I work currently as a Professor of Northern Politics and Government at the University of Lapland. Before this I was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the Tromsø University Museum, Arctic University of Norway (UiT). In my research, I seek to bring together approaches in International Politics, Indigenous studies and Cultural Studies. In the widest sense, I am interested in understanding how broad social changes which have the capacity to reshape power relations globally are articulated locally, and especially in the so called “margins” rather than in the centre/ the metropole. Given this, I love the opportunity to live and do research in the northernmost part of Europe, in a region where the categories of East and West, North and South, centre and periphery, constantly demand to be rethought.
Before studying Indigenous issues in my own country, my work actually focused on Middle East politics and especially on the Palestinian’s struggle: I started working in the region in early 2000s as a freelance journalist and photographer, because I was concerned with growing juxtaposition between “the West” and “the Islamic world” that had developed in the aftermath of the Cold War. In 2002, I took advantage of the opportunity to move to London to study Middle East Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), to develop broader understanding of the region’s political history. Eventually, I wrote a PhD thesis on the late modern politics of Palestinian everyday life during the intifada (2011, University of East London) which was later on published as a book with Routledge. In 2007 I moved back to Finland, this time in Rovaniemi, where I have lived since then. Unfortunately I have not been able to go back to Palestine for ages – and for this reason I also have not done any research on Middle East politics after the PhD. There are enough Western researchers who study non-Western societies without actually living there or keeping in constant touch.
The topic of my current research project has been part of everyday conversations at my home for the past ten years. This attachment to Sámi politics and society owes to my husband and in-laws, whose own experience and expertise in efforts to develop Sámi self-determination, through research as well as Sámi political institutions such as the Sámi Parliament, is quite unmatched and stretches across three generations. Living in Lapland and following Indigenous politics has also resulted in a growing research concern with issues of natural resource management, environmental politics and political and cultural aspects of extractivism. I have examined these issues through a few separate projects, including an art project relating to the rise of wild berry industry and seasonal Thai berry pickers in Finland, and a co-edited (with Catalina Cortes-Severino) Cultural Studies special issue on Cultural Studies of Extraction. More recently, I have done research also on the controversial plan – that has since then been shelved – to build an “Arctic Corridor” or “Arctic Ocean Railway” from Rovaniemi to Kirkenes. In addition to connecting Europe to China via the Arctic Ocean, the railway would seriously affect Sámi reindeer herding in the area and accelerate extractive resource development in the Arctic region more broadly.
In future, I plan to engage the study of Arctic world politics also more broadly, looking at the political and cultural dimensions of extractive industries and ideology, and the ways in which they intersect with settler colonialism and competing imperialism’s in the Northern regions.