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

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.