By Alexandra Meyer “If you arrived in autumn, you would stay up here until the spring or summer. We did not have any possibility to get down [to the mainland]. It was quite fantastic in many ways. It was a completely different society. It used to be calm here. You knew more or less everyone. […]

By Philipp Budka* What does the future hold for a remote community of about 900 people on Hudson Bay in Northern Manitoba, Canada? This question was constantly on my mind when doing ethnographic research for the ERC project InfraNorth in the town of Churchill. When I met with local residents to talk about their experiences […]

By Ria-Maria Adams, Alexandra Meyer & Mia Bennett According to popular belief, Santa Claus operates with a flying sleigh, pulled by reindeer – including one with a red nose. This means of transport allows him to access every corner of the world, no matter how remote and disconnected, needing only a rooftop or a small […]

By Alexis Sancho Reinoso This post is inspired by my storymap entitled “I walked over the Atlantic… or: how a small fishing nation manages to build a world-class road network” (October 2023). Timely before Christmas, the Faroe Islands’ fourth subsea tunnel connecting the islands of Streymoy and Sandoy will be inaugurated. Since the 1970s, most […]

By Olga Povoroznyuk A border town Kirkenes is a town with the population of some 3,500 residents located in the Sør-Varanger municipality of the county of Troms og Finnmark in northeastern Norway and in the immediate vicinity of the Finnish and Russian borders.  It was in Kirkenes that in 1993 the countries sharing the Barents […]

by InfraNorth July, 2023: Our researchers are out in the field again to collect data and organise infrastructure future scenario workshops in the US and Canada. Olga Povoroznyuk and Peter Schweitzer are sharing their latest updates from current field trips in Alaska in the towns of Nome and Anchorage. We have put together some of […]

By Olga Povoroznyuk This blog post was first published by the Austrian Polar Research Institute Tiksi in Russia, Nome in the US, and Kirkenes in Norway are three socially and culturally different Arctic coastal communities. Still, in this post I argue, that their colonial histories as well as present-day identities and development plans share a […]

By Timothy Heleniak I travelled to the Faroe Islands not to go hiking, view puffins, or take in a concert of Faroese music at the wonderful Nordic House. Rather, I ventured to the north Atlantic archipelago to study the decades-long transport infrastructure project of linking the islands together. Many of the infrastructure projects studied within […]

By Olga Povoroznyuk and Ilya Krylov On February 17-24 this year, the University of Vienna hosted by far the largest international interdisciplinary Arctic research forum and a meeting point for scholars, artists, Indigenous peoples and more – the Arctic Science Summit Week. Members of InfraNorth research team enthusiastically took this opportunity to present the project […]

By Alexis Sancho Reinoso These lines summarize a series of personal thoughts from a geographer who had the opportunity to participate in the Biannual Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society. The event took place on March 21-23 in Rovaniemi, the capital of Finnish Lapland, and it was incredibly well organized by the Anthropology Research Team […]

By Philipp Budka Tourism is big in Churchill, a town of 870 people situated at the junction of the boreal forest, the Subarctic tundra, and the Hudson Bay in Northern Manitoba, Canada. And tourism is closely entangled with transport infrastructures, such as roads, trails, railway, and airport. Through these infrastructures, tourists are able to reach […]