I am a historical anthropologist interested in a wide range of topics concerning Siberia and the Circumpolar North, where I have been collaborating with local and Indigenous communities (predominantly with Nenets and Altai) for more than two decades. Furthermore, my research and teaching interests also comprise the themes of human-environment relations, the social and cultural lives of archival collections and museum artefacts, visual and sonic studies, and Siberian Indigenous and settler-colonial literatures. My research methodologies are based on a relativistic and bottom-up understanding of human practices and ideologies and intersections of academic and “non-western” ways of knowing. As a field ethnographer, I have conducted research in Siberia and the Russian North, Northern Finland, Svalbard, North Caucasus, and Inner Mongolia.
I am currently working on a few projects. One is dedicated to the centennial history of voice recordings in Siberia and the Phonographic Archive of the Pushkin House in Saint Petersburg which has held them since the 1930s (sponsored by the Modern Endangered Archives Programme and UCLA library, 2023-2025). Within this project, our team – which also comprises Professor David Anderson, University of Aberdeen, UK and Dr Svetlana Podrezova, Pushkin House, Russia – work on the digitization of the unique collection of old audio recordings of Siberian Indigenous voices. The digitized collection will be shared with the “source communities” in North Eurasia and made available online.
My other projects cover several topics from the environmental history of the Arctic and Siberia. I am working on the history of epistemically entangled seed banking and agricultural experiments in the High North (funded by Eudaimonia Institute, Oulu, Finland; together with Professor Vesa-Pekka Herva and Dr Esa Ruuskanen, University of Oulu, 2022-2026).