Samira Saramo is Kone Foundation Senior Researcher at the Migration Institute of Finland. Previously, she served as an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Turku’s John Morton Center for North American Studies. Saramo’s transdisciplinary research focuses on ethnicity, gender, emotion, violence, place-making, and social movements in both historical and current contexts. Analyzing personal letters, memoirs, and social media narratives, Saramo is particularly interested in the form and accompanying challenges of life writing research.
In Samira Saramo’s current Kone Foundation funded project, “Deep Mapping the ‘Uncharted Territories’ of Finnish Immigrant History,” she aims to create a multilayered and multisensory digital map platform to challenge entrenched assumptions about Finnish immigrant history in North America. By allowing platform users to layer maps, narratives, photographs, soundscapes, statistics, and archival documents, the project provides new ways of seeing complicated claims on place, belonging, and history. Through the digital map platform, Finnish immigrant history in Ontario is situated not only in the community’s own significant cultural and everyday places, but also over time in the changing contexts of the physical environment, Indigenous place-views, state-imposed colonial frameworks, and overviews of historical population/economic data. The project encourages dialogue among Finnish society, immigrant communities, and scholars about the assumed “natural” place of Finns in Canada and the USA.
In the ongoing research project, “Death and Mourning in Finnish North America,” previously funded by the Academy of Finland and the Wihuri Foundation, Saramo explores Finnish immigrants’ personal narrations and everyday experiences with death and mourning in the years 1880–1939. Saramo contends that the fear of dying alone, far away from home, fostered the development of North American ethnic community life. She has recently published “‘I Have Such Sad News’: Loss in Finnish North American Letters” in European Journal of Life Writing (2018) and “Lakes, Rock, Forest: Placing Finnish Canadian History” in Journal of Finnish Studies (2018). Saramo, along with Hanna Snellman and Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto, coedited the collection Transnational Death (SKS 2019), in which she assesses the field of transnational death studies.
Saramo’s research interests also include contemporary violence and grassroots activism in Canada and the United States. This work has resulted in the article “Unsettling Spaces: Grassroots Responses to Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women during the Harper Government Years,” which appeared in a thematic issue of Comparative American Studies, “Disrupting Insecurities: North American Grassroots Interventions” that Saramo coedited with Benita Heiskanen. In 2017, the article “The Meta-violence of Trumpism” appeared in a special issue of the European Journal of American Studies, “Popularizing Politics: The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.”
Saramo holds a Ph.D. in History from York University and has previously also taught at Lakehead University and Confederation College.