Jun 17, 2025: Panel and Presentation by Ria-Maria Adams at the Finnish Anthropological Society Conference 2025
InfraNorth researcher Ria-Maria Adams will be convening a panel and presenting a paper at the 2025 Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society in Helsinki. This year’s conference, which marks the Society’s 50th anniversary, will be held under the theme Comparisons in Helsinki from June 16 to 18, 2025.
The panel session “Rethinking Infrastructure through Comparative Lenses: Climate, Environment, and Cultures in Transformation” (Panel 29) will take place on Tuesday, June 17, between 14:00 and 15:30 EEST. It will feature contributions that explore infrastructure not merely as physical systems, but as dynamic socio-political and cultural processes shaped by and shaping local and global transformations. Together, the contributions in this panel will discuss how different infrastructures reflect the past, present and future, and how they are grounded in local actions made visible through ethnographic case studies.
As part of the panel, Ria-Maria Adams will present a co-authored paper titled “Accessing the ‘Inaccessible’: The Role of Airports for Arctic Local Communities,” written together with Alexandra Meyer and Sophie Elixhauser. The paper examines the role airports play or are expected to play in everyday life and community development in three remote Arctic communities (Longyearbyen, Rovaniemi, and Tasiilaq), highlighting the local effects, promises, and fears associated with the increased accessibility brought by existing and planned airport infrastructure.
For further details, please visit the conference website.
