Collaborative Research: Gender, Environment, and Change: Exploring Shifiting Roles in an Inupiat Community

• Main Authors: Zanotti, Laura, Carothers, Courtney
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: NSF Arctic Data Center 2017
• Subjects: Alaska; Ethnography; Leadership; Strength; Barrow; Inupiat
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.18739/a24f1mj78; https://arcticdata.io/catalog/view/doi:10.18739/A24F1MJ78

This collaborative environmental anthropology study provides a detailed ethnographic picture of the ways in which Alaska Native communities are responding to global challenges while at the same time retaining and practicing their core indigenous values in the face of many uncertainties. This project uses a participatory and critical feminist framework to explore the gendered and generational facets of change and specifically focuses on the pathways that women, men, and families forge to live well in Barrow. By focusing on the agentive ways in which Iñupiaq women and men contribute to maintaining healthy communities and environments as well as the constraints impeding this process, we avoid a top-down analysis of global political, environmental, economic, and cultural change. Our approach recognizes women and men as contributors to strategies for healing and strength and as empowered individuals enhancing community-life by following a variety of different pathways. Thus, this research also provides an important opportunity to explore applied concerns in anthropology and resource management by valuing women’s and men’s knowledge and community roles during a time of intense environmental shifts, market fluxes, and cultural heritage revival. This study also contributes to literature on decolonizing methodologies for research within the field of anthropology and the social sciences more generally. By focusing on community strength and well-being, this project also demonstrates the way in which participatory and collaborative social science research designs are critical to understanding strategies to cope with uncertainty. A number of digital recordings and transcripts from project participants will be archived at the Iñupiat Heritage Center, part of the Department of Iñupiat History, Language, and Culture.