho’s blog ‘Scripta – writings from a sinking West’. ⁴ Halla-aho is the ideological leader of the Finnish anti-immigration activists and a Member of the European Parliament (Finns party) since 2014. His writings centre on Islam, the ‘unintegratable’ migrant communities and the dystopic future of the ‘West’ (Keskinen, 2013), and similar topics and opinions are hotly discussed also in Hommaforum alongside other issues, most of which are in some way related to immigration politics.

Hommaforum is probably past its political heyday (which occurred around 2009–2011) now, but it is telling of the ongoing significance of the forum for mainstream politics that for instance the current Speaker of the Finnish Parliament Maria Lohela is a member and known for her anti-immigrantist activities. The forum continues to occupy a central position within the public debate on immigration – and also within the public imagination concerning the Finns party and anti-immigration activists. At the time of the writing of this article, the forum has over 8700 members and it contains 1,468,799 messages and 38,730 topics. ⁵ In the face of such vast quantities of data, I have made use both of ethnographic methods of observation and ‘lurking’ on the site (Isomäki et al., 2013) and of discursive analysis of particular discussion threads. In addition, I have done background interviews with present or previous members in order to gain information of the culture and history of the forum.

Hommaforum has discussion areas which are visible only for registered users, but my research has been limited to the public parts of the forum both because this makes ethical considerations easier (Wilkinson and Thelwall, 2011: 388) and because I am most of all interested in the public discussions which serve the political mission of Hommaforum. For ‘Homma’ is a discussion forum but also a political community with certain aims and means more or less shared by its members. The most explicit of these aims is, to cite a forum moderator, to ‘normalize critique of social immigration’. ⁶ This ‘critique of social immigration’ has manifested in the forum also in the form of racist utterances and hate speech for which Hommaforum has become famous despite its strict moderation policies. As a political project it is a place for a thick web of affects and emotions ranging from hatred and frustration to empathy and joy (Nikunen, 2010). This web of affects and emotions spans from the forum to the reader and beyond, as will soon be discussed.

Instances of laughter and disgust

Hommaforum as a subject of empirical research easily brings forth negative comments as well as expressions of anxiety, dislike and even disgust from fellow academics. Usually, when I explain my ongoing research on the forum to someone who is familiar with the Finnish context, the discussion follows a particular pattern. People respond to the mention of Hommaforum as a research subject by saying that it ‘must be awful’ and that they ‘could not do it’ and ‘have never wanted to read it’, and continue by asking me how do I do it or bear it (reading Hommaforum), because ‘it must be tough’. In this way, the expressions of disgust brought out by the research topic are followed by empathy towards the researcher. Often one can also detect a degree of concern for the emotional risk that such a research might bring with it. Sometimes people make sounds like ‘uhhuh’ or faces that communicate uneasiness. Not once has anyone come forward to tell me that they are participants or avid readers of Hommaforum.

These reactions suggest that Hommaforum is a place that bears a certain reputation: it could be said that it has become not only a forum for but also a symbol of particular kind of racism in Finland. The expressions of anxiety, dislike and disgust might thus be interpreted as a form of moral judgments in which affective or emotional responses mark moral outrage (Kolehmainen, 2012; Tyler, 2008: 23) and also position the commentator him- or herself as the opposite of all the things that Hommaforum has come to signify. This is telling of how (moral) judgement and emotion cannot be placed in opposition to one another, as emotion is a mode of apprehending the world that includes both affect and cognition (Ahmed, 2004c: 195–196; Gray, 2008: 942).

Furthermore, if one follows Sara Ahmed’s (2010, 2004a, 2004b) conceptualization of sticky affects, it can be said that Hommaforum is an object onto which certain kind of affects such as anxiety and disgust ‘stick’ so that the mere mention of the forum in different situations brings forth these affects even if no one participating in the discussion is particularly familiar with the forum and its specific contents. (This is evident when people comment that they themselves could never read the forum and are appalled at the thought of having to read it for research purposes.) Moreover, anxiety and disgust do not stick solely to Hommaforum but also to ‘the kind of people who participate in Hommaforum’, an issue to which I will return later.

