Dec 13, 2023: Olga Povoroznyuk Receives sowi:doc Award 2023

Dr. Olga Povoroznyuk, the research coordinator and study region lead for the Russian Arctic in InfraNorth, has received the sowi:doc Award 2023 for her outstanding dissertation project “Soviet infrastructure in the post-Soviet era? Building a railroad and identity along the Baikal–Amur Mainline in East Siberia.”

Dr. Povoroznyuk defended her dissertation at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Vienna, with the supervision of Dr. Peter Schweitzer, in September 2022. Her thesis explores the role of large-scale infrastructure projects as embodiments of state modernization and identity building processes. Drawing on the case study of the Baikal-Amur Mainline, a railroad line built in the 1970s and 1980s in East Siberia, she explores how the railroad shaped socialist communities and identities and how it still remains a powerful medium for transmission of ideologies and memories in the post-socialist politics of identity and emotion. In her railroad ethnography, she introduces the concept of transformative infrastructure to highlight the agency of large-scale projects drawing Indigenous, local and migrant populations into the orbit of modernization. Her research was supported by the FWF project Configurations of “Remoteness”, as well as the ERC Advanced Grant Project InfraNorth.

The Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna grants the sowi:doc Awards annually to recognize excellent research outcomes. These awards are given to three to four doctoral graduates whose theses have been nominated by their supervisors. The primary goal of the sowi:doc Awards is to inspire and encourage these graduates to pursue an academic career.