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.

Dec 3, 2024: InfraNorth Participation at the 6th Nordic Conference for Rural Research

Two members of the InfraNorth team, Timothy Heleniak (a senior research fellow at Nordregio) and Ria-Maria Adams, will participate in the 6th Nordic Rural Research Conference, held in Kiruna, Finland, from December 3-5. This year’s conference theme is “New Pathways to Sustainable Transitions?” Timothy Heleniak is coordinating working group 1.1, “The benefits of migration in […]

Dec 2, 2024: CRAFT Webinar with Peter Schweitzer, Olga Povoroznyuk and Stanislav Saas Ksenofontov

On Monday, December 2, 2024, at 19:00 CET, Peter Schweitzer, Olga Povoroznyuk, and Stanislav Saas Ksenofontov (Indigenous Sakha social scientist, Postdoctoral scholar at the University of Northern Iowa), will be guest speakers in the CRAFT webinar series “Engaging Social Sciences and Indigenous Perspectives in Arctic Infrastructure Research.” The event will be streamed live on Facebook. […]

Nov 28, 2024: Presentation by Ria-Maria Adams at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

Katrin Großmann (Forschungskollektiv Peripherie und Zentrum, FH Erfurt) and InfraNorth researcher Ria-Maria Adams will be presenting at the conference Zivilgesellschaftliches Engagement & Stadterneuerung (in English: Civic Engagement & Urban Regeneration) organized by the Institute for European Urban Studies (IfEU) at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in Germany (November 28 – 29, 2024). On Thursday, November 28, at […]

Nov 2024: Chapter by Peter Schweitzer in the Anthropos Special Issue “The Seasonal and the Material”

Anthropos, the international journal of anthropology and linguistics, has just released the special issue “The Seasonal and the Material: Anthropology of Seasonal Practices,” co-edited by Sabina Cveček and Barbara Horejs. Among its contributions is a book chapter by Peter Schweitzer, titled “Seasons and Seasonality in the (Alaskan) Arctic: Human and More-than-human Cycles of Engagement.” In […]