Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Vienna and APRI - Austrian Polar Research Insitute Vienna, Austria.
My research focuses are the multitude of relations of people and institutions to the environment: in particular I look on social aspects of extractive industries and transport infrastructures (i.e. the built environment). I am interested in mobility studies where I study multi-local lives of fly-in/fly-out petroleum and mining workers, inequality in the (im)mobility context as well as gender aspects as a crosscutting issue in these fields. In the course of various international research projects I am conducting field work in Siberia as well as in Canada´s Yukon Territory with indigenous and non-indigenous people. The transfer of scientific knowledge to the public is a key concern in my work. Therefore I am a proponent of combining applied research, community based research and theory building in the Arctic social sciences.
I am serving since 2014 as IASSA council member and since several years as Austrian representative of IASC. In 2017 I was able to establish together with colleagues the IASSA Working Group “Gender in the Arctic”. As a founding member of the Austrian Polar Research Institute (APRI), and spokesperson of the Regional Group Circumpolar and Siberian Studies of the German Association of Anthropologists (DGV), I am actively promoting Arctic social sciences in non-Arctic countries. Serving on the IASSA Council means not only representing scholars from these regions, but also to foster scientific collaboration among newly emerging research groups and established scholars/centers in Arctic and non-Arctic regions.
