About Us

Site Administrator:

Brad Martin is a PhD candidate in history at Northwestern University, near Chicago, Illinois. He is currently conducting dissertation research on the political ecology of aboriginal land claims and national park management in northern Canada and Alaska.

Webmistress:

Laurie Prange-Martin is a librarian at Yukon College in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. She has a strong personal and professional interest in fostering research on the circumpolar north in the humanities and social sciences.

Regional Representatives:

Christina Sawchuk is a PhD candidate in polar studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge in England. Her dissertation research concerns the culture of exploration in the early twentieth-century Canadian Arctic.

Dr. Johan Schimanski is an associate professor in comparative history at Tromsø University in northern Norway. He is currently part of the coordinating group for the Arctic Discourses project and is working together with cultural historian Ulrike Spring on the public and literary reception of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition (1872-1874).

Karen Routledge is a doctoral candidate in American history at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA. Her dissertation is a critical reinterpretation of 19th-century arctic survival stories. It compares the experiences of Inuit families, American whalers, and American enlisted men who travelled far from home and encountered hardship in unfamiliar environments.

Dr. Gita Laidler is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She has been working with three Nunavut communities around Baffin Island for the past five years in efforts to characterize the importance of sea ice processes, uses, and change from local Inuit expertise. She is also interested in collaborative research methods, the human dimensions of environmental change, and linking Inuit and scientific knowledge in a complementary manner.

Julia Christensen is co-director of Northern Students/Northern Research (NSNR), a network in northern Canada linking northern communities and graduate students. She is also a PhD Candidate in Geography at McGill University where she works on issues of homelessness, housing insecurity, and resource development in the Canadian North. Julia will be sharing her representative responsibilities with Alana Kronstal, co-director of NSNR and graduate student in the University of Victoria's Studies in Policy and Practice program. Alana's research addresses the impacts of resource development on health and social service provision in the Northwest Territories, Canada.

Dr. Gabriella A. Massa is the IPY Coordinator for Provincia di Torino, Italy. She is currently a PhD candidate in anthropology and ethnology at the École de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, where she is conducting research on "Arnaq. Inuit Woman. Historical Memories of a Rapidly Changing Society". Dr. Massa shares her network responsibilities with Enrico Foietta, an archeology student at the University of Torino and Circolo Polare Association, Milano. Visit Gabriella's blog here: http://gabriellamassa.wordpress.com.

Peter Loovers is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and is also affiliated with the Gwich'in Social and Cultural Institute in northern Canada. His research involves a contemporary ethnography with Gwich'in in and around Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories. His areas of interest include: Christianity-shamanism, land claim agreements, human-animal relations, western and indigenous philosophies, fur trade, indigenous rights, conceptions of personhood, ‘practicality of learning,’ climate change, and oral history.

Darlene Perkins is a PhD candidate in nursing at Johns Hopkins University and a Graduate Fellow at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. She is from Alaska and her dissertation research focuses on ethics of gene/environment research in Alaska Native populations. She takes a community based perspective with her work and partners with local Tribal organizations.

Dag Avango is a post-doctoral researcher and coordinator of the IPY-project LASHIPA (Large-Scale Historical Exploitation of Polar Areas), at the Arctic Centre, University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He is also affiliated with the Division of History of Science & Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Dag's research concerns the interactions between polar politics and natural resource exploitation in the Arctic and Antarctic, from the 17th century until present.

Dr. Kerrie Ann Shannon is an assistant professor of socio-cultural anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA. Current research involves an examination of community involvement in conservation hunting for polar bears in Nunavut, Canada. Research interests include: ethnographic methods, human-environment relations, economic anthropology, knowledges and skills and games.

Russell Fielding is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University. His research interests involve historical and contemporary human-environmental interactions and he is currently studying the culture and ecology of small-type traditional whaling communities throughout the Caribbean and Atlantic.
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