By Cristóbal Adam & Ria-Maria Adams Comparison – a method so essential in anthropology, shapes our understandings of humans, societies, environments, and the diversity of cultures, yet it goes so often unnoticed because it’s so deeply ingrained in our research practices. Comparative methods have been a matter of debate in sociocultural anthropology, and the discipline has […]

By Katrin Schmid “Do you mind if we swing by the hub on our way home?” We drive along the paved road through the industrial area of town, toward Iqaluit International Airport, then turn right, away from the passenger parking lot and towards a warehouse with yellow pillars out front. A large sign reads, “Canadian […]

By Olga Povoroznyuk, Alexandra Meyer, and Peter Schweitzer Why Kirkenes? Our plans to work in Kirkenes started taking shape during a time when the Arctic was still considered to be a region with (relatively) open borders, allowing for a free flow of goods and people, as well as several joint socio-economic, infrastructural, and cultural ventures. […]

By Alexandra Meyer “If you arrived in autumn, you would stay up here until the spring or summer. We did not have any possibility to get down [to the mainland]. It was quite fantastic in many ways. It was a completely different society. It used to be calm here. You knew more or less everyone. […]

By Philipp Budka* What does the future hold for a remote community of about 900 people on Hudson Bay in Northern Manitoba, Canada? This question was constantly on my mind when doing ethnographic research for the ERC project InfraNorth in the town of Churchill. When I met with local residents to talk about their experiences […]

By Ria-Maria Adams, Alexandra Meyer & Mia Bennett According to popular belief, Santa Claus operates with a flying sleigh, pulled by reindeer – including one with a red nose. This means of transport allows him to access every corner of the world, no matter how remote and disconnected, needing only a rooftop or a small […]

By Alexis Sancho Reinoso This post is inspired by my storymap entitled “I walked over the Atlantic… or: how a small fishing nation manages to build a world-class road network” (October 2023). Timely before Christmas, the Faroe Islands’ fourth subsea tunnel connecting the islands of Streymoy and Sandoy will be inaugurated. Since the 1970s, most […]

By Olga Povoroznyuk A border town Kirkenes is a town with the population of some 3,500 residents located in the Sør-Varanger municipality of the county of Troms og Finnmark in northeastern Norway and in the immediate vicinity of the Finnish and Russian borders.  It was in Kirkenes that in 1993 the countries sharing the Barents […]

by InfraNorth July, 2023: Our researchers are out in the field again to collect data and organise infrastructure future scenario workshops in the US and Canada. Olga Povoroznyuk and Peter Schweitzer are sharing their latest updates from current field trips in Alaska in the towns of Nome and Anchorage. We have put together some of […]

By Olga Povoroznyuk This blog post was first published by the Austrian Polar Research Institute Tiksi in Russia, Nome in the US, and Kirkenes in Norway are three socially and culturally different Arctic coastal communities. Still, in this post I argue, that their colonial histories as well as present-day identities and development plans share a […]