Day: October 16, 2018

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Hanna Lempinen’s article on the societal dimensions of the Barents energyscape

Postdoctoral researcher Hanna Lempinen wrote an article “At the margins of the Barents energyscape” for the latest issue of Barents Studies. The issue covers topics around marginal phenomena, and Hanna’s article is focusing on societal dimensions of energy.

In political, popular, and scholarly debates, the Arctic – and most importantly within
it the Barents region – is portrayed as being on the brink of becoming the “world’s
new energy province”. Growth in global energy demand, dwindling reserves, political
instabilities at existing production sites, warming climate, as well as advancements
in extraction and transportation technologies are pushing energy activities further
towards the previously inaccessible north. In these framings, energy in the Arctic is
mostly understood as synonymous with oil and gas production for international exports
and as a concern of markets and politics, and of technology, science, and economics.
Exploring media representations of the regional energyscape through the “theory-methods
package” (Clarke 2015, 87) of situational analysis, this article highlights the
diversity of regional energy beyond oil and gas production; the simplistic manners in
which the societal dimensions of energy are understood; the absence of everyday life,
ordinary people, and the female gender from the depictions of the regional energyscape;
and the lack of attention to climate impacts of northern energy production.

This and other articles can be found online here.

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Sakari Höysniemi’s new blog post for Winland

Sakari Höysniemi wrote a new blog post “Onko Suomen ja Venäjän välinen energiakauppa uhka vai mahdollisuus?” (Is energy trade between Finland and Russia a threat or an opportunity?) for Winland project.

The report, released this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted the urgent need to reduce emissions and the need to spread climate policy to all social decision-making. Few countries, however, are doing this now. Sakari Höysniemi from Winland project looks at the recent research article on how the reduction of emissions affects trade and relationships between energy producers and consumers.

Read Sakari’s full post for the Winland blog online here.

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Interview with Dmitry Yagodin for Russian Media Lab

Russian Media Lab, Aleksanteri Institute’s multisciplinary research project examining Russian media and freedom of expression, conducted an interview with our new Postdoc Dmitry Yagodin. In the interview “Shouts from shadows: peculiar play in the Russian blogosphere” Dmitry talks about the topic of his still relevant PhD thesis “The Blogization of Journalism (2014)”, that dealt with how blogs politicize media and social space in Russia.

In the early 2000’s the Russian blogosphere appeared as an alternative and less constrained space for people to express themselves. This sparked Yagodin’s interest to study the topic.

Read the full interview on Russian Media Lab’s blog.