Apr 5, 2024: Call for Papers for InfraNorth Workshops at VANDA 2024

The 4th Vienna Anthropology Days – VANDA conference, which will be held at the University of Vienna (23 – 26 September 2024), has just opened its call for papers. Four InfraNorth-related sessions are included:

Philipp Budka, Giuseppe Amatulli, and Ria-Maria Adams are organizing the workshop “Building Tomorrow: Exploring Infrastructures and Futurities.” This session invites contributors to discuss the relationships between specifically large-scale infrastructures and futurities – affective and ideologically loaded desires, or fears of being in the future – by reflecting on two questions: (1) What role do futurities play in the imagining, conceiving, and making of infrastructures and their futures? (2) How do infrastructural futurities shape the relationship between infrastructure development and sociocultural lifeworlds?

Olga Povoroznyuk and Mia Landauer (REBOUND) are organizing the workshop “Arctic Sustainability Revisited: Mixing Methods to Study Communities in Transition.” This roundtable will discuss challenges and best practices of anthropological and social science research on Arctic sustainability and communities in transition. It will assemble anthropologists and other social scientists to discuss these and other ethical and methodological questions drawing on their research practices in the Arctic and beyond.

Stefan Krist, Elena Davydova, Olga Povoroznyuk, and Peter Schweitzer are organizing the workshop “History of an Opening and Handling of a Closure: Possible Ways of Social Anthropological Research on Russia Today.” This panel aims to discuss different ways social anthropological research on Russia can be conducted in light of the ongoing war and invites contributions that reflect on experiences of switching to or applying alternative approaches to “being there” methods, the role of digital media/technologies in research, as well as reassessments of data collected in Russia before the war and/or the history of countries’ openings and closures to “outside” inquiries in general.

Alexandra Meyer and Susanna Gartler are organizing the workshop “Anthropology and climate change: The potentials and pitfalls of Anthropocene engagements.” This session seeks to explore what Anthropology can gain from grappling with climate change and the Anthropocene. It welcomes both conceptual and empirical contributions examining the theoretical and/or methodological opportunities and challenges inherent in such engagement.

The deadline for submissions is June 1st, 2024. More information can be found here.

Jan 2026: InfraNorth Contributions to Forthcoming Book “Arctic Silk Roads”

InfraNorth researchers contribute two chapters to the forthcoming book Arctic Silk Roads: An Anthropology of the Unbuilt, edited by Natalia Magnani and Matthew Magnani. The volume will be published by Berghahn Books in January 2026 as part of the Studies in the Circumpolar North series. As climate change accelerates, the melting of sea ice is […]

Dec 2025: Peter Schweitzer Interviewed on Austrian Public Radio Ö1

The Austrian public broadcaster Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF) featured InfraNorth principal investigator Peter Schweitzer in an interview on its Ö1 weekend feuilleton “Diagonal” on December 6, 2025, which focused on the politics of infrastructure. Schweitzer appeared in a segment titled “A Silk Road Across the Arctic” (in German: Seidenstrasse über die Arktis), interviewed by Erich Klein […]

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

Dec 2025: Forthcoming Special Issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

The forthcoming special issue “Ethnographies of Infrastructure” of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, guest edited by Philipp Budka, Peter Schweitzer, and Olga Povoroznyuk, is progressively being made available online ahead of the print edition, which will appear in February 2026. The introduction, authored by Schweitzer, Povoroznyuk, and Budka, is now available open-access. It presents the […]

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

Dec 2025: Article by Peter Schweitzer, et al. in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography has recently published the article “Scenarios and Ethnography: Infrastructural Futures as Windows into the Present” by Peter Schweitzer, Olga Povoroznyuk, Philipp Budka, Alexandra Meyer, Katrin Schmid, and Nikita Strelkovskii. This article reflects on two scenario workshops conducted in 2023 in Kirkenes, Norway, and Churchill, Canada, as part of the ERC […]

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

Dec 2025: Article by Katrin Schmid in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography has published the article “Amazon in the Arctic: E-Commerce, Infrastructure, and Alimentary Assemblages in Nunavut, Canada” by InfraNorth researcher Katrin Schmid. Since establishing a delivery hub in Iqaluit, Nunavut in 2020, Amazon.com, Inc. has become an essential resource for many Nunavut residents, providing affordable access to goods otherwise constrained by […]