Last spring, I was invited to engage with the new book Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic in two capacities: as a podcast host interviewing the authors and as a reviewer to take part in the book symposium by Perspectives on Politics.
And last week, both the podcast and the symposium were published on the same day!
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
(more…)The long-awaited edited volume “Decolonizing Sustainable Development Goals” has been published open access. I am extremely grateful to the editors for all their efforts in making this book available beyond library access and institutional affiliations.
This book analyzes the well-known SDGs from a very important but rarely addressed angle: Indigenous and local perspectives. It shows why the goals cannot be taken for granted, but need to be critically discussed to limit conflicts and tensions during their implementation.
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.
(more…)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.
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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Anna Niia Varfolomeeva 