Olga Povoroznyuk successfully defended her PhD dissertation “Soviet Infrastructure in the Post-Soviet Era? Building a Railroad and Identity along the Baikal–Amur Mainline in East Siberia”. Her cumulative dissertation introduces the notion of transformative infrastructure and focuses on the role of large-scale infrastructures as articulations of state modernization and identity building. The research was supported by […]
Interdisciplinary review article on social and environmental consequences of roads and railways led by Olga Povoroznyuk with contributions from W. Vincent, P. Schweitzer and a few other Arctic scholars is now accessible online in the Canadian journal Arctic Science https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/full/10.1139/as-2021-0033 The article features six Arctic case studies and is a result of collaboration between social […]
Olga Povoroznyuk & Philipp Budka present individual papers on transport infrastructures at the European Association of Social Anthropologists’ 17th Biennial Conference (July 26-29, 2022) in the panel “Promising Growth: Anthropological Reflections on Sprawling Infrastructure and Inequality“.
Alexis Sancho-Reinoso has created a story that combines maps, pictures, and text to tell his experiences while travelling to Luleå and Kiruna, in the Swedish northernmost region Norrbotten. The excursion took place after the InfraNorth workshop about the history of Arctic infrastructures. The storymap is available here.
The Arctic, which often has been recognized by residents of temperate climate zones for its supposed unspoiled nature, has a long history of colonization, urbanization and industrial exploitation. From the days of Arctic whaling to gold rushes and oil booms, the Arctic has a rich legacy of built environment serving as infrastructure mainly for non-arctic […]
This survey focuses on the role of transport infrastructures in Arctic and sub-Arctic communities. It is anonymous, consists of seven (7) questions, and takes about 10 minutes to complete.The survey is available at https://sosci.univie.ac.at/InfraNorthQuestionnaire/All residents in Northern communities aged 18 years or more are invited to participate in the survey!
Philipp Budka was interviewed by the Austrian Polar Research Institute (APRI) about his fieldwork in Northern Manitoba, Canada: Interview in German Interview in English (translated by APRI)
Olga Povoroznyuk and Peter Schweitzer talked about transport infrastructures, climate change impacts and sustainable communities along the Arctic coast at a two day symposium “Experiencing Climate and Environmental Changes in and beyond Europe” on May 5-7, 2022 in Ljubljana. Symposium Program
ERC project “InfraNorth” (“Building Arctic Futures: Transport Infrastructure and Sustainable Northern Communities”) https://www.infranorth.eu/ will hold two events at the conference Vienna Anthropology Days taking place in Vienna on September 26-30, 2022. Please, feel free to submit your papers to the panel “Infrastructure and the Built Environment in the Anthropocene” and your expressions of interest to […]
The community workshop on Arctic infrastructure and climate change “RATIC meets T-MOSAiC”, co-organized by Skip Walker, Peter Schweitzer and Olga Povoroznyuk at the Arctic Science Summit Week, from 14:00 – 18:00 CEST in Tromsø, Norway and online: https://www.assw.info/sessions/ratic-meets-t-mosaic Meeting Announcement PDF Please, join us – online participation is free!
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 […]
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 […]