Project updates

Building on insights from our three-week collaborative fieldwork in June 2023, we explored this time how different governance scenarios may affect adaptive responses to environmental change in Wainwright using a survey and qualitative interviews. We were in touch with 60 community members, who took part in our survey and some of them we also interviewed. Thank you so much again to each and everyone of our participants for taking the time as well as the fantastic staff at the Tribal Office and the City of Wainwright who made this fieldwork possible! A special thanks to the Wainwright Tribal Council (see picture) for their ongoing support and contributions to the project! We will soon share more!

Check out this web piece about our upcoming fieldwork, put together by the fantastic communications team of the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. And follow us on Instagram for real-time updates as we (Kinga Psiuk, Simon West, Caroline Schill) head into the field!

On 17 December 2024, Kinga and Caroline invited colleagues from the Stockholm Resilience Centre to a seminar where they shared project insights, reflections and next steps. They also exhibited high-quality prints of some of the photographs that research participants took or shared during fieldwork in June 2023. The seminar was well attended and the exhibition was very well received!

We are delighted about the news that we have received a research grant awarded in competition for our upcoming fieldwork from The Hierta Retzius Foundation for Scientific Research, administered by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

We gave a talk titled, “Living with rapid environmental change in Wainwright, northern Alaska: Iñupiat community insights through participatory photography”, at the conference of the Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) ‘PECS-3: Pathways to Sustainability’ in Montréal, Canada (August 12-15, 2024).

The conference gathered a diverse group of scholars, policy-makers, stakeholders, practitioners, and Indigenous rights-holders from across Canada and all over the planet to share cross-cutting inter- and transdisciplinary research and insights to enable wellbeing for both people and planet.

In this talk, Kinga and Caroline shared the process, outcomes, and reflections of the three-week collaborative fieldwork that took place in June 2023 to explore the environmental changes that matter most to the community of Wainwright using participatory photography, photo elicitation, and interviews.

We reproduced the original exhibit shown in Olgoonik Hotel in Wainwright in June 2023 in virtual form here. The exhibit is a collection of photographs taken by participants for the purpose of the project or photographs that participants already had and decided to share as part of the project. Each photograph is accompanied by caption that reveals meaning evoked during the Photovoice process. Several photographs taken by field researcher Kinga Psiuk were also included. These are complemented by captions based on the conversations with participants. Together, the photographs create a story of environmental changes, lifestyle, and concerns - all embedded in the context of past, present, and future.

Check out page 11 in the new Annual Report (2022/2023) of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, the administrating organisation of our project. Apart from our first visit to Wainwright, the report also highlights our first project paper, which was published in August 2022. Link to report here.

The Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics is an international research institute under the auspices of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The major objectives of the Beijer Institute are to carry out research and stimulate scientific cooperation to promote a deeper understanding of the interplay between ecological systems and social and economic development.

In June 2023, it was finally time to visit Wainwright. Kinga Psiuk and Tracie Curry conducted the collaborative fieldwork on behalf of the project team. During a three-week period, we explored together the environmental changes that matter most to the community using participatory photography, photo elicitation, and interviews. A temporary photo exhibit from the work was developed and displayed in the local Olgoonik Hotel (see picture; photo credit: Kinga Psiuk).

Simon and Caroline were invited to present their scientific paper ‘Negotiating the ethical-political dimensions of research methods: a key competency in mixed methods, inter- and transdisciplinary, and co-production research’ at the ‘CIRCUS Symposium 2022 - Conducting Research Together,’ on October 20, 2022. You can find a video of their presentation here.

CIRCUS, the Centre for Integrated Research on Culture and Society at Uppsala University, Sweden, is a platform for interdisciplinary culture and society research.

In our first project paper, published in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications in August 2022, we (Simon and Caroline) argue that negotiating the ethical-political dimensions of research methods is a key competency in mixed methods, inter- and transdisciplinary, and co-production research. Research methods are not just technical tools but are social practices with ethical and political consequences.

We describe ethical dilemmas we faced in bringing methods together in a mixed-method design: Developing a priori vs. responsive research design; and providing anonymity vs. credit for participant contributions.

We share the practices that we engage in to better explore these sensitive issues together: reading groups (philosophy of science, ethics and science and technology studies), personal video diaries, and facilitated group dialogues. And we share the skills that helped us to negotiate and come to provisional solutions: reflexivity and accountability, deliberation, and practical wisdom. We suggest how these practices and skills might be integrated within research projects, graduate training programs and research organisations and provide pointers for evaluators in assessing the ethical-political rigour of research projects.

Improving our abilities to recognise and negotiate the ethical-political dimensions of research methods can lead to transdisciplinary research that is more: rigorous, careful, and equitable and socially responsive.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic we had to yet again postpone our fieldwork. We hope to be able to go to Wainwright in the summer months of 2022.

Due the Covid-19 pandemic we could not go to Wainwright in the summer months of 2020 to start working with the people of Wainwright. We postponed fieldwork to 2021.

We are excited to finally start our journey — to explore together with the community of Wainwright their responses to environmental change in the Arctic. We are currently planning our first fieldwork to be happening in the Arctic summer months of 2020. Stay tuned!