Jukka Nyyssönen works as a research professor in the High North Department. He started at NIKU in 2020 and has been involved with the PARKAS and GREENGROWTH research projects. His research field is Sami history. Nyyssönen strives for multidisciplinary research and uses environmental social scientific as a methodological and theoretical starting-point and Natural Sciences as an empirical foundation.

He holds a Mag.Phil. and Lic.Phil from the University of Jyväskylä (History) and he defended his doctoral thesis “Everybody recognized that we were not white”, Sami identity politics in Finland, 1945-1990 at the UiT – The Arctic University of Norway in 2007.

Nyyssönen has studied Sami history for more than 20 years. He has published in the fields of history of minorities, environmental history, educational history, animal history and history of science. Among his research interests are the politicisation of nature, environmental conflicts, environmental and Sami policies, conservation history, reindeer in research, relation between traditional and modern land use forms in sub-arctic regions, and the Sami rights attached to these fields.

Nyyssönen has worked in the Department of archaeology, history, religious studies and theology, as well as at the Arctic University Museum, both at the UiT. In addition, he has taught at the University of Oulu and Helsinki, and at the Sami Allaskuvla and worked at the University of Turku (2018)