Laura Junka-Aikio

Laura Junka-Aikio Laura won the 2017 Cultural Studies and Stuart Hall Foundation Award for Early Career Researchers. Laura is a researcher at the Tromsø University Museum, University of Tromsø / The Arctic University of Norway, working on a collective research project on the Societal dimensions of Sámi Research. Since gaining a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of East London in 2011, she has also worked as a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Lapland, and as a post-doctoral researcher at the Giellagas Institute for Sámi research at the University of Oulu, Finland.

Laura’s research is concerned with questions of colonialism and decolonization and politics of knowledge in the context of “colonial presents”, such as the military occupation of Palestine, or Scandiavian settler-colonialism relating to the Indigenous Sámi. In addition to writing, Junka-Aikio has worked on these themes through visual arts and photography. She is the author of Late Modern Palestine: The subject and representation of the second intifada (Routledge, 2015), and a co-editor of the recent Cultural Studies special issue Cultural Studies of Extraction (2017).

Laura’s award-winning article ‘Can the Sámi speak Now? Deconstructive research ethos and the debate on who is a Sámi in Finland’ is available to read on the Taylor and Francis website.