Bio

Annikki Herranen-Tabibi (she/her) is a medical and environmental anthropologist of the Circumpolar Arctic. She is engaged in long-term ethnographic research in Sápmi, the transborder homeland of the Indigenous Sámi people. Her scholarly work defines a space for research and collaborative action at the intersections of global health with medical and environmental humanities and social sciences. Across these arenas, her work is grounded in questions of care – interpersonal, intergenerational, and ecological.

Annikki is currently working on two major research projects. The first, titled Resurgent Ecologies of Care, is based on 28 months (2014-2018) of ethnographic research in Deanuleahki, a river valley along the northernmost reaches of the Finnish-Norwegian state border, and examines post-Second World War transformations in ecological and kin-based caregiving relations and practices. The second, titled Land, Life, and Health in a Thawing Arctic, interrogates the health effects of climate-induced disruptions to webs of Arctic subsistence livelihoods, and diverse responses to those effects, in Sápmi. With a focus on cryosphere collapse – i.e., the accelerating retreat of frozen water across the Earth system – in the permafrost peatlands of Sápmi, she will examine individual and collective practices of caring for land and land-based knowledge amidst climate-induced transformations.

Annikki holds a doctorate in Social Anthropology from Harvard (Ph.D., 2022), and a BA and MA in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science and Yale University, respectively. She is a United World College of the Atlantic alumna.