I am a researcher in political and cultural studies, and work currently as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the Tromsø University Museum, Arctic University of Norway (UiT). The project, titled “Indigenous research, Institutionalisation and Neo-politicisation: Conjunctural Analysis of the Politics of Sámi Research in Finland”, examines changes in the political terrain of Sámi research in Finland from the 1970s onwards. One of its central aims is to create a better understanding of the challenges that Sámi research as a decolonising project committed to Indigenous self-determination is facing currently. My research brings together insights from Indigenous and Cultural Studies and the results of this two-year project will be published in the form of a research monograph.
Before studying Indigenous issues in my own country, my work 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.
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 institutional politics, 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 some initial research relating to the controversial plans 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.
I hope that in future, I can engage engage these themes more consistently, paying particular attention to the political and cultural dimensions of extractive industries and ideology, and the ways in which they intersect with settler colonialism in Europe’s high North.