My response to the comments I get when I mention Hommaforum as a research topic always seems to follow a particular pattern as well: I make an apologetic face as if saying ‘I know isn’t it awful that I am doing this research’, or I make it known in some other way that I share the disgust and dislike attached to the forum. Sometimes even my tone of voice when saying Hommaforum communicates uneasiness and dislike. I am thus complicit as a researcher in the making of the moral judgments described above. By expressing certain affective and emotional reactions I want to make sure that everyone knows I stand in opposition to the forum and all the things it has come to signify. However, I often feel the need to say something soothing as well, about how it is not so bad, and recently I have started saying that sometimes I cannot but laugh, that I cope by laughing. This is the truth, or as least a part of it; laughter is one of my responses to the absurdity of things that are said in Hommaforum, and it also functions a means to keep a level head when the absurdity and racism of the discussions become overwhelming.

Let us take as an example a certain discussion thread that contains hundreds of messages, most of them focusing on a leather couch. This discussion was triggered by an article in a Finnish magazine that contained a picture of a woman sitting on a couch at her home with her children to accompany a written story of this family’s typical Saturday morning. What was interesting to many members of Hommaforum in this picture and in the accompanying story was that the woman in question had been born in Somalia, though she had moved to Finland when she was five years old, which means that she had been living in Finland for over twenty years. However, the discussion concerning the article was mainly about how someone with a Somali background could ever afford such a coach. It included for instance debating the prices of coaches and whether the coach in the picture had been bought as a new one or as second hand, and also looking up the woman’s education and work place and speculating how much money she makes and whether that money could explain the allegedly expensive coach. It was rather clear from the discussion that many of the discussants had put a considerable amount of their time in trying to find out everything they could about the financial situation of this woman who was and who would also remain unknown to them. As the discussion went on it also touched upon the children being bare footed in the picture and some commentator for instance stated that the fact that the woman made pancakes on a Saturday morning (according to the article) was unacceptable and possibly a reason for the state to intervene and take the children to custody. All in all, what was very clear from the comments in the discussion was that for the activists in Hommaforum, there was no possibility that could allow for a woman with a Somali background to have a certain coach or, to be specific, a certain lifestyle that such a coach was thought to signify. If she worked then her employment was certainly somehow suspicious and wrong, and if she was unemployed she was using tax payer’s money. She was thus ‘known’ to be morally dubious and a burden to the taxpayer no matter what the facts of her life were, and she was also known to be a bad mother which could be detected from the simple act of making pancakes.

After reading hundreds of messages concerning mainly the coach and its assumed monetary worth but also countless other issues including pancakes and the possibility of her having a mobile phone paid for by her employer, I was overwhelmed, and I laughed. It was certainly not a reflected response but more of a ‘gut reaction’ that took place before I could account for it.

To be sure, such laughter can be explained by saying, as I did just now, that the sheer absurdity of certain discussions leaves one no other options to respond than to laugh. (At the time I did indeed note in my research diary that I had read a discussion that was ‘the high point of absurdity’.) Furthermore, as a corporeal reaction, laughter is actually close to crying (consider the saying ‘didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry’) and it can take place also when another kind of reaction might be expected or might seem more appropriate. Laughter can be a sign of nervousness, fear or confusion. Sometimes when people receive shocking news, their first reaction is to laugh, and grief only follows afterwards. Laughter while doing research might thus be compared to this kind of confused reaction in the face of something incomprehensible but ultimately saddening. Laughter, pain and anger are not mutually exclusive (Kyrölä, 2010: 76).

Furthermore, if one considers in closer detail the practice of reading as a method of virtual ethnography, it might be noted that reading in general entails unexpected experiences and encounters. Researching texts means that sensations aroused by these texts or one’s eventual readings cannot be known from the start (Paasonen, 2007: 49). Writing on affects and pornography, Susanna Paasonen notes that texts are inseparable from acts of reading and their possible moments of surprise. There is thus no guarantee that a certain object or text will evoke any particular response (Paasonen, 2007: 49). Considering laughter as an affective reaction thus highlights the possibility of surprise in the act of reading. The uneasiness of this laughter also brings to light the expectations or norms concerning affective and emotional reactions, (‘feeling rules’ [Henderson, 2008; Hochschild, 1979]) one might be expected to feel anxiety and disgust when encountering the anti-immigration debate, but the ‘unruliness’ and unexpectedness of affects brings these expectations into light and prompts critical inquiry.

