Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Arctic Humanities, Arctic infrastructure studies and GIS

The position A three-year Postdoctoral Research Fellow position is available at the School of Business and Economics (Handelshøgskolen), UiT The Arctic University of Norway, starting 1 March 2027. The position is affiliated with the Research Council of Norway Groundbreaking research funded project ROADS – The Roads That Remain: Residual Pathways as Living Archives in Northern Fennoscandia (2026-2030), led by Dr. #### Tarja Salmela. We are seeking a researcher with expertise in GIS, spatial analysis, and critical approaches to mapping and infrastructure, and interest towards collaborative, experimental, and community-oriented research methods. The successful candidate will join an interdisciplinary and internationally oriented research team investigating how roads and pathways continue to shape Northern landscapes long after their official purpose has faded, alongside pathways that are less visible in the landscape yet continue to endure through local knowledge, ongoing practices of movement, and memory. The appointment is for a period of three years, ending 28 February 2030. It is a prerequisite that the applicant can carry out the project over the full course of the employment period. No person may hold more than one fixed term position as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the same institution. As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, you will have the opportunity to advance your scientific career and further qualify for academic positions. If you do not already have the educational competence that meets the requirements for an Associate Professor position in Norway, UiT will arrange such competence during the employment period. The workplace is at UiT in Tromsø. You must be able to start in the position within a reasonable time after receiving the offer. Working and living in Tromsø Tromsø/Romssa serves as an important hub for research, culture, governance, and mobility in the region of Northern Norway and Sápmi. Its position as a regional gateway between coastal, inland, and cross-border northern landscapes makes it a particularly meaningful base for ROADS. The School of Business and Economics at UiT hosts a growing community of scholars working on sustainability, governance, mobilities, Arctic transformations, and societal change. The successful candidate will become part of a dynamic interdisciplinary environment, including UiT’s Environmental Humanities thematic network that ROADS is closely connected to. The project/position's field of research The project ROADS offers the first systematic study of residual road infrastructures in Northern Fennoscandia—roads and pathways that have fallen out of official purpose but continue to shape landscapes, memories, and mobility practices across the region. These include bypassed roads, abandoned transport corridors, former military and extractive infrastructures, and old roads and seasonal pathways embedded within local and Sámi land-use traditions. While many remain visible in the landscape, their histories increasingly persist through local knowledge systems that risk disappearing as generations pass. Rather than approaching such infrastructures as obsolete remnants, ROADS conceptualizes them as living archives: material traces through which memory, power, mobility, resistance, and future possibilities continue to unfold. Drawing on feminist and decolonial Science and Technology Studies, critical infrastructure studies, political ecology, environmental humanities and Indigenous ontologies, ROADS seeks to broaden conventional understandings of infrastructure by integrating relational, seasonal, and more-than human mobility systems into analyses of northern landscapes. The project combines GIS-based spatial analysis, archival research, ethnography, repeat photography and artistic methods, and collaborative countermapping. It is grounded in close collaboration with local and Sámi communities and culminates in community-responsive public outputs, including a multilingual digital storymap and participatory mapping platform. While GIS and spatial analysis provide important analytical foundations, ROADS combines these approaches with ethnographic, archival, visual, and artistic methods. The project therefore welcomes applicants interested in methodological experimentation and interdisciplinary research across the social sciences, humanities, environmental sciences, and arts. The Postdoctoral Project And Responsibilities The Postdoctoral Research Fellow will play a central role in the project and contribute to both its analytical and public-facing outputs. The postdoctoral researcher will lead the spatial and archival components of Work Package 1: Tracing the temporal lives of residual and rendered invisible infrastructures and contribute to synthesis and engagement activities in Work Package 3: Reimagining residual road infrastructures and mobilities in Northern Fennoscandia. Key Responsib