Configurations of “remoteness” (CoRe) - Entanglements of Humans and Transportation Infrastructure in the Baykal-Amur Mainline (BAM) Region

The Arctic and Subarctic have gained a surprising amount of attention in recent years. What used to be the ‘remote’ backwaters of global economic and political currents has morphed into a new frontier of geopolitics, resource extraction, and developmental designs. New transportation infrastructure often plays a critical role in these transformations. But its effects – accessibility, the shrinking of social and physical distance, the increased speed of connection – are not uncontested. On the one hand, those for whom ‘remoteness’ has been an asset, are often among the opponents of such developments. New transportation infrastructures are often not built to make the lives of local residents easier but to move cargo from point A to point B. Thus, there are ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of such infrastructural developments.

Our key research question, therefore, is: Given the technosocial entanglement of people and infrastructure, how do changes in remote transportation systems affect human sociality and mobility?

CoRe is located in North Asia, at the junction of eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East. We call the area the BAM region because it is defined by the Baykal-Amur Mainline (BAM) railroad and its sidetracks. In that region there are pockets with a long history of industrial development and resource extraction, while many parts of the area have been little affected by Soviet and post-Soviet modernization efforts. Current attempts to revitalize, improve and extend the railway Network serve as the backdrop for our project.


 News

11.11.2022
 

On October 21, 2022, Gertraud Illmeier successfully defended her Master’s thesis on the topic “Oil infrastructures and their affordances for ‘traditional’ livelihoods in Eastern Siberia”.

27.09.2022
 

Olga Povoroznyuk successfully defended her PhD-thesis "Soviet Infrastructure in the Post-Soviet Era? Building a Railroad and Identity along the Baikal–Amur Mainline in East Siberia"

17.12.2021
 

Olga Povoroznyuk presented a poster featuring results of her research on CoRe at the meeting of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna

08.12.2021
 

CoRe brochure is well received in Tynda

25.08.2021
 

Comprehensive booklet on the village of Tokma has been published and presented to the public

 

20.06.2021
 

Concluding CoRe panel at ICASS X gathered the presentations of the project team members and collaborators