Doctoral Dissertation: Ethnographic Research Among the Sakha of Russia: An investigation of social cultural change in a globalized world.

George Mason University, Fairfax VA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports dissertation research by a PhD student, Vera Solovyeva, to investigate of the effects of environmental change on two indigenous communities in northern Russia. This project seeks to understand how indigenous communities adapt to environmental change within a context of other dramatic changes, e.g., globalization, colonization, missionization, language loss, and others. The co-PI has strong community connections for the distribution of her work and this project will contribute to the completion of a PhD by an arctic indigenous woman, a highly underrepresented group in the social sciences. This is ethnographic research that explores the resilience of arctic peoples under conditions of environmental change in an under-researched region of the world. This research will contribute to out understanding of the resiliency of marginalized peoples who have undergone intense historical trauma and are now undergoing increasing social and economic pressures from environmental change. The research also investigates arctic indigenous attitudes regarding possible future policy options to mitigate environmental change.