This paper focuses on the notions of “time” and “temporality” of nuclear waste, as well as the different time horizons implied by practitioners of nuclear waste storage. In doing so, the paper develops understandings of a key problem defining nuclear waste storage in C21: namely, how to communicate information and memory over the 100,000 years that highly radioactive nuclear matter remains a threat to organic life. This question is notable not least because it involves the proposition of communicating with “deep time” future scenarios in which contemporary representational systems are ineffectual, and even the existence of the “human” is in doubt.
By
Thomas Keating et al
April 7, 2025
August 24, 2023, Helsinki Music Centre, Finland. In the concert hall, the last sounds of the orchestra gradually fade away, and only the fragile, almost unheard echoes of music linger through several minutes of silence. Then — long standing ovations. At the same time, how-ever, many of the audience members in the full house of 1 600 seats are openly crying. The audience had just heard HUSH (2023), a concerto for trumpet and orchestra, the last work of the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. She had passed away at the age of 70 only a couple of weeks before this performance
The essay is based on several interviews with the composer, and on reviews of her works that I have made while working as a music journalist and critic between 1997 and 2003. After my transition to an academic career in musicology, I continued working with Saariaho’s music but in the scientific context. In 2008, I wrote my doctoral thesis on her first opera, L’amour de loin (Love from Afar, 2000). Since then, I have continued to explore Saariaho’s music, and above anything else focused on her operas; for instance, I have written the program book texts of her works for the Finnish National Opera. That is why this essay, after introducing Saariaho’s early years and development towards a full career as an opera composer, concentrates on her operatic works.
Essay by
Liisamaija Hautsalo
September 18, 2024
Olli-Pekka Martikainen is the Secretery General of the Association of Finnish Music Schools, an umbrella organization that includes 97 schools. He has a doctorate in music and he previously worked as the vice dean of the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki. Apart from leadership in higher music education Martikainen has worked as an orchestral and chamber musician and as a teacher at the Sibelius Academy. Martikainen holds the first artistic Doctoral degree in the field of percussion music in Finland. Ann Werner asked him questions about higher music education in the Baltic region with her own research on nation and gender in higher music education as background.
By
Ann Werner
September 18, 2024
Drawing on in-depth interviews, this essay investigates professional strategies and researcher identity constructions in the precarious postdoctoral phase. The analysis indicates that most of the informants in the present study seem to be somewhere in the middle of the process of establishing a postdoctoral/early-career identity. The essay underlines the need for better preparing PhD students for the postdoctoral phase; and suggests that to most of the informants, the emerging researcher identities are secondary to more pressing issues, relating to survival in academia alltogether.
Essay by
Joakim Ekman
September 18, 2024
Statistics show that around 40 000 Russians escaped through Finland from the day that President Putin declared the mobilization and during the nine days that followed until the border closed. I am on my way to Karelia, a region along the southern part of the Finnish-Russian border where some of the most intense battles between two countries took place during the Second World War. As I write this October 2022, the atmosphere around the border is tense, the relations between the two countries are colder than in a long time, and people on either side of the border have difficulties even seeing each other. That, however, has not always been the case...
By
Påhl Ruin
January 18, 2023
Kivinen, Markku & Humphreys, Brendan (eds.). (London and New York: Routledge 2021). xxv and 368 pages.
By
Kristian Gerner
October 25, 2021
The outbreak of the Corona virus pandemic has led to a number of legal measures, varying in time and space, over the Baltic Sea area and neighboring states. But the actual distribution of the pandemic does not necessarily follow the administrative territories that form the statistical basis for decisions. While usually defined for specific territories (whole states or administrative areas), the effects on peoples’ daily behavior have been particularly strong in the borderlands. In March 2020, suddenly a sharp line was created along the hitherto almost invisible border between Tornio-Haparanda, Finnish police and border guards checked the line, and only a few people were admitted to cross, based on strict definition of purpose. The reason for the closure was a high incidence of illness and deaths in Sweden.
By
Thomas Lundén
December 1, 2020
The government will be a centre-right government including three of the four large political parties: the Centre party, the True Finns and the National Coalition party. This is the first time the True Finns are in government and as in several European states a case of when a populist radical right parties contributes to the making of a centre-right government.
By
Ann-Cathrine Jungar
May 12, 2015
The economic recession characterises the Finnish parliamentary elections that are held on Sunday April 19. The political parties compete about the support of the voters by promising economic austerity during the upcoming legislature.
By
Ann-Cathrine Jungar
April 14, 2015
The Finnish voters were called to the ballot boxes for the third time in little more than a year on Sunday, October 28th. It was the local elections’ turn. The question on everybody’s minds was whether the True Finns would reprise their success in the parliamentary election.
By
Ann-Cathrine Jungar
November 10, 2012
Issue 2025, 1: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.