Talent grant SSH: Mette Simonsen Abildgaard

Talent grant for early career assistant and associate professors in SSH at Aalborg University. My long-term career goal in the talent program is to sharpen the infrastructural research agenda I am developing in arctic research by bridging approaches from media research, anthropology and STS/science and technology studies. In short, I have an interest in how the groups, who are rarely heard in Arctic infrastructure development, are affected by and influence infrastructure in their everyday lives. A core problem in the field is that infrastructures by their nature exceed many of the national, scale and technical boundaries, humanistic research usually follows, and my project is to develop methods and concepts that can follow destructures as phenomena that exist both as global systems and personal experiences. I gather this agenda under a concept I call 'infrastructural encounters', which thus also constitute a theoretical contribution to infrastructure research.