Vortrag: The Social Lives of Transport Infrastructures in the Arctic | Olga Povoroznyuk und Peter Schweitzer (Uni Wien)

Lecture by Olga Povoroznyuk und Peter Schweitzer
The Social Lives of Transport Infrastructures in the Arctic
In the frame of the Module Emerging Fields in Architecture (++), HB2, TU Wien

Dr. Olga Povoroznyuk is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. Her research interests include the issues of infrastructure and development, identity, ethnicity and indigeneity, postsocialism and postcolonialism, climate and environmental change in the Circumpolar North (Northern Russia, Alaska, Northern Norway) and in remote areas. Dr. Povoroznyuk published a book on post-Soviet transformations in indigenous Evenki communities in East Siberia and a number of publications in social science and anthropology journals and volumes. Currently, she is a research coordinator and study region lead on an ERC project focusing on the role of transport infrastructure in permanent habitation, sustainability and well-being of Arctic coastal communities. Olga Povoroznyuk is Austria’s representative to social and human working group a co-chair of the Initiative on infrastructure and climate change at the International Arctic Social Science Committee, a faculty member of the Austrian Polar Research Institute. She is actively involved in teaching, peer-reviewing, interdisciplinary collaborations and dissemination of research within and beyond academia.

Dr. Peter Schweitzer is currently Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna. He is a founding member of the Austrian Polar Research Institute and served as its director from 2016-2020. From 2014-2022, he was one of two Austrian representatives to the Social and Human Working Group (SHWG) of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) and was its first chair from 2011 to 2015. Schweitzer served as president of the International Arctic Social Science Association (IASSA) from 2001 to 2005 and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His theoretical interests range from kinship and identity politics to human-environmental interactions, including the social lives of infrastructure and the community effects of global climate change; his regional focus areas include the circumpolar North and the former Soviet Union. He has published widely on all of these issues. Since 2021, he has been leading the ERC Advanced Grant Building Arctic Futures: Transport Infrastructures and Sustainable Northern Communities (InfraNorth).

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The module Emerging Fields in Architecture imparts current knowledge from new research fields in architectural and engineering disciplines, with the aim of dealing with current and future design challenges in a broader social context in an interdisciplinary and fundamental way. The lectures impart knowledge about different and interdisciplinary approaches to design, current developments and results of material and construction research, about planning and building under/in extreme conditions as well as about structures that change or develop due to changing parameters.

In this context, strategies for design (from the initial idea to implementation) are questioned in an interdisciplinary discourse, and the question of how the path from idea to realisation can be shaped and to what extent it is possible to be systematically creative is explored. In the practical part, an independent cross-thematic examination is to be carried out.