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.
It explores how residents of the Arctic engage with transport infrastructures and their intended and unintended local consequences. Churchill is unique in terms of transport infrastructure. The community, which is not accessible via roads, is home of Canada’s only deep-water port on the Arctic Ocean. This port is the only harbor in the American (Sub)Arctic with a direct link to the North American railway system. In addition, the town’s airport has become key for the growing tourism industry in the “Polar Bear Capital of the World”. This study explores the role of transport infrastructures in sustaining and transforming Churchill. In doing so, it focuses on infrastructural entanglements, failures, and promises.
One of the first InfraNorth researchers our project met with was 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