Even if one recognizes laughter as an unruly, surprising and relatively autonomous corporeal affect with multiple, ambivalent meanings and emotions attached, it doesn’t mean that laughter would be an ‘innocent’ reaction without any consequences or attachments. Rather, this recognition makes it even more important to take a moment in order to reflect on what makes laughter possible in the particular instance of a researcher reading the discussions in the anti-immigration forum.

Distances and proximities: bringing whiteness into being

Several scholars discussing affects and emotions have directed attention to distances and proximities (for example, Ahmed, 2010; Probyn, 2010). Furthermore, recognising one’s own situatedness within the research is an important part of reflexivity in qualitative research (Berger, 2015: 220). I will thus begin by inquiring how my particular position both ‘far from’ and ‘close to’ the anti-immigration debate enables laughter when encountering certain discussions. First of all I am by now familiar with (‘close to’) the conventions of such discussions, and recognize for instance that the figure of the leather couch has a history of repeated occurrences in the anti-immigration debate. This adds an extra layer to the absurdity of the discussion and propels my laughter. Second, however, and more importantly, there is a distance between me and those who are the main ‘objects of discussion’ in the forum. ⁷ I am not an immigrant in Finland, I have a white skin and I have no direct experience of racist violence. Thus the discussions – apart from the ones concerning women in general – are not directly hurtful to me, though they make me angry, fearful and sad. It might be that if I inhabited a different position, for instance if my loved ones were targets of racist violence, I would not laugh no matter how absurd the text I was reading. Or at least the mixture of pain and laughter would be more intense. The distance between my position as a researcher and the actuality of racism thus translates into an emotional distance from the discussion. In this case, it is a privilege to be able to laugh.

Taking this perspective of laughter as a privilege a bit further, one might also consider laughter in such an occasion as a way in which whiteness is felt and brought into being through embodied, intimate acts (Faria and Mollet, 2014: 2). This means thinking not only that it is distance that enables laughter but also that laughter might create distance (between me as a researcher and those whose lives are directly threatened by racism) and in this process of creating distance, enhance racialized power relations. If race is understood as something that can be produced, dismantled and remade through situated and momentary feelings (Faria and Mollet, 2014: 2) and through affective landscapes (Graefer, 2014: 107), it is exactly such processes that take place through the affective reactions that at first glance appear as a trivial and private experience of the researcher.

Imogen Tyler (2008: 23) notes that laughter is community-forming in that it is always shared with a real or imagined community, and it is clear that laughter serves the task of community-forming also in Hommaforum. This is visible for instance in the new words and phrases that are coined in the discussions, for they usually contain some kind of humorous word play or ironic reference, often malicious to those who are seen in the forum as unwanted or despicable. Migrants, then, are not only targets of hatred or disgust in the forum, they also become targets of laughter – and laughter often serves to intensify dislike and disgust. Laughing, indeed, resembles disgust as it rejects its object and creates distance (Tyler, 2008: 23).

Taking this into account, laughter in the face of the forum discussions is not something that would be particular for a researcher – there is reason to believe that also the members of the forum are laughing or at least feeling amused from time to time when reading the posts. Sometimes the absurdity of certain discussions might be intentional and ironic and part of the culture of laughter that is typical for the forum. The laughter of a researcher, even if one thinks that one is laughing at the discussants, could thus actually be shared by them. Laughter, as an unruly and unexpected affect, can thus reveal unexpected and unrecognised proximities. It is through such affective proximities that the production of whiteness (Faria and Mollett, 2014: 2) then takes place. For this reason, it is crucial to recognise the racializing power relations that function through affective responses and also one’s own location within them.

Feeling rules and emotional labour

Thinking further the questions of proximity and distance, it is also worth considering the one occasion in which I was myself a topic of a discussion thread in Hommaforum. The discussion concerned a public lecture I gave and it took issue with both the content of the lecture and my personal characteristics and presentation skills (or the lack of them, to be precise). To read that thread was difficult and instead of an urge to laugh I had a sinking feeling in my gut and an urge to stop reading, even if the things that were said were not even that hurtful.

The fact that the attack was so mild, I suggest, has to do with whiteness: if I was thought to be a migrant or otherwise was racialized as non-white, it would have been more ruthless. But as that was not the case, the discussion thread in itself was not very offensive, it was even quite funny in its predictability (for instance, calling me a ‘little girl’ in order to undermine my position as a university researcher with a doctoral degree).

