Uttishta Sreerama Varanasi, Nils Ehrenberg, Rūta Šerpytytė, Shifa Abdi, and Johanna Ylipulli. 2026. Agency, Autonomy, and Relationality in Public Services: Tales of Migrant Mothers in Finland. In Proceedings of the 14th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI ’26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 33, 1–16.
Abstract
Migrant mothers are typically portrayed as one of the most vulnerable or marginalised groups in Nordic societies. Design and research targeting marginalised groups often use a deficit-centred lens, perceiving them as a burden to the welfare state that is to be alleviated. In this article, we examine how migrant mothers in Finland can mobilise their agency and autonomy. Our empirical research draws on 17 semi-structured interviews with migrant mothers in Finland, which were analysed using the Capability Approach through a qualitative and interpretivist lens. In our analysis, we develop three themes: Agency, Autonomy, and Relationality, which describe how migrant mothers navigate the Finnish welfare state. We argue that autonomy alone is insufficient to achieve equity and social inclusion on a systemic level, requiring designers to re-think how to approach relational agency to develop more equitable public services.