Dec 2025: Article by Olga Povoroznyuk in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography recently published the article “Toward a Comparative Ethnography of Arctic Seaports Projects: Local Impacts of Expanding Maritime Infrastructure in Alaska, Norway, and Russia” by InfraNorth researcher Olga Povoroznyuk.
In this article, the author’s comparative ethnography focuses on suspended seaport expansion projects in three Arctic coastal communities: Nome (USA), Kirkenes (Norway), and Tiksi (Russia). All three projects are driven by similar development promises and geopolitical threats, enacting divergent national interests and producing diverse local impacts. While Nome and Kirkenes pursue commercial and tourism-oriented futures, Tiksi remains shaped by military and state-centric imperatives. Across all three cases, Indigenous and local perspectives reveal tensions between global infrastructure promises, national interests, and the lived experiences of marginalization, cultural disruption, and environmental risk.
The study conceptualizes infrastructure as a political and social process, arguing that suspended projects continue to generate emotional engagement and social mobilization. On a methodological level, the article underscores the value of comparative ethnography and infrastructuring across scales for critical inquiry into how globalizing maritime infrastructures produce local disengagement and disempowerment.
This article is available open access in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. It is part of the special issue “Ethnographies of Infrastructure” guest edited by Philipp Budka, Peter Schweitzer and Olga Povoroznyuk, which will be published in February 2026.