I did laugh, later, when I told other people about the discussion, but then laughter had a particular function: it was not a ‘gut reaction’ but a more conscious means to suppress the acknowledgement that I actually found the discussion hard to read despite its relative mildness. In this case, laughter was thus a means to cope with certain emotions, most clearly shame and anxiety that I felt when reading the comments. Moreover, laughter was a means to hide these emotions from view. It did not feel comfortable to admit that reading the discussion felt bad because that would have revealed my vulnerability in the face of something that I thought should not have that kind of power over me. My response to the comments I described above, ‘it’s not so bad’, might also in part reflect this reluctance to admit any vulnerability.

Whereas the proximity enabled by whiteness kept me distant from the hurtful aspects of the discussions, this proximity of a different kind – when the discussion hit a sore point, ‘too close’ – brought with it an experience of powerlessness. This powerlessness demonstrated itself through uneasy affects and emotions, and laughter was part of my way of trying to reclaim the power over what has the capacity to affect me. Affects and emotions can thus not only reveal the power relations we would rather not recognise and force us into relations that we would rather not enter, but also function as a means to counter or undermine these relations.

To be sure, distances and proximities imply different forms of laughter. The laughter that is aimed to undermine hurt and powerlessness is a very different kind from an unexpected ‘gut reaction.’ However, both kinds of laughter actually bring into light questions concerning ‘feeling rules’: whether one should be affected in a certain way by certain objects and how one is supposed to show one’s feelings or emotions. Every researcher is affected, in surprising and at times uncontrollable ways, by the research process. Yet we have in mind an ideal norm of how a researcher should or should not feel (Dickson-Swift et al., 2009) and we try to adjust our reactions to this norm.

Disgust and possibly anxiety in the face of the anti-immigration debate are normalized and expected reactions. However, it seems that as a researcher there is a balance to be kept between showing disgust but simultaneously covering both feelings of shame and insecurity and unexpected, shameful fits of laughter. This, I suggest, is a form of emotional labour in the sense that it is not only a question of having emotions while doing one’s work but a question of managing these emotions in the eyes of (real or imagined) others (Carroll, 2013; Hochschild, 1983). In this way, one can begin to trace the norms that define a good researcher, and the ways in which emotional labour both helps us to accommodate to them and keeps them in place.

All this means that there are limits, conditions and unseen consequences to laughter depending on the distance or the proximity that one has to whatever propels that laughter. Laughter can be a way to ease pain, as Katariina Kyrölä (2010) notes, but it is also clear that pain is not always eased by laughter – it might also be intensified. Moreover, in some occasions laughter might enforce existing power relations and norms. So laughter, in terms of research, does invite questions of privilege, positions and distances. However, it also invites further ethical consideration, to which I will turn next.

Laughter, disgust and class

To take a slightly different perspective, one might consider what it means to laugh at the texts that one is researching from the point of view of the people who are producing these texts. Especially in feminist research, there is a general understanding that a researcher should aim to build a respectful and if possible a non-hierarchical relationship to the people and communities that they are researching (Bergen, 1993: 202; Ramazanoglu and Holland, 2002: 112–115; Sampson et al., 2008: 921). Similarly, the ethical guidelines concerning internet research or research of virtual worlds are most often based on an explicit or implicit assumption of co-operation, trust and respect (Boellestorff et al., 2012; Chen et al., 2003; Denzin, 2003; Turtiainen and Östman, 2013). These are troubling assumptions in many ways – not least because they seem to take for granted that the researchers always have more power than those being researched – but the idea of respect does ring true regardless of the subject of the research or whether the people involved are hostile or ‘unloved’ (cf Blee, 1998). Laughing at the people one is researching, or their community, or their discourse thus seems to be the opposite of what might be thought of as an ethical approach. What makes the ethical issue here even more pressing, however, is that the kind of laughter I am talking about is not a private experience the researcher might have and then forget about. I have already made clear how it is a form of laughter that is enabled by whiteness and can also contribute to the production of whiteness. There is, however, also another kind of issue to consider here, namely that of class.

