“I Want You to Tell Me about Yourself.” Epistemic Simplification in Asylum Decision-Making in Finland

The article examines epistemic simplification in asylum decision-making. By drawing on literature on epistemic violence and injustice, and on cultural misunderstandings in asylum decision-making, the article provides novel insights by focusing on how the cultural notions of family and violence, as well as intersectionality, travel between asylum documents. The article analyzes absence and abstraction of social events as well as exclusion and generality of social actors in asylum interview records and negative decisions made by the Finnish Immigration Service in the years 2016–2017. Through examining how epistemic simplifications are produced, the article shows how cultural misunderstandings do not simply happen but are produced as part of asylum decision-making, and how epistemic violence and injustice are therefore ingrained in different kinds of asylum cases.