Jenni Niska

Doctoral researcher, Tampere University

Jenni Niska is a PhD Researcher at Tampere University, Finland.

In her project on Arctic rivers in contemporary film and literature, she explores how recent literary and cinematic works construct the Arctic through the motif of the river on the level of narrative content as well as on medial and material levels. She puts into dialogue works that imagine the Arctic from the outside and works that originate from within the circumpolar regions, revealing clashes and convergences in these narratives and foregrounding the importance of lived Arctic riverscapes. Her work is informed by both ecomaterialist and spatial studies theories as well as Indigenous epistemologies. She grew up on the Finnish side of the Tornio River Valley, which informs her interest in transnational northern rivers.

In her article “Towards a Hydropoetics of the Arctic: Watery Connections in Restless River (Arnait Video Productions, 2019)”, she explores the continuities between human and environmental bodies of water, the Inuit female gaze, and the proliferation of Indigenous images in women’s filmmaking from Nunavut. She has co-authored a chapter on salmon geographies in contemporary circumpolar literature and visual art that will be published as part of the first publication coming out of the Mediated Arctic Geographies project. Currently she is working on river imagery in Sámi cinema and art. 

Jenni Niska can be contacted at jenni.niska@tuni.fi