Ever since the Finns party and Hommaforum became a relevant political force they have been the object of ridicule, especially on social media. ⁸ A stereotypical figure has emerged to encompass all that is deemed disgusting and wrong in the Finns party or Hommaforum members: they are repeatedly laughed at because of how they are thought to be: tasteless, redneck, vulgar, illiterate peasants who smell bad and should be banished from Finland (Kuusela, 2011). This is laughter that sides with hatred and disgust and serves to distance those who laugh from those who are laughed at.

Such a combination of laughter and disgust is shared or at least recognized I think by everyone who considers themselves to be on the opposing side of populist, racist and nationalist politics in Finland. As already noted, laughter and disgust here indicate moral judgment, and serve the purpose of drawing clear lines between oneself and racism. I suggest, however, that laughter on this occasion is also used as a political weapon with the aim of diminishing the importance and credibility of the Finns party and Hommaforum in mainstream politics. Even if, for instance, lack of education does not really apply to members of Hommaforum (many of them seem to be highly educated, as is Jussi Halla-aho, and the language used in the forum also testifies to higher education [Vänni, 2009]), it has become customary to think of them as an unruly mass of uneducated and stupid animal-like hillbillies ⁹ that should be banished from the political and social mainstream. This conception is of course implicitly present also when I discuss my research topic with colleagues or friends.

Whereas I share the political aim of banishing the Finns and the members of Hommaforum from the political mainstream, I am also troubled by this combination of laughter and disgust. What is disturbing here is not laughter as such but the stereotypical figure that emerges through the kind of laughter I describe above. For this is a stereotype that is already well-known from historical and contemporary depictions of under class or working class people: someone who is uneducated, disgusting, behaving like an animal, aggressive and smelling bad – and a racist (Jones, 2012; Tyler, 2008, 2013). Laughing at the stupidity of the Finns party or Hommaforum members can thus actually be seen on a continuum with other contemporary forms of class-hatred and disgust that often function through laughter. Beverley Skeggs (2004, 1997) and Imogen Tyler (2008), for instance, describe similar combinations of laughter and disgust in relation to the white working class in the context of Britain. Whether the members of Hommaforum are actually working class is not the issue here. Rather, the issue is the circulation and enforcement of imageries and figures that mark and marginalize the working class as animal-like racists. Merging the figures of the racist internet discussant and the working-class male serves to enforce the idea that racism is a feature of the lower classes. This is an assumption that functions as a convenient way to externalize racism as something that is not a feature of oneself or of the society as a whole but only a deficit of certain ‘lower’ people. As Stephanie Lawler (2005: 437) notes, at the present moment when racial ‘diversity’ is paid at least lip-service, the working class becomes to embody a racism that is officially condemned. The combination of laughter and disgust that I describe here can thus be seen as part of this process of working class becoming either ‘too white’ (Jones, 2012: 116–117; Lawler, 2005: 437) or ‘filthy white’ (Tyler, 2008: 25–26). This is a process that allows viewing racism as a problem that only concerns the uneducated or marginalized instead of viewing it as an institutionalized part of the whole society. In this way we come back to the process of producing whiteness through laughter, as it is not only the boundaries between white and non-white that are enforced through laughter but also the boundaries between respectable and non-respectable (Skeggs, 2004; Tyler, 2008: 26) whiteness.

Moreover, it is striking that the stereotype that is supposed to depict the members of Hommaforum or the Finns party is actually very much alike to the stereotypical conception of migrants that is constructed in Hommaforum. In the discussion threads migrants from certain countries are depicted as tasteless, vulgar, illiterate peasants who smell bad and so on. As already noted, migrants thus become targets of both laughter and disgust very similar to that directed to the members of Hommaforum. I do not think this similarity is a pure coincidence. Rather, I think there is a circulation of laughter and disgust as well as of stereotypes. Employing Sara Ahmed’s (2004a) concept, it can be said that there exists a particular affective economy and a circulation of affects between me as a researcher, my colleagues and the members of Hommaforum, and finally the migrants as well. Laughter and disgust are thus not something that would reside in migrants or the members of Hommaforum but something that is produced in the circulation of these affects and then distributed across the social field. This circulation fosters the production of stereotypes both of working class as racists and of migrants as illiterate and vulgar parasites. It also serves to polish upper-class whiteness as tolerant and pro-diversity despite the ongoing structural racism and increasingly strict border controlling that is very much upheld by white elites. Laughing at the absurdity and stupidity of the writings in Hommaforum thus means that one risks taking part in this complex circulation of both laughter and disgust.

