I am currently the postdoctoral research fellow for a project titled, the Ethnohistory and ethnoarchaeology of reindeer herding on the Alaska Peninsula. With Patrick Plattet as the PI, this project is in collaboration with National Park Service, Alaska Regional Office and is funded by NPS Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Units (CESU). The project aim is to highlight the “American” period in Southwest Alaska by exploring the history of reindeer herding in the region. As a socio-cultural anthropologist with interests in northern anthropology, ethnohistory, material culture, and phenomenology, I hope to explore this history and its resulting legacies by broadly considering narratives and embodiments of place among residents of the Alaska Peninsula.
This reindeer herding project will build on the experiences I gained during my dissertation research, which focused on how people in northwest Alaska make and manipulate forms of material culture like raw materials, tools, historic artefacts, and contemporary art. For that research, I explored how people use material practices to generate social coordination, a concept I developed to encapsulate the creative resourcefulness whereby people weave things, places, and people into their practices of livelihood in order to make their lives go well. Four themes emerged from this focus, including: Alaska Native uses of material heritage as a strategy to achieve wellness, the production and sale of Alaska Native art for economic and cultural resilience in rural Alaska, negotiations of place and belonging, and everyday uses of built environments that articulate social transition.
Some of the work for my dissertation contributed to the collaborative project and booklet titled, Living with old things: Inupiat Stories, Bering Strait histories, which was funded by the National Park Service’s Shared Beringian Heritage Program. This project recorded stories elicited from 19th century ethnographic artifacts from the British Museum in London and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. As Part of that collaboration, I travelled to British museums with cultural advisors Faye Ongtowasruk and Barbara Weyiouanna of Wales, John and Pearl Goodwin of Kotzebue and Ron and Turid Senungetuk of Homer and originally Wales and Norway to document Inupiaq collections.
NPS: Shared Beringian Heritage Program
http://www.nps.gov/akso/beringia/about/news/living.cfm
Education:
2011 PhD Anthropology, University of Aberdeen
2001 MPhil Polar Studies, University of Cambridge
1999 B.S. Anthropology, University of Alaska Fairbanks
