Feb 9, 2026: Talk by Philipp Budka at the University of Manchester’s Social Anthropology Seminar Series
On Monday, February 9, 2026, from 3:00 to 5:00 pm (GMT), InfraNorth researcher Philipp Budka will deliver a guest talk as part of the seminar series of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. The event will take place in room G20-21 of the Arthur Lewis Building. The departmental seminar series is convened by Valentina Zagaria and Jennifer Cearns, and this session will be chaired by Jolynna Sinanan.
Budka’s talk, titled “Sovereignty by Design: Community Infrastructures in Remote Canada,” considers infrastructural sovereignty, an emerging analytic within his research for understanding how communities shape the design, ownership, and governance of essential infrastructures. He explores this approach through two case studies in northwestern Ontario and northern Manitoba. Drawing on fieldwork in both regions, Budka examines how remote communities seek greater control over digital and transport systems in response to long-standing state and market neglect.
The KO-KNET broadband network, owned and operated by First Nations, illustrates a form of digital self-determination. The Arctic Gateway Group, a consortium of 41 Indigenous and northern communities, offers a parallel example through its reclamation of the Hudson Bay Railway and the Port of Churchill to secure regional transport autonomy. Rather than treating infrastructure as a technical backdrop, the InfraNorth researcher approaches it ethnographically as a relational and political formation shaped by histories of colonial exclusion, practices of care, and aspirations for sustainable futures.
By placing these cases in dialogue through the concept of infrastructural sovereignty, the talk contributes to anthropological debates in infrastructure studies, Indigenous and community sovereignty, and ethnographies of transformation. It also engages decolonial perspectives on infrastructure, technology, governance, and community-led futures in settler-colonial contexts.
Dr. Philipp Budka is a sociocultural anthropologist at the University of Vienna, where he works as Lecturer and Research Associate in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. He also serves as Study Region Lead for North America in the ERC Advanced Grant project “InfraNorth.” His research focuses on the anthropology of media, technology, and infrastructure, with a regional emphasis on remote and northern Canada.
For more details, please visit the website of the UoM Social Anthropology Departmental Seminar series.
