“We build a railroad and the railroad builds us.” This idea gave title to Olga Povoroznyuk’s talk at the sowi:doc 2023 Awards ceremony of the Vienna Doctoral School of Social Sciences (ViDSS).
Dr. Povoroznyuk, one of this year’s award winners, talked about her dissertation “Soviet infrastructure in the post-Soviet era? Building a railroad and identity along the Baikal–Amur Mainline in East Siberia,” which delved into the role of large-scale infrastructure projects as embodiments of state modernization and identity-building processes. Drawing on her case study of the Baikal-Amur Mainline, a railroad line built in the 1970s and 1980s in East Siberia, she explored how this transportation infrastructure shaped socialist communities and identities and remains a powerful medium for transmitting ideologies and memories in the post-socialist politics of identity and emotion.
Also speaking at the event were the other two award winners, Etienne Schneider and Marlis Stubenvoll, and three students of the Vienna Doctoral School of Social Sciences. The welcome addresses were given by Manuela Baccarini, vice-rector for research and international affairs at the University of Vienna, Hajo Boomgaarden, dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, and Sophie Lecheler, spokesperson of the Vienna Doctoral School of Social Sciences.
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 […]
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 […]
Olga Povoroznyuk and Peter Schweitzer presented findings from the InfraNorth project at the ARCA co-creative community workshop “Biocultural Heritage and Climate Adaptation in Arctic Cities,” held on October 7–8, 2025, at The Nave in Anchorage, Alaska. Their presentation drew connections between their recent research conducted in Anchorage and other field sites in Alaska: on the […]
A new book examining the rapid climate and geopolitical shifts in the Arctic, Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic, by Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds, has been recently published by Yale University Press and launched in London. Mia Bennett is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Washington, founder and editor […]
