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.
InfraNorth researchers contribute two chapters to the forthcoming book Arctic Silk Roads: An Anthropology of the Unbuilt, edited by Natalia Magnani and Matthew Magnani. The volume will be published by Berghahn Books in January 2026 as part of the Studies in the Circumpolar North series. As climate change accelerates, the melting of sea ice is […]
InfraNorth researcher Ria-Maria Adams will deliver a lecture titled “For Whom Do the Sleigh Bells Toll? Social Media’s Role in Shaping Expectations of Arctic Tourism Destinations” on December 2, 2025, at 16:30 GMT, at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, as part of its Anthropology Seminar Series. The talk will delve into how tourism infrastructures […]
The quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal Polar Geography has recently published the article “Temporality of Arctic Transport Infrastructure: Bridging Seasonal Supply in Egvekinot, Chukotka” by InfraNorth researchers Elena Davydova and Olga Povoroznyuk. The article explores local impacts of, and responses to, seasonal configurations of connectivity and disruptions in the functioning of transport infrastructure in the Russian […]
A new special issue of Anthropologica (Vol. 67, No. 1, 2025), the journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society, has just been published. Titled “Narratives and Temporalities of Infrastructure: The Canadian Experience,” the issue was co-edited by Giuseppe Amatulli (Carleton University) and InfraNorth researcher Philipp Budka and presents anthropological perspectives on water, energy and transport infrastructures […]
The Polar Journal, which publishes policy-relevant research on polar affairs from across the social sciences and humanities, has recently released the article ‘Building transdisciplinary bridges and learning from the Svalbard context’ by Julia Olsen, Alexandra Meyer, and Lisbeth Iversen, Ulrich Schildberg, Ragnhild Holmen Bjørnsen, Grete K. Hovelsrud, James Badu, Dina Brode-Roger, Adriana Craciun, Hanne H. […]
On November 5, 2025, at 5:00 pm CET, InfraNorth researcher Philipp Budka will deliver a lecture titled “Sovereignty by Design: Community Infrastructures and Relational Futures in Remote Canada,” as part of the Wednesday Seminars, the lecture series of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Budka’s talk examines infrastructural sovereignty—the […]