Looking at laughter in the context of the wider affective economy of anti-immigration debate helps to show that there are ethical dimensions involved in the web of affects in which the researcher inevitably takes part. It could even be said that experiencing uneasy feelings or emotions during a research project actually signals the emergence of ethical dilemmas (Blee and Currier, 2011: 401). In the case of my research, it quickly became impossible to extricate methodological and ethical concerns from the analytical interpretations that provide a certain understanding of the debate and of the circulation of laughter and disgust. Laughter, then, because it is something that circulates and not something that only belongs to the one laughing, can serve as a bridge that binds together the methodological and ethical as well as the interpretational aspects of the research.

Learning from laughter

Qualitative research often means that one is bound to experience surprising and uneasy affects and emotions, laughter being one of them. In this article it has been my aim to show how exploring laughter can lead not only to critical and analytical discoveries but also to the strengthening of the methodological and ethical standpoints of the research, and also to the insight that these are not separate aspects of a research process but interwoven through affective reactions.

To explore the conditions and affinities of laughter in the anti-immigration debate, I have suggested in this article two possible routes of investigation. First one looks at the proximities and distances that enable and condition certain kinds of laughter. Second one looks at laughter and disgust as a part of a morally charged affective economy in which they are produced in circulation and ‘stick’ to certain objects. Both of these routes of investigation lead to ambivalent discoveries. Laughter can be a sign of proximity but it can also be a privilege allowed by distance. Laughter can challenge existing power relations but it can also enforce them and contribute to the marginalization of those already marginalized. Instead of easy answers, laughter thus invites further reflections on relations of power and what they mean in terms of researching the anti-immigration debate.

When Cate Watson (2009: 110) discusses empathy in research, she suggests researchers should be open to the inevitability of difference, not just between the researcher and the researched, but within the researcher too. According to Watson (2009: 114), doing research presents us with occasions in which we have to ‘confront not only difference between ourselves and those we seek to engage with, but also […] our own internal multiplicities and differences’. Watson (2009: 110) offers the metaphor of polyphony/cacophony as a more appropriate alternative to empathy. In light of my exploration of laughter, I find Watson’s perspective insightful in that it emphasises the lack of closure and the ambivalence present in any research. It is precisely this ambivalence, I claim, that can be traced and brought to light through emotional and affective reflexivity. Learning from laughter thus does not offer any kind of closure but rather it is the beginning from which to unravel relations of power and differences at play in the anti-immigration debate and the changing place of the researcher in all this.

Admittedly, once one starts to reflect on affects and emotions in a research process there is always the danger of becoming self-centred and losing sight of the point at which these affects and emotions lose relevance in terms of the whole research project (Widdowfield, 2000: 202). There thus needs to be a balance between accounting for one’s own reactions and staying alert to the wider affective and emotional landscapes in society. In this respect I find it particularly beneficial to take a cue from the theoretical contributions that see affects and emotions as embedded and produced in social relations. Seeing affect as social makes it necessary to constantly extend the analysis beyond oneself and beyond individual accounts of feelings, whereas pressing the autonomy of affect might lead to a different emphasis. I thus claim that the theoretical take on affects and emotions chosen for the research has significance in terms of methodological reflections and in accounting for the emotional labour that the researcher does.

Moreover, I suggest that an approach that sees affects as embedded in power relations can serve as a very useful tool in investigating hostile or unloved groups or communities. In contrast to the requirements of open rapport, trust and empathy that very fast become feeling rules and norms to which the researcher tries to adjust, the take on affects as embedded in power relations makes it possible to account also for those affective reactions that are deemed shameful and ‘wrong’ in doing research. In this way, the power relations at play in a research project can be explored in all their ambivalence and difficulty, and can be taken into account not only in terms of methods but also in terms of the interpretations that one makes. Instead of constituting feeling rules or norms, this kind of approach makes it possible to account for affect as surprising and at times uncontrollable force without losing sight of its social implications and conditions. Hence one can begin to think of ways in which unruly and ethically questionable affects can, through careful reflection and contextualization, be made part of an ethically responsible research.