March 22, 2022: Webinar “Crossroads, Ice Curtain & Chokepoint: Bering Strait Over Time”

Webinar with Peter Schweitzer

The Bering Strait, the body of water that both separates and binds together the USA and the Russian Federation, has been an area of heightened world historical significance ever since it formed a land bridge between Northeast Asia and Northwest North America at the end of the last Ice Age that enabled the peopling of the Americas. Despite these deep historical connections, the talk will focus on the region’s more recent history since the late 19th century. This history has been characterized by indigenous cultural contacts, imperial ambitions, resource extraction, as well as infrastructural projects and plans. The story of these entanglements will be told along the lines of several research projects led by the speaker and spanning the last 30 years, ranging from “Traveling Between Continents” to “Moved by the State” to “Building Arctic Futures (InfraNorth)”. The latter, a recently commenced ERC project, focuses on the nexus between transport infrastructures and the well-being of Arctic communities. The Bering Strait is a chokepoint for Arctic maritime traffic between the Atlantic and the Pacific, no matter whether transportation is routed via the Northern Sea Route or the Northwest Passage. While the geopolitical and strategic significance of the Bering Strait has been great throughout the 20th century, the invasion of the Ukraine will undoubtedly lead to making the 80 kilometres separating Russia from its eastern neighbour into even more volatile waters. Notwithstanding these global dimensions, the talk will be anthropological in nature and focus on the local scale.

22nd of March, time 14:00 in HKL, 13:00 in Vienna

University of Helsinki Website

Zoom Link

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 […]