Feb 27, 2024: Ria-Maria Adams Successfully Defends Her Doctoral Dissertation
Ria-Maria Adams successfully defended her doctoral dissertation
Ria-Maria Adams has successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis “The Quest for Good Life: Well-Being of Young People in Finnish Lapland” at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna under the supervision of Peter Schweitzer (University of Vienna) and Florian Stammler (University of Lapland). Janina Kehr (University of Vienna) and Joachim Otto Habeck (University of Hamburg) acted as examiners and Cornelia Staritz (University of Vienna) chaired the public defence.
In her dissertation, Ria-Maria focuses on young people’s perspectives on well-being in northern Finland. She highlights the importance of anthropological contributions to studies on Arctic youth and urges a more nuanced understanding of young people’s aspirations when they are in the process of deciding whether to stay in or leave their rural hometowns. This research was mainly supported by the uni:docs fellowship program of the University of Vienna. The research was completed while working for the ERC Advanced Grant project InfraNorth [Project ID: 885646]. This work was also partly supported by the WOLLIE project funded by the Academy of Finland [Project ID: 314471], as well as the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland, which granted her a guest researcher status for the entire time of her research.
The University of Vienna’s research magazine, Rudolphina, recently featured Peter Schweitzer, principal investigator of InfraNorth, and his long-standing anthropological engagement with Arctic communities. Schweitzer’s research focuses on issues related to the built environment, mobility, remoteness, and the social impacts of climate change on community life in the Arctic. The article, which includes a video interview […]
InfraNorth team member Philipp Budka will deliver a public presentation of his research titled “Infrastructural Sovereignty and the Social Life of Transport: Ethnographic Insights from Northern Manitoba, Canada” on Wednesday, April 16, from 12:00 to 1:00 PM (GMT-5) at the Manitoba Museum Auditorium in Winnipeg, Canada. Churchill, Manitoba—a remote Subarctic town of approximately 870 residents—offers […]
InfraNorth team member Katrin Schmid’s recent presentation on transport infrastructure and food sovereignty in Nunavut was featured in Nunatsiaq News, a local newspaper in the region. Schmid shared her findings at the Nunatta Sunakkutaangit Museum in Iqaluit on April 8, 2025, in a public presentation titled “Country Food Cargo: How Transport Infrastructure Shapes Food Sovereignty […]
International Conference, September 22 – 24, 2025, at the University of Vienna. Extended deadline for submissions: April 21, 2025. Infrastructure is often seen as solid, fixed, and inevitable while shaping the way we move, live, and connect. But what about the infrastructures that remain unfinished, abandoned, or merely imagined? How do built, un-built, or non-built […]
On April 9, 2025, from 7:00 to 8:00 PM CDT (GMT-5), Philipp Budka will present a talk titled “Navigating Change: How Transport Infrastructure Shapes Life in Churchill” at the Theatre of the Town Centre Complex in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada. As part of this community event, the InfraNorth researcher will explore how transport infrastructures both shape […]
The third volume of the Fractured North book series, edited by Erich Kasten, Igor Krupnik, and Gail Fondahl, has recently been released by SEC Publications, the publishing house of Kulturstiftung Sibirien. The volume includes a chapter by Olga Povoroznyuk, titled “Reconceptualizing Siberia: a personal account of a changing field.” In it, she reflects on her […]
