Anna Niia Varfolomeeva

Category: Publications

  • Beyond the Arctic as “Great White Nothing”

    During the heated Greenland controversy that intensified in January 2026, Donald Trump famously said: “What I’m asking for is a piece of ice, cold and poorly located… It’s hard to call it land.”

    This statement reflects a much wider and deeply rooted issue: the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions have long been imagined as “nothing” – as an “empty space” supposedly lacking meaning.

    Such harming representations continue today, as new technologies and industries once again present the North as being empty, abundant, and endlessly resourceful. It becomes easy to forget that, for many, it is a long-lived and deeply loved place.

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  • From Tar to Data: Resource Cycles of the Oulujoki River

    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.

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  • Back to the texts, not yet the fields

    My article on women’s mining labor in Russian Karelia was recently published in Laboratorium journal; the longest I’ve ever spent working on a single text.

    Its first life began in 2018, when I shared an early draft at a workshop on gender and materiality in Aarhus. Later, I reworked it for a special issue on gender, design, and material culture in (post-)Soviet Russia. That work ended abruptly in March 2022, soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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  • Productive Bodies, Care, and Destruction

    Back in 2021, I published an essay based on my article for the Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies in the No Niin student magazine. Here is the beginning of that text, accompanied by the amazing illustrations of Zacharias Holmberg.

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