Anna Niia Varfolomeeva

Tag: Finland

  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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