Jan 25, 2024: Alexandra Meyer Successfully Defends Her Doctoral Dissertation
Alexandra Meyer has successfully defended her doctoral dissertation.
Alexandra Meyer has successfully defended her PhD thesis “Arctic Change: An Ethnography of Entangled Climatic and Societal Transformations in Longyearbyen, Svalbard” at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna.
Her thesis addresses how people in Longyearbyen, Svalbard perceive, live with, and adapt to entangled socio-economic and climatic change change. The research was supported by the EU’s Horizon 2020 project Nunataryuk [Grant Agreement ID: 773421] and the ERC Advanced Grant project InfraNorth [Grant Agreement ID: 885646].
The second edition of The Palgrave Handbook of Arctic Policy and Politics, edited by Carin Holroyd and Ken Coates, has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan. The book brings together a diverse group of international scholars and practitioners from North America and Northern Europe, spanning multiple academic disciplines, to contextualize the Arctic across fields of […]
InfraNorth researchers have contributed two chapters to the book Arctic Silk Roads: An Anthropology of the Unbuilt, edited by Natalia Magnani and Matthew Magnani, and published by Berghahn Books as part of its Studies in the Circumpolar North series. As climate change accelerates, the melting of sea ice is fueling the global imagination and geopolitical […]
The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography has recently published the article “Lifelines and Gateways: The Relational Affordances of Arctic Airports” by InfraNorth researchers Alexandra Meyer, Ria-Maria Adams and Sophie Elixhauser. Airports are indispensable to life in the Arctic. Often shaped by geopolitical agendas and external economic interests, they provide vital links for local communities across remote […]
The Austrian public broadcaster Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF) featured InfraNorth principal investigator Peter Schweitzer in an interview on its Ö1 weekend feuilleton “Diagonal” on December 6, 2025, which focused on the politics of infrastructure. Schweitzer appeared in a segment titled “A Silk Road Across the Arctic” (in German: Seidenstrasse über die Arktis), interviewed by Erich Klein […]
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 […]
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 […]
