Dec 2025: Article by Peter Schweitzer, et al. in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography has recently published the article “Scenarios and Ethnography: Infrastructural Futures as Windows into the Present” by Peter Schweitzer, Olga Povoroznyuk, Philipp Budka, Alexandra Meyer, Katrin Schmid, and Nikita Strelkovskii.
This article reflects on two scenario workshops conducted in 2023 in Kirkenes, Norway, and Churchill, Canada, as part of the ERC project InfraNorth. In each workshop, four future scenarios were presented and discussed with participants. Apart from speculations about what the future might bring, these discussions provided ethnographic insights beyond what had been found through more traditional means of ethnography.
The overarching question of the article is what can be learned from scenario workshops that other ethnographic methods might not afford. The authors explore the ethnographic potential of infrastructure studies and argue that infrastructures, as objects of futurity, lend themselves to scenario-based ethnography.
The article introduces the theoretical and methodological considerations necessary to do so, presents the scenario workshops and their ethnographic results, and emphasizes information beyond what other fieldwork methods had provided. This is followed by a discussion of the temporal horizons of ethnography, while the final section returns to the authors’ starting questions and sketches what they have learned in the process, suggesting that scenarios and scenario workshops have the potential to offer ethnographic windows into infrastructural presents by talking about the future.
This article is available open access in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. It is part of the special issue “Ethnographies of Infrastructure” guest edited by Philipp Budka, Peter Schweitzer and Olga Povoroznyuk, which will be published in February 2026.
