News and Announcements

Gender disparities in the out-migration of young people from rural fishing regions across the North Atlantic and North Pacific suggest important differences in the ways rural young men and women identify with and experience rural life. Rachel Donkersloot, director of the Working Waterfronts Program for the Alaska Marine Conservation Council, has studied those disparities in the rapidly shifting landscape of a rural Irish fishing community.

Residents of the Mat-Su Borough north of Anchorage say they would be willing to pay substantial amounts for actions that help protect things that drew them to the area in the first place—including salmon streams, local farmland, and opportunities for recreation and hunting. That's the main finding of a recent survey ISER economist Tobias Schwörer conducted of borough residents. The survey asked respondents to choose among different hypothetical future land-use and development alternatives, with different costs assigned to each alternative. By their choices, the respondents put dollar values on actions that would help protect non-market resources, like healthy salmon runs and public easements for hiking or snowmachine trails. These dollar amounts are hypothetical—no one was actually asked to pay anything—but they are still important measures of what borough residents value and consider worth paying for. The survey was done for The Nature Conservancy, with funding from the Bullitt Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Read the 4-page summary of survey results, and see technical documentation of the survey and analysis of data. For more information, get in touch with Tobias Schwörer at tschwoerer@alaska.edu.

Ms. Rönkä will present research on the impacts of globalization on the lives of pulp mill workers in Northern Finland, city of Kemijärvi. Due to global increases in efficiency of production, pulp mills and factories in Finland were offshored to the global south. Her qualitative study examined how the workers experienced the mill closures and how the closures affected their lives and livelihoods. The research demonstrates that when globalization research is confined to large macro level economic, political and cultural processes, it excludes examination of how the impact of global flows is influenced by the history, culture, and social structure of local contexts. One way to understand complex globalization processes better is to examine them through place-based, lived experiences. Anna Reetta Rönkä graduated in 2010 with an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from University of Oulu, Faculty of Humanities. The UAA Department of Public Health is currently sponsoring Ms. Rönkä as a visiting scholar while she is working on her doctoral research about the experience of loneliness from childhood to adulthood in Northern Finland. Her current research interests include: socio-emotional wellbeing and health in circumpolar societies, gendered experiences of loneliness, and social isolation. Her affiliations are Women´s and Gender Studies, Faculty of Education and Institute of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu Finland.

Jennifer Shaw, PhD (Case Western Reserve, 2013) is a Senior Researcher at Southcentral Foundation in Anchorage, where she conducts research on youth suicide prevention, healthcare decision-making, and the development of culturally grounded health services. Her research interests are in medical anthropology, social determinants of health, and cross-cultural childhood and adolescence. She will talk about the role of subsistence in the well-being of Dena’ina Athabascan youths growing up in Southwestern Alaska. How do subsistence and other cultural activities fit into the lives and aspirations of contemporary Dena’ina youths living in rural Alaska? What factors impede or facilitate their ability to achieve these aspirations in the transition to adulthood? Dr. Shaw conducted an ethnographic case study with 19 youths in one Dena’ina village, which showed that despite concerns about Alaska Native youths’ commitment to culture, this group deeply identifies with their tradition and aspires to continue these activities into adulthood, despite significant obstacles in their paths.

Reinhold Sackmann, Dr. rer.pol. habil., is Full Professor for Sociology, Dynamic Analysis of Social Structure, at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. His fields of research are life course analysis, sociology of education and coping with demographic change. He talks about how after accelerated population growth in the last two centuries, in a number of European and East Asian countries there are signs of a stagnant, sometimes shrinking population that is getting older and more heterogeneous. What are the effects of this new situation? Is there scope to modify effects of these new trends? Dr. Sackmann conducted a longitudinal data analysis of German school systems from 1995-2010, which shows that demographic change has had a profound effect on the institutional system of the education system, which for a long time was seen as a path dependent system that could not be transformed by political reforms.

Jessica Cherry, a research associate professor at UAF’s International Arctic Research Center, will discuss the physics and economics of climate impacts on hydropower, as well as valuation of observational systems relating to climate and water, using examples from Scandinavia, Alaska, and California. Norway has significant observational infrastructure, allowing researchers to see strong connections between precipitation and supply, air temperature and demand, and electricity price and trade volumes. In Southeast Alaska, which has few such observational systems, there are technological challenges in providing geophysical data to hydropower operators, and additional challenges in measuring the value of improved forecasting. Jessica Cherry holds a PhD in climate physics from Columbia University in New York. This presentation is open to the public, but Dr. Cherry hopes that it will also lead to discussions and potential research relationships with researchers from ISER and other organizations.

Historically and into the present day, herring and herring roe (tskah and xs'waanx) have provