Mag. Sigrid Irene Wentzel is a member of the APRI research groups on socio-cultural systems. She graduated from the University of Vienna in social and cultural anthropology. Her PhD project focuses on architectural design in the Sakha republic (Yakutiya) in the Russian Far East. The thesis is entitled “Designing modern and contemporary Sakha architecture: An Ethnography of the complex entanglement of people and buildings in the Sakha republic in the late Soviet period and the post-Soviet phase until 2017”. For her Ph.D. dissertation, she carried out extensive qualitative fieldwork among practitioners of architecture.
From 2014 to 2020 she was a project collaborator with CORE – Configurations of Remoteness. She researched the unintended consequences of the railroad development in the Sakha Republic (Yakutiya). In the context of the CORE project, she published one single-authored paper and three collaborative papers – all in peer-reviewed international journals.
Having an artistic background herself, she loves to carry out research amongst creative practitioners. She is also passionate about teaching social anthropology and art and is constantly seeking for new ways to combine these two fields. Currently, Sigrid Irene Wentzel is finalizing her Ph.D. dissertation and works as a visual arts teacher in secondary school. Spending her days between anthropological writing and art classes – and raising two children – her daily life experience is a dynamic journey through art, anthropology and education.
Sigrid Wentzel is interested in anything that is connected to materiality, architecture, art, visual representations, the history and present of the Russian Far East, oral history and biographical research as well as debates about decolonizing education and research practices.
