Month: October 2018

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Sanna Kopra’s interview in Keskipohjanmaa

Finnish newspaper Keskipohjanmaa published an article “Kasvojaan hiilestä pesevä Kiina mielii ilmastojohtajaksi – ilmansaasteet vauhdittavat muutosta” (Washing its hands of coal China wants to be a climate leader – air pollution speeds up the change) with Sanna Kopra’s interview in it.

By reducing its own air pollution China could significantly reduce climate change in the Arctic, Kopra says.

In Chinese big cities such as Beijing, air quality is sometimes extremely bad.

Kopra estimates that China could combine through black carbon two interests: cutting black carbon emissions can not only improve the air quality domestically, but also affect the Arctic. In recent years, China has been increasingly interested in the region.

Over 60% of the black carbon emissions worldwide over half, about 60%, originate from Asia, especially from China and India. Even though soot is generated far from the polar ice, it can stay in the atmosphere from a few days to weeks and end up thousands of miles away.

This and other thought-provoking insights can be read in Finnish here. Additionally, the interview was also published in Turun Sanomat and Lapin Kansa.

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Making Home in the Industrialized Russian Arctic

A new special issue “To be at Home. House, Work, and Self in the Modern World” with a contribution from our postdoctoral researcher Alla Bolotova has been published this September. The issue is part of “Work in Global and Historical Perspective” book series published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg.

Alla wrote a chapter for the volume titled “Making Home in the Industrialized Russian Arctic”:

Before the Soviet period, the Russian Arctic was scarcely populated, with very few cities. Today, the Russia Arctic is the most industrialized and urbanized polar territory in the world. Numerous industrial towns were built in the Russian Arctic during Soviet industrialization. Their populations comprised voluntarily and forced migrants and their descendants. In this essay, I present the family histories of two women who settled as children in newly established towns in the north. They grew up in very different historical periods. My aim is to look at the history of the towns of Kirovsk and Apatity through the life stories of women from different generations. I explore how these women and their families adapted to new places in different historical and social contexts, paying special attention to the beginnings of their life in the north.

This essay is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Kirovsk-Apatity urban agglomeration in Murmansk Oblast. Kirovsk and Apatity, fifteen kilometres apart, were founded at different stages of Soviet industrialization. Kirovsk started to grow in the 1930s, at the foothills of the Khibiny mountains. Apatity was established in the 1950s in close proximity to Kirovsk. In 2016, there were 26,971 people living in Kirovsk, and 56,730 in Apatity.

Full text of the article can be accessed here.