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.
So many things have happened in the past few weeks.
We had a wonderful two-day retreat with our AniMate more-than-human research team: talking about small wins, sharing dreams, eating good food, and listening to the sounds of nature.
I also met many inspiring researchers during the SAFIRE Thematic Semester event Bridging Ways of Knowing, where I talked about the interconnected industrial histories of Leppiniemi and Muhos, two small settlements near Oulu.
Later in June, together with my student assistant Julia, I visited Muhos. We chose the venue for our upcoming community workshop and visited the local museum run by volunteers.
There, next to the boat that once carried tar along the Oulujoki river, I learned that I had been awarded a four-year Academy Research Fellowship from the Finnish Research Council.
A conference where you are slightly afraid to leave the guesthouse because of the strong wind bending low-growing trees down. A conference set amongst stunning landscapes, where fish and chips are sold next to woolen sweaters, and coinciding with a traditional Faroese whale hunt. Yes, the UArctic Congress 2026 at the Faroe Islands (sometimes referred to as The Edge of the World) was a very unique conference experience.
My participation was seemingly straightforward: I presented my research on the impact of energy transition on more-than-human landscapes in the panel on meaningful stakeholder engagement co-organized with my colleagues from UArctic Thematic Network on Arctic Sustainable Resources. However, large academic events represent much more than a presentation slot.
Fulbright scholarship recipients often call themselves family. Before leaving Oulu for the orientation day with Fulbright Finland in Helsinki last week as a new grant recipient, I had been wondering whether this sounds too affectionate.
After spending the day with them, I see that there is indeed a certain aura among Fulbrighters: openness to conversation, genuine interest in other cultures, ease and academic rigour, all combined. This is an atmosphere where I felt at home.
My comparative project on data centres in post-industrial Arctic settlements recently received funding from Fulbright, and next spring I will be visiting Alaska for the first time ever, building collaborations with the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Our research-art project “Tar, Power, Data” began in March, and yesterday Kati and I made our first joint visit to Leppiniemi, a former hydropower settlement close to the new Google data centre construction site. We walked around the settlement, took photos, and spoke with several residents about their sense of community and their perceptions of future changes. One of the houses in Leppiniemi even has its own Instagram account!
We also toured the Pyhäkoski power plant museum, which recently reopened after renovation. The exhibition spans several floors and covers a variety of subjects, from the use of concrete in the plant’s construction to fish farming as an effort to compensate for the environmental impacts of hydropower.
Since 2021, I have served as the Secretary of Social and Human Working Group at the International Arctic Science Committee. I have just returned from the annual Arctic Science Summit Week, this year held in Aarhus, Denmark, where, for the fifth time, I was responsible for preparing and hosting the Working Group meeting. This is an all-day event: we began the meeting at 8:30 am and finished at 6:30 pm, ten hours in a row!
When I envisioned this blog post on the evening train to Aarhus, I thought I would write: I remember my first WG meeting as a very new Secretary. It required such an investment of energy, and I was so worried and tired, but this year I managed the same meeting effortlessly…
It didn’t happen like that. There were once again unpredictable last-minute changes: presentations needed to be transferred, videos displayed, minutes taken, and Zoom links and agendas sent. I was, once again, worried and tired.
What has changed? I knew I would manage nevertheless, and I was not surprised when the meeting ran smoothly in the end. I still cannot prepare for everything, but I believe in myself more than I did five years ago.
the conference’s welcome ceremony began with ice fishing;
it included a pitch by a mermaid;
in your free time, you could do some crocheting and think about Deleuze and Guattari at the Rhizome Salon;
finally, its closing featured a keynote speech by the former First Lady of Iceland, Eliza Reid, and a children’s address during which I could not hold back tears.
The surface of the LUMI supercomputer looks like origami. This is a tribute to the paper mill on whose premises LUMI and several other data centres are situated. The UPM Kajaani paper mill was a reliable, long-term local employer in this northern Finnish region until it closed in 2008, leaving more than 500 people unemployed.
Since 2012, the data centre industry has been occupying the former halls and storage areas of the mill. Its spirit is still felt here: in the deserted railway lines that once carried fresh paper out, in the wooden owl installation gifted to the mill by pupils of the local school, and in the old-fashioned chairs of the former factory café that now hosts data centre workers.
2026 began with good funding news: our research-art initiative “Tar, Power, Cloud: Strengthening Resilience through Art & Citizen Science” has recently received support from the Frontiers of Arctic and Global Resilience (FRONT) profiling research programme at the University of Oulu.
In this project, we aim to bridge ethnographic research, artistic practice, and citizen science to explore how industrial and technological development shapes human–landscape relations in the town of Muhos, just outside Oulu. I have long been interested in exploring the potential of research-art collaboration around questions of resource extraction in the Arctic. So, this feels like such an important opportunity – and hopefully (not too late for the New Year resolutions, right?), this is just the beginning.
My first publication in Finnish came out in November. This article is one of the outcomes of my Forming Resourcescape project, which was supported by an expenditure grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation in 2024. The edited volume is titled, in English, Turns and Twists – Cultural Environmental Transformations in the North.
Anna Niia Varfolomeeva 