anthropology-staff

Florian has done research and lived in many regions of the Russian North since the mid 1990s, and has ever since enjoyed the particularities of how people contemporarily and historically organize their life in this vast area. Since the anthropology team’s big ORHELIA project, he has also started working comparatively with people living in the Western European Arctic, and led several research projects working with Western and Russian Arctic societies and cultures. Much of his research and publications are on the encounter of (extractive) industries with animal-based livelihoods and how its governing changes the livelihoods of Arctic peoples, both indigenous and local. More recently, he has also worked on well-being, youth and Arctic urban anthropology. This research - often using a mix of participant observation and oral history as a method - contributes to broader theoretical debates on worldviews of extractivism, human-animal adaptability and well-being.

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tel. +358 400 138 807

Ria-Maria is a PhD candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna. Her research interests revolve around Arctic youth wellbeing, infrastructure, shrinking northern towns and sustainable communities. She is currently funded by the ERC Advanced Grant Project InfraNorth by the University of Vienna, while being an active member of the Arctic Anthropology team in Rovaniemi by contributing to different events, such as the Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society. Previously she has worked in the WOLLIE project on Arctic youth wellbeing issues. Since 2018 she has conducted ethnographic research in the towns of Rovaniemi, Kolari, Kemijärvi, Pyhäjoki and Puolanka. Her current research area expands from Rovaniemi to communities along the “iron ore line” leading to the ice-free port of Narvik. 

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Lukas has been working in the anthropology research team since 2013 and earned his PhD degree in 2020. Since 2022 he works in the project WIRE – Fluid Realities of the Wild. With a background in oral history and Russian studies, Lukas specialized at the Arctic Centre in indigenous and youth issues in the Russian Northwest. His main research interests are about the Soviet policies towards indigenous minorities and their consequences to this day. A further strand of research has been anthropological inquiry into young peoples’ aspirations and well-being in Arctic single-industry towns. Methods of oral history, participant observation, archival work and media analysis are equally represented in his work. In all of his research, Lukas puts an emphasis on long-term field commitment, including bringing back research results to the communities they stem from. 2021-2022 Lukas took a break from academia and worked as a project coordinator in the Business Ladies Project at the Arctic Governance team. His role was to establish a strategic peer support network for immigrant female entrepreneurs in Finnish Lapland, which aimed at creating to sustainable businesses and a successful integration in society.

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tel. +358 40 484 4418 

Stephan got his phD from the University of Leipzig with a thesis on public and private spheres among the West Siberian Khanty under the impact of large scale oil extraction. He has been working in the Russian North since the early 1990s and has also field experience in post Soviet Central Asia. His main interests are in the analysis of privacy and intimacy, the theory of hiding and exhibiting, taiga reindeer herding, and the impacts of extractive industries in the Russian North. He worked in the ORHELIA project on the relations between states and their northernmost residents with a focus on the European Nentsy.

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tel. +358 40 484 4079

Panu got his PhD from the University of Helsinki in social and cultural anthropology with a thesis on cooperation and reciprocity in the Skolt Sami reindeer herding community of Sevettijärvi Northern Finland and the community’s relation to state administration. His research interest is directed to productive processes and human relations in the north.

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tel.  +358 40 484 4158

Francis Joy is a Post-doctoral researcher at the Arctic Centre, Rovaniemi, Finland; having graduated from the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Lapland in 2018. Research interests and publications to date include a broad range of topics and subjects in connection with the study of prehistoric rock art in Finland, Sámi shamanism and sacrifice. More recently, the subject matters of reuse of Sámi cultural heritage into tourism; creation and decoration of new types of contemporary Sámi drums and reuse of ancient rock art in children’s education has been a central focus within post-doc research. Studies into Sámi shamanism, drum making and sacrificial practices have been built through cooperation with Sámi participants in Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in north-west Russia.

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Teresa got her PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Oulu with a thesis on the coexistence of reindeer herding, extractive industries and nature-based tourism in northern Fennoscandia, with a focus on the anthropology of the good. She has done research mainly in the Finnish-Swedish border region. Her research interests currently revolve around the coexistence of competing livelihoods, northern human-environment relations and wellbeing. She is a member of the Arctic Anthropology Research Group and the Global Change Research Group.

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Evelyn has a degree in physics, an mphil in polar studies from the University of Cambridge, and a masters in indigenous studies from the University of Tromso. She is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, Scott Polar Research Institute supervised by Florian Stammler and Piers Vitebsky. She has carried out extensive fieldwork among animal husbanders in Siberia and Evenki reindeer herders and hunters in the Nizhnaya Tunguska river basin in Irkutsk region. Her work focuses on human-animal-environment relations and processes of mutual learning, enskilment, taming and ‘symbiotic domestication’, partly in the framework of the ArcArk project.
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Roza Laptander's research interests are based on sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, documentating the Nenets language and spoken history of the Western Siberian Nenets. In her work she describes the Nenets' memories about the past and their present life in the Yamal tundra. It shows that spoken stories and interviews concerning big changes on the tundra reflect a general mechanism of making Nenets official historical narratives. Through analyzing silence in the example of the Yamal Nenets people stories, Laptander studied the role of silence and silencing offering a new approach to understanding how small indigenous societies keep memories and stories about their past. She is a member of the Anthropology Research Group and the Global Change Research Group.

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Nuccio got his PhD from the University of Manchester in Social Anthropology with a thesis on perception of landscape and concepts of space among Sami people in Northeastern Finland, where his regional specialization lies; in particular he has done fieldwork with Sámi reindeer herders in Sallivaara Reindeeer Association. The research focused on people’s relations with the landscape and on its influence in fashioning their sense of identity. More general issues of perception of the landscape, place and mobility play a prominent role in the research.

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tel. +358 40 484 4295

Nina Meschtyb got her phD from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Ethnology and Anthropology. She has extensive fieldwork experience in Russia, among European and Yamal Nenets reindeer herders, and also in Murmansk and Amur regions. Her main interests are in postsocialist transformation, gender in the tundra, cultural impacts of industrialisation, and relations of people to their authorities. She is also an excellent field photographer and has contributed to exhibitions on- and offline internationally. In ORHELIA she worked with Kola Sami on their perception of and relations to the Soviet and post Soviet state through oral history and biographic interview analysis.
Email: meschtyb(at)mail.ru.
tel. +358 40 484 4078

Dr. Ayonghe Akonwi Nebasifu holds a Doctor of Social Science degree from the University of Lapland with expertise in "People-Nature Relations, Forest Policy, and Governance", which he conducted as a member of the Anthropology Team, using six years of anthropological research (ethnography aided by multimethods) among the people of the Mount Cameroon National Park in Sub-Saharan West Africa. His doctoral thesis illustrates the agency of indigenous residents and the persistence of their ways of knowing the land in a national park. In it, he explored the relations between officials and local people in the co-management of the Mount Cameroon National Park and its adjacent communities, relations characterised by unequal power.

Karolina works as a researcher at the Northern Institute for Environmental and Minority Law and is also a member of the Anthropology Research Team at the Arctic Centre. She holds a master degree in law from the University of Wroclaw. In her doctoral research, Karolina is looking at the right to the cultural heritage of the Russian ethnic minorities. She is combining an analysis of international law with an anthropological approach involving fieldwork research.

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tel. +358 40 484 4269

Anna has specialized in Arctic anthropology since 1995. Currently, she leads a Finnish-Argentinian circumpolar consortium project CIBIECO: Circular Bio-Economy: From Theory to Practice (2022-24). The project is concerned with the question - can we change our linear ways of thinking and how so that we can operate in the same circular way as the more-than-human world, where there is no waste disposal site? Her recent research has also focused on how changes in the water-ice-land interface are reflected in human actions, risk experiences and choices made to maintain our connection with nature. Within this field, she investigates the social life of theoretical climate paradigms (sustainability, resilience) applied in different economic sectors (reindeer herding, cow breeding, fisheries and tourism.

In the anthropology of "cold" her research focuses on imagined and lived spaces/places, social properties of "cold" and cold infrastructure. Her interests also lie in indigeneity-; oral history-, cross-border-, food- and migration studies. Field studies have covered different regions across the Arctic - in Fennoscandia (Finland, Norway, Iceland); Russia, Canada -, and in the Sub-Antarctic (Tierra del Fuego, Santa Cruz, Argentina).

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tel. +358 400 882 065

MSSc Henri Wallen is a doctoral researcher working on his thesis on the Pre-Development Social Impacts of Mining projects. He has been working on environmental issues related to extractive industries and reindeer herding. Currently he’s taking part in the multidisciplinary research project “JustNorth”. His research interests also include computational methods in social sciences and applications of complex systems theory.

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tel. +358 40 484 4239
Twitter: @henriwallen