Our Field Sites
Dr Olga Ulturgasheva focuses on how Siberian indigenous herders and hunters’ approaches to climate change are evolving, both through their own efforts at addressing the dynamic of climate change and in response to the dialogues with environmental scientists. Ulturgasheva documents the long-term empirical observations, with an especial focus on Siberian herders and hunters’ animistic knowledge of the local landscape, to produce insights into how they perceive, predict, and imagine their own futures of unmanageable change within their boreal forests and tundra. She also works with regional and international climate scientists who will provide insights into how climate change and its effects are perceived regionally and internationally. They will meet with Indigenous herders and hunters to discuss and compare observations. Their discussions and planning would factor in the changes to Indigenous animistic knowledge and practice, which are currently unfolding in response to environmental degradation, industrial development, and climate change.
For this project Dr Nina Kruglikova focuses on the history of climate science in Russia and how at present Russian climate scientists imagine and understand the latest dynamics of climate change. Her role involves carrying out research among Russian climate scientists, and explore how Russian climate science contributes to the latest developments in the field of climate change studies.
Dr Mally Stelmaszyk, expanding on her PhD research, focuses on the questions of animism and climate change in Far Eastern Russia. She explores how the processes associated with environmental change and climate uncertainty influence beliefs and practices of indigenous communities in Amur and Khabarovsk regions, in particular the Nanai and the Eveny. She further asks if and how these distinct knowledges and practices can be merged with scientific approaches in order to better understand climate change.
For this project, Dr Milligan is working in Yunnan and Sichuan in China, and Saint-Petersburg in Russia. He is comparing new assemblages of scientific knowledge that are produced when scientists envision a world transformed by climate change in China and Russia.