Examining the intersections of place-making and development in the Pribilof Islands, Alaska

University Of Alaska Fairbanks Campus, Fairbanks AK

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed research focuses on developing a mixed methods approach to research into the complex social, economic and environmental issues facing the Pribilof Islands. The student, Lyons, proposes using a place-making approach to understanding community instead of a more standard development approach. Lyons is a NSF-funded Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) student at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, and her research focuses on integrating ecological and anthropological data into tools that can inform fisheries and management decisions in the fishery-dependent communities of St. Paul and St. George in the Pribilof Islands of Alaska. With the use of a social-ecological system framework (that refers to complex interactions between the social and ecological environments) in which she highlights the notion of "place-making (in which a community establishes a coherent sense of place), this dissertation research attempts to develop techniques that can integrate the detailed ethnographic data collected by social scientists into management and policy decision-making.