Anna Niia Varfolomeeva

Tag: academia

  • One bright Fulbright day

    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.

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  • Hydropower and its silences

    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.

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  • The web of work

    When I was a PhD student, my supervisor told me I had a true luxury: time to concentrate on my writing. At that time, I was puzzled: I certainly did not feel privileged. However, recently I keep returning to these words as tasks interweave as a web: revisions to respond to, co-teaching, meetings, reimbursement claims, Finnish lessons, contacting local organizations for a citizen science project, and planning for upcoming deadlines.

    This interweaving is especially visible after grant applications. For weeks prior to submission, I have to put other work aside. But after I click “submit,” it is hard to relax as the web of assignments reappears in my calendar and, more importantly, my mind, – resembling, in some way, my recent photos from the art-science conference side event.

    The web is an interesting metaphor, as this is also the way I think about my topic – interrelation of industries and technologies in Arctic landscapes, points of connection across times and geographies, or intersections of physical and symbolic lines. Recently, however, I have been thinking: how to approach the daily web of work as a meaningful arrangement, not a daunting accumulation of assignments?

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  • On changing and staying: reflections from ASSW 2026

    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.

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  • Why citizen science?

    I am quite late in reflecting on the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) conference I attended at the beginning of March. But I still have to write this post because:

    • 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.
    • anyway, this most probably was…
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  • 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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  • Beyond Words, Loss, and Failure at the YHYS Colloquium

    Last week, Oulu hosted the annual Fall colloquium of the Finnish Society for Environmental Social Science (YHYS). This was my first experience with YHYS, and although I had only just recovered from a rather fierce virus and wasn’t at my best, I was quickly drawn in by the colloquium’s vibrant atmosphere. My main sources of inspiration, however, may sound unusual: nothingness, failure, and the absence of words.

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  • Notes from an Arctic retreat

    Last week, just as the grant submission emotions were finally settling down, I got to experience a bit of tourist Lapland. The project REBOUND, focusing on just green transition in the Finnish North, had a two-day workshop and retreat in a holiday village right at the Arctic Circle.

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  • Feelings of sustainability

    Amidst the heat of the grant application season, it is difficult to keep up with the blog. But very cool things are happening: over the past two weeks, I have taken part in conversations on emotional practices and relations within sustainability transitions at two conferences in opposite parts of Finland.

    First, at the Science for Sustainability conference in the heart of Helsinki, we held a panel devoted to actors often marginalized in energy transition debates in the North: Indigenous residents, migrant workers, animals, and nature. Our five-minute lightning talks were followed by a discussion on just transition and belonging (including some critical remarks on whether justice for all is actually achievable).

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  • Other worlds than these

    “Go then, there are other worlds than these.” The line from The Dark Tower came back to me when I encountered an inspiring quote by Elizabeth Povinelli that also resonates with my research:

    “But no world is actual one world. The feeling that one lives in the best condition of the world unveils the intuition that there is always more than one world in the world at any one time“ (Povinelli 2011, original emphasis).

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