Anna Niia Varfolomeeva

Tag: Arctic

  • 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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  • Discussing sustainability from the margins

    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.

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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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  • Unfolding digital futures

    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.

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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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  • A New Collaboration for the New Year

    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.

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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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  • Time to pause and attend

    In just a couple of days, this Saturday, Finland will close down for Juhannus (Midsummer): the towns will be practically empty, and here in Oulu, even bus transportation will stop for a day. After almost five years, I’ve come to appreciate how the two main Finnish holidays, Joulu (Christmas) and Juhannus, reflect the yearly rhythms so well, highlighting the darkest and the lightest days of the year. Both of these focal points of the planetary cycle are met with quietness and apprehension.

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  • Teaching the Arctic in the midst of a pandemic

    Five years ago, I was preparing to teach my first Arctic-themed course.

    Spring 2020 was a difficult time for many, myself included. I had just come out of hospital quarantine after being one of the first diagnosed COVID-19 patients in my region (I’ve documented this experience here). My university was frantically switching to online teaching. For the first time in my life, I was giving lectures from my kitchen to a sea of black Zoom squares, with only the occasional student face appearing. How could I keep them interested? Why should they even care about permafrost or Indigenous identity when the world around them seemed to be collapsing?

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