Modern countries made maps to control geographical space. For societies around the Baltic Sea, nautical charts were crucial for demarcating national boundaries, facilitating transportation, and advising military strategies. However, the Baltic Sea was only seasonally hospitable, with ice closing navigation routes in winter. The landscape was also shaped by sea currents, winds, and temperature changes, making winter navigation difficult and risky, even with ice-capable vessels.

We study the emergence of ice research in the Baltic Sea region from the 1880s until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. This period saw the development of steel-framed steamships and icebreakers, as well as sensing processes and instruments to create understandings of sea ice. These changes stimulated a transnational community for collecting ice information, standardizing concepts and methods, and communicating ice information. Local observations and experience-based knowledge transformed into systematic scientific analysis, and national projects expanded through transnational cooperation. Technological development was a driver and enabler of this transformation, with marine engineering and industrialization calling for extended navigation seasons and observation technologies evolving from human monitors to systematic technology-aided data collections using icebreakers, airplanes, and radio transmission.
The research is based on primary sources from the meteorological institutes in Finland and Sweden. It contributes to our understanding of how technological changes altered the sensing and shaping of the Baltic Sea region, enabling longer navigation periods and more advanced sensing operations.

With the rapidly growing hype in the Himalaya in the early 20th century in anticipation of British attempts on Chomolungma (Mt. Everest), a shadow was cast on the perhaps understudied and equally exciting corner of Himalayan mountaineering history: Nandā Devi expeditions in the 1930s. Here I examine the 1934 Nandā Devi expedition from the perspective of technological knowledge transfers between foreigners and Himalayans to evaluate whether such a perspective complicates the typical understandings of expertise in these environments. By treating these expeditions as cases of technological exchange, I ask: what can we learn about their sociocultural, material, and epistemic dimensions?
In this project, I theorize “technology” as complex cultural phenomena, not only as instruments, in which ideas and practices are situated. This perspective enables the investigation of practices like language, religion, and expedition-specific techniques in addition to tools such as food, equipment, and medicine—and how, together, they grant life, work, and play on the mountain. This conceptualization of technology provides an entry point for a new perspective on the material history of expeditionary practices, and ultimately allows me to examine the cultural and epistemic aspects of material technologies and vice versa.
This project aims to make clear the importance of recognizing and nurturing diverse forms of knowledge and expertise in addressing complex challenges which extend far beyond the slopes of Nandā Devi. Such an approach resonates with contemporary efforts to bridge transcultural divides and undo the historical devaluing of local knowledge systems.