Despite long histories of colonization, arctic and subarctic areas have (re)appeared as new resource frontiers of the 21st century. With the advancement of resource extraction and construction technologies as well as the increasing attention of developers, politicians and other stakeholders, new transportation and industrial infrastructures are imagined, planned and built. They physically change the landscapes by affecting local and indigenous land use practices and mobility regimes and boosting the growth of urban infrastructure and industrial settlements along its way. Large-scale infrastructure projects produce networks of human and non-human actors, including resource extraction companies, state bodies, NGOs and other interest groups, as well as tracks, rails, mines, financial and natural resources, etc. These constellations are formed and reconfigured in the process of negotiations about development plans, distribution of benefits, and access to resources and particular infrastructure services. In this panel we use the notions of "hard" infrastructures (rails, roads, pipes, ports, buildings) and "soft" ones (social institutions and groups, interactions and knowledge) in order to address co-production of material structures (of the built environment) and social networks. Questions we intend to explore may be related to the roles of state and private investors in infrastructure projects; benefits, "fly-over effects" and other impacts on local communities; practices of land use, mobility, and sociality induced by new infrastructures; and other material and affective interactions of humans with infrastructure. We invite papers in the fields of infrastructure and materiality studies, social impact assessments, STS or Actor Network Theory involving both present-day and historical investigations. While the regional focus of the panel is on arctic and subarctic regions, we actively encourage comparative studies in other "remote" areas, in the Global South and elsewhere.
Please, submit your abstracts of no longer than 4000 characters by June 15 2018 through the conference website following the link vanda.univie.ac.at/program/call-for-papers/online-paper-submission/ In case of questions or queries, do not hesitate to contact the panel chairs:
Olga Povoroznyuk olga.povoroznyuk@univie.ac.at
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna,
Austrian Polar Research Institute (APRI)
Gertrude Saxinger gertrude.saxinger@univie.ac.at
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna
Austrian Polar Research Institute (APRI)
Peter Schweitzer peter.schweitzer@univie.ac.at
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna
Austrian Polar Research Institute (APRI)
