There is a really cool research project doing work in Manitoba. It’s a European Research Council Advanced Grant Project called “Building Arctic Futures: Transport Infrastructures and Sustainable Northern Communities” (InfraNorth) is being realized at the University of Vienna and runs from January 2021 to December 2025.
Today we met with one of the InfraNorth researchers! Katrin Schmid. Katrin is a PhD student at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. She previously worked with Gitxaała Nation in Canada on the K’tai Social Ecology project and SSHRC-funded Gitxaała Perceptions of Change project (University of British Columbia, 2018-2020).
She is a member of the Austrian Polar Research Institute and the Austrian Subarctic and Arctic Working Group, as well as the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists. Katrin’s research interests include perceptions of change, especially through the lens of cumulative effects analyses, and their influence on socio-economic sustainability, policy-making, and imagined futures of communities. She is based in Nunavut, Canada for the InfraNorth project. Her work centers on the role of Nunavut residents’ imagined futures in the development of transport infrastructure throughout the territory.
We’re very thankful to Katrin for coming in and meeting with us. We learned a lot about their project and we hope to see them again soon. Learn more about the InfraNorth project here: https://infranorth.eu