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I am an anthropologist, and I started to teach at the Department of History and Ethnology in 2014. In 2017–2021, I worked as a professor of anthropology at the University of Helsinki as Sarah Green's replacement. So I have just returned to teach at the Ģ��ֱ�� as a senior lecturer. 

I defended my dissertation in 1997 and have had a rather long career as a researcher. I have obtained research funding for four research projects the Academy of Finland. These projects have focused on rural and urban India, and I have studied such themes as women’s wage work and agency, political participation, and gift-giving. In 2005, I began to study the appropriation of mobile telephony in rural India. I continued this research until 2012, first as an Academy Researcher and then as part of a project funded by the Academy of Finland led by professor Laura Stark. 

I consider ethnographic fieldwork the cornerstone of my research—most of my research ideas have come from the field. For example, I became interested in mobile phone use after living in a village before there was any phone system. When I returned there, people started to use mobile phones for the first time. I ended up observing the appropriation of mobile phones in the village on annual field trips for almost a decade. This multi-time ethnography provided a unique opportunity to analyze how the introduction of a digital communication medium contributes to social change. The project resulted in several articles as well as the book “” (Oxford University Press 2018). I have published articles in such peer-review journals as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Ethnos, Modern Asian Studies, and Contemporary South Asia. My books “Introduction to Changing India: Culture, Politics, and Development” (Anthem Press 2012) and “Muuttuva Intia” (in Finnish, Edita 2007), which I wrote with Minna Säävälä, give a general idea of contemporary India as well as my research.

I became interested in climate change after witnessing how people in rural India are already suffering from atypical weather phenomena. This observation led me to explore the politics of climate change on the east coast of India, which is a particularly vulnerable region to climate change. I now lead a research project, “” funded by the Academy of Finland. The project explores how people perceive and negotiate their weather and climate-related displacement and how they struggle for their right to earn a sustainable living. The broad aim of the project is to understand the process of environmental displacement and thereby generate novel ideas and insights to improve theory, policy, and practice by means of which the environmental migrants’ right to sustainable livelihoods could be ensured.

The focus of the project, which employs three researchers, is on the displaced people in Bangladesh and India, countries which have been ranked as being among the most vulnerable to climate change over the next 30 years. Two researchers of the project have observed the recent increase in climate change-induced migration in their hometowns—Mohammad Jasim Uddin in Sylhet, Bangladesh, and Dayabati Roy in Kolkata, India. Jelena Salmi (Ģ��ֱ��) explores how migrant workers and Koli fishing communities in Madh Island, Mumbai, perceive environmental changes and devise strategies of adaptation and alternative livelihoods. She also studies the factors that, together with climate-induced rainfall deficits, cause people to migrate to Mumbai and the impact of migration on their social and material resources.