The forthcoming special issue “Ethnographies of Infrastructure” of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, guest edited by Philipp Budka, Peter Schweitzer, and Olga Povoroznyuk, is progressively being made available online ahead of the print edition, which will appear in February 2026.

The introduction, authored by Schweitzer, Povoroznyuk, and Budka, is now available open-access. It presents the conceptual and methodological foundations of the special issue, situating the contributions within developments in the anthropology of infrastructure and ethnographic engagements with transport infrastructures.

Ethnographies of infrastructure

As the editors of the special issue note, more than 25 years ago Susan Leigh Star (1999) published “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” written from a science and technology studies (STS) perspective, in which she argued for a relational approach and outlined what she called “tricks of the trade.” Building on Star, ethnographers have increasingly turned their gaze toward infrastructure, with research expanding across diverse theoretical lineages: from actor-network theory and STS to neo-Marxist analyses and more-than-human perspectives on infrastructure in the Anthropocene.

Anthropological perspectives examine political, temporal, material, and affective dimensions of infrastructure. Ethnographically driven accounts combine thick descriptions, narratives, maps, archives, community ethnography, and multi-sited comparison, showing how infrastructures shape knowledge, mediate politics and social life, and capture situated encounters, anticipatory dimensions, environmental activism, resistance, and locally reconfigured assemblages.

Such perspectives are presented in this special issue, with most contributions addressing transport infrastructures in small Arctic communities confronting external infrastructure initiatives linked to resource extraction, tourism, or military interests. Together, they demonstrate the ongoing methodological and conceptual vitality of ethnography for examining how infrastructures are lived, negotiated, reworked, contested, and imagined.

InfraNorth contributions

The special issue includes four contributions by InfraNorth team members:

1. Scenarios and Ethnography: Infrastructural Futures as Windows into the Present, by Peter Schweitzer, Olga Povoroznyuk, Philipp Budka, Alexandra Meyer, Katrin Schmid, and Nikita Strelkovskii.
2. Accessing the “Inaccessible”: The Role of Transport Infrastructures for Northern “Wilderness” Destinations, by Alexandra Meyer, Ria-Maria Adams, and Sophie Elixhauser (forthcoming).
3. Toward a Comparative Ethnography of Arctic Seaport Projects: Local Impacts of Expanding Maritime Infrastructure in Alaska, Norway, and Russia, by Olga Povoroznyuk.
4. Amazon in the Arctic: E-Commerce, Infrastructure, and Alimentary Assemblages in Nunavut, Canada, by Katrin Schmid.

As open-access articles are progressively made available online at the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, the full special issue will appear in print in February 2026.