Cold Rush

Cold Rush

From Language on the Move by New Books Network

September 9, 2025 · 28 min

About this episode

In this episode, Ingrid Piller interviews Sari Pietikainen about her book Cold Rush, exploring the complexities of Arctic resource extraction amidst climate change and economic investment.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Ingrid Piller

Guest: Sari Pietikainen

Topics covered

  • Arctic resources
  • climate change
  • global capitalism
  • indigenous politics
  • ethnography
  • critical assemblage analysis

Keywords

  • Cold Rush
  • Arctic
  • climate change
  • Sámi
  • ethnography
  • global capitalism
  • critical assemblage analysis

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Palgrave Macmillan

Books & works: Cold Rush

Places: Arctic, Finnish Arctic, Sámi

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