Cold Rush

Sep 9, 2025

Sari Pietikainen is an interdisciplinary scholar from the University of Jyväskylä, specializing in discourse studies and environmental humanities. She discusses her book 'Cold Rush,' focusing on the Arctic's race for natural resource extraction amid climate change. Interesting topics include the commodification of indigenous practices, the cultural significance of Arctic berry picking, and the complex dynamics of tourism labor in Lapland. Pietikainen also emphasizes the need for inclusive governance as the region navigates the impacts of climate change.

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ANECDOTE

Salmon Widow Origins

Sari Pietikäinen describes being a "salmon widow": a partner consumed by salmon fishing for weeks at a time.
She uses this local term to introduce her long-term connection to Tornio River Valley and her research roots.

ANECDOTE

Three Decades In Tornio Valley

Sari has been a part-time resident of Tornio River Valley for over 30 years through family ties and research projects.
Her long-term presence shaped her interest in commodification of Arctic nature and indigenous culture.

INSIGHT

Revaluing Arctic Resources

"Cold Rush" revalues previously low-value Arctic resources into marketable commodities like snow and northern lights.
Climate change and global demand jointly drive this re-commodification and growing tourism.

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Sari Pietikainen about her new book Cold Rush (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

This book is an original study of “Cold Rush,” an accelerated race for the extraction and protection of Arctic natural resources. The Northernmost reach of the planet is caught up in the double developments of two unfinished forces – rapidly progressing climate change and global economic investment - working simultaneously in tension and synergy. Neither process is linear or complete, but both are contradictory and open-ended.

This book traces the multiplicity of Cold Rush in the Finnish Arctic, a high-stakes ecological, economic, and political hotspot. It is a heterogeneous space, understood as indigenous land within local indigenous Sámi people politics, the last frontier from a colonial perspective, and a periphery under the modernist nation-state regime. It is now transforming into an economic hub under global capitalism, intensifying climate change and unforeseen geo-political changes.

Based on six years of ethnography, the book shows how people struggle, strategize, and profit from this ongoing, complex, and multidirectional change.

The author offers a new theoretical approach called critical assemblage analysis, which provides an alternative way of exploring the dynamics between language and society by examining the interaction between material, discursive, and affective dimensions of Cold Rush. The approach builds on previous work at the intersection of critical discourse analysis, critical sociolinguistics, nexus analysis and ethnography, but expands toward works by philosophers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.

This book will be of interest to researchers on language, discourse, and sociolinguistics interested in engaging with social critique embedded in global capitalism and accelerating climate change; as well as researchers in the social and human sciences and natural sciences, who are increasingly aware of the fact that the theoretical and analytical move beyond the traditional dichotomies like language/society, nature/human and micro/macro is central to understanding today´s complex, intertwined social, political, economic and ecological processes.

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