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 […]
By Alexandra Meyer and Sarah Helena Schäfer Studying infrastructure means to think beyond infrastructure: It is not just about a bridge, a railroad, a ship, but about the people and the hopes and dreams connected to such material aspects of life. This year, we dedicated our second InfraNorth workshop to the topic of “Ethnographies of […]
By Timothy Heleniak I travelled to the Faroe Islands not to go hiking, view puffins, or take in a concert of Faroese music at the wonderful Nordic House. Rather, I ventured to the north Atlantic archipelago to study the decades-long transport infrastructure project of linking the islands together. Many of the infrastructure projects studied within […]
By Olga Povoroznyuk and Ilya Krylov On February 17-24 this year, the University of Vienna hosted by far the largest international interdisciplinary Arctic research forum and a meeting point for scholars, artists, Indigenous peoples and more – the Arctic Science Summit Week. Members of InfraNorth research team enthusiastically took this opportunity to present the project […]
By Alexis Sancho Reinoso These lines summarize a series of personal thoughts from a geographer who had the opportunity to participate in the Biannual Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society. The event took place on March 21-23 in Rovaniemi, the capital of Finnish Lapland, and it was incredibly well organized by the Anthropology Research Team […]
By Philipp Budka Tourism is big in Churchill, a town of 870 people situated at the junction of the boreal forest, the Subarctic tundra, and the Hudson Bay in Northern Manitoba, Canada. And tourism is closely entangled with transport infrastructures, such as roads, trails, railway, and airport. Through these infrastructures, tourists are able to reach […]
By Elena Davydova and Vladimir Davydov This blog post is based on field studies conducted in winter 2017, summer 2018, and spring 2019. While fieldwork in all our Russian fieldsites is placed on hold, we wanted to show with this post where our fieldwork would have taken us to expand on our existing knowledge. In […]
By Peter Schweitzer and Olga Povoroznyuk As most of the world, our project team – the one leading InfraNorth – was shocked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. This unprovoked aggression seems to have ended more than 30 years of productive collaboration between Soviet/Russian and western anthropologists, at least on the institutional […]
By Ria-Maria Adams and Mia Bennett Iron ore is fundamental to modernity from scales microscopic to monumental. Embedded within the glittery makeup we wear, the cell phones we carry, the bridges we cross, and the railways we ride, the ferrous mineral is a vital component to an infinite number of products. With the world population […]
By Katrin Schmid There is a double basketball court across the street from Northmart grocery store in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut Territory in Canada. During the summer of 2022, the court was missing a hoop and backboard, but the missing infrastructure is not what is of note here. From the outside these games look […]