Returning to Stone: My First Book Contract

The academic year began with a new happy commitment. I have recently signed a contract for my first academic monograph with Central European University Press (CEU Press).

The book, tentatively titled Living with Stone: Extraction, Environmental Change, and Loss in Northern Russia, will be published in the “Environmental History of Central and Eastern Europe” series. It will develop the main themes of my PhD dissertation, focusing on Indigenous Veps’ connections to decorative stone.

_{At the field site in Karelia in summer 2021}

I am happy to return to the fieldwork material I collected between 2015 and 2021 and to tell this exciting story in a book. I first tried to put together a book proposal back in 2021, but I struggled to find a central argument that would bring the different parts of the research together. I paused and devoted my attention to other research projects.

Then, 2022 happened, with all the associated pain and uncertainty. I could no longer return to the field and had to rethink my relationship with the material I had already collected.

But the need to tell this story was always at the back of my mind. Now, after working in Oulu as part of the AniMate research collective, I have a much clearer vision of the more-than-human relations between people and materials that I aim to explore in the book. Shifting the focus towards stone itself finally helped me bring these different stories together.

It feels especially meaningful to symbolically return to CEU, my alma mater, with this book contract. I am very grateful to the acquisitions editor and the series editors for their support and enthusiasm about the project.

At the same time, my DATAVOID project on Arctic data centres starts this autumn, so I will be moving between stone and data centres for a while 😄