Over half a million funding for University of Oulu project on Naturecultural Resilience of the Sámi from Research Council of Finland

The Research Council of Finland has funded research project CEAVZIL: Borders of the Naturecultural Resilience of the Sámi at the Giellagas Institute at the University of Oulu. The funding is 599,365 eur and the project will run from 1 September 2026 to 31 August 2030.

In the project, researchers will examine naturecultural resilience processes among the Sámi using a combination of Sámi studies approaches, new social pragmatism, and more-than-human perspectives.

“Our empirical cases include, on the one hand, the everyday cooperation between the Sámi and the Finnish Border Guard, and on the other, two "waves" of activism as particular forms of naturecultural resilience”, says leader of the project Tapio Nykänen, Associate Professor at Giellagas institute and FRONT programme.

The aim is to create new understanding of some less studied events in contemporary Sámi history and, at the same time, to renew resilience theory from a Sámi-grounded perspective and in the light of the recent conjunctural turn of critical resilience research.

“We will use both conventional and experiential methods, including "patrol walks" and "activist walks" in Sápmi”, Nykänen adds.

The team consists of University of Oulu researchers Tapio Nykänen, Helena Ristaniemi, Päivi Magga, Outi Autti, and Maija Jokela. In addition, Viola Koskinen received four-year funding from the Kone Foundation last December for research that overlaps closely with CEAVZIL. Hence, Koskinen will in practice be a member of the CEAVZIL team, joining, for example, the patrol walks research together with the rest of the team.