Nov 5, 2025: Presentation by Philipp Budka at the University of Vienna
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 practice of community control over the design, ownership, and governance of essential infrastructures—through two ethnographic case studies in northwestern Ontario and northern Manitoba. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, he explores how communities in remote regions have worked to shape and sustain digital and transport infrastructures in response to state and market neglect. The KO-KNET broadband network, owned and operated by First Nations, exemplifies digital self-determination, while the Arctic Gateway Group—a consortium of 41 Indigenous and northern communities—has reclaimed the Hudson Bay Railway to secure regional transport autonomy. Rather than treating infrastructure as a technical backdrop, Budka approaches it ethnographically as a relational and political formation shaped by colonial histories, practices of care, and aspirations for sustainable futures. By connecting these cases through the lens of infrastructural sovereignty, the talk contributes to anthropological debates on infrastructure, Indigenous and community sovereignty, and ethnographies of transformation, while engaging decolonial perspectives on technology, governance, and community-led futures in settler-colonial contexts.
The seminar will be held in a hybrid format, with in-person attendance at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna (Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna, 4th floor, Übungsraum) and online via Zoom. Registration is not required. Further details about the lecture can be found here.
