Mar 27, 2024: Article by Alexandra Meyer and Zdenka Sokolíčková in “Ethnos”
The latest issue of Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology has published the article ‘Melting Worlds’ and ‘Climate Myths’: Diverging Stories of Climate Change in Longyearbyen, an Arctic ‘Frontline Community’ by Alexandra Meyer and Zdenka Sokolíčková.
Climate change is a powerful story in Longyearbyen, the largest settlement on Svalbard in the high Arctic. While most natural science agrees on accelerating climate change with profound environmental impacts, this article unpacks the multidimensionality of the topic locally.
Meyer and Sokolíčková examine climate change as a discourse, analyzing how the local community receives and reproduces the dominant climate change discourse, and comparing it to other narratives about climate change and adaptation. The authors aim to contribute to the growing field of reception studies in anthropology. They conducted ethnographic fieldwork to gather their data, which includes interviews, informal conversations, and importantly, counter-stories that provide nuances and contest the dominant climate change discourse. The authors point to the over-simplification, sensationalism, and (mis)use of the climate discourse for other purposes. They suggest it is essential to listen to such counter-stories to promote fair, inclusive, and transparent climate change politics.
The article is open-access and can be read online here.
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Feb 21, 2025: Presentation by Peter Schweitzer and Olga Povoroznyuk at the 2025 Barents Spektakel
Peter Schweitzer and Olga Povoroznyuk will participate in the 2025 Barents Spektakel, an annual art and culture festival in Kirkenes, Norway. In its 21st edition, the festival explores the theme “Remote Control,” fostering a cross-disciplinary exchange on the center-periphery model and the dynamics between central areas and peripheral (or remote) regions. On Friday, 21 February, […]
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Call for Papers “Beyond Infrastructure? (Un-)built Environments in the Anthropocene”
International Conference, September 22 – 24, 2025, at the University of Vienna. Deadline for submissions: April 6, 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 environments […]
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Dec 3, 2024: InfraNorth Participation at the 6th Nordic Conference for Rural Research
Two members of the InfraNorth team, Timothy Heleniak (a senior research fellow at Nordregio) and Ria-Maria Adams, will participate in the 6th Nordic Rural Research Conference, held in Kiruna, Finland, from December 3-5. This year’s conference theme is “New Pathways to Sustainable Transitions?” Timothy Heleniak is coordinating working group 1.1, “The benefits of migration in […]
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Dec 2, 2024: CRAFT Webinar with Peter Schweitzer, Olga Povoroznyuk and Stanislav Saas Ksenofontov
On Monday, December 2, 2024, at 19:00 CET, Peter Schweitzer, Olga Povoroznyuk, and Stanislav Saas Ksenofontov (Indigenous Sakha social scientist, Postdoctoral scholar at the University of Northern Iowa), will be guest speakers in the CRAFT webinar series “Engaging Social Sciences and Indigenous Perspectives in Arctic Infrastructure Research.” The event will be streamed live on Facebook. […]
