March 16, 2022: Article “Infrastructural legacies & post-Soviet transformations in Northern Sakha (Yakutiya), Russia”

The town of Tiksi came into being in the 1930s, when the Soviet Union intensified its efforts to industrialize the Arctic. A critical element of that policy was to make the Northern Sea Route a viable Arctic shipping lane and Tiksi, located where the Lena River meets the Arctic Ocean, became an important transportation hub on that route. Post-Soviet transformations led to a rapid decline in population numbers and economic significance of the town, while climate change opened up new opportunities for shipping and mammoth tusk collecting. Today, the situation seems to have stabilized but the promises of a bright future pronounced in strategic papers by the government are yet to be realized. The article explores the socio-economic, infrastructural and environmental changes of recent decades in order to explore future development prospects for Tiksi. The infrastructural legacies of the Soviet past, combined with the environmental conditions of the region, result in the intertwined material dependencies of built and natural environments. Still, these material dependencies are neither straitjackets nor unchangeable. It is the interplay between global climate change, national policies, and local initiative that will challenge the material dependencies of the past and present.

Published in “Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning”, March 16, 2022

Full article as PDF

Olga Povoroznyuk and Peter Schweitzer published a paper based on their fieldwork in Northern Siberia in 2019

The Paper „Ignoring environmental change? On fishing quotas and collapsing coastlines in Bykovskiy, Northern Sakha (Yakutiya)“ written by InfraNorth team members Olga Povoroznyuk and Peter Schweitzer was published by Ambio, a journal of environment and society issued by the Royal Swedish academy of Sciences. The paper is discussing the impact of climate change on the […]

June 7-10, 2023: Paper at SIEF2023

Philipp Budka will give a paper at the 16th Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF2023) in Brno, Czech Republic. In his paper for the panel “Contested futures? Sustainability conflicts and local practices in the age of global uncertainty”, he explores how tourism and transport infrastructures are entangled in the town of […]

May 22, 2023: InfraNorth Workshop “Ethnographies of Infrastructure”

After a decade of rising popularity of treating infrastructure anthropologically, the time seems ripe to look at how we have been studying infrastructure. This workshop intends to address three critical questions in that respect: 1) What are the theoretical and methodological tools anthropology brings to the table when studying infrastructure? 2) How can the traditional […]

March 30, 2023: Discussion “Infrastructure, Remoteness & People”

The Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung will host a panel discussion with Peter Schweitzer & Gregor Sailer on “Infrastructure, Remoteness and People”. The discussion will be part of Gregor Saeiler’s photo exhibition “The Polar Silk Road”. Peter Schweitzer & Gregor Sailer will discuss the entanglements of geopolitics, economy, infrastructure, and humans in the polar areas. The discussion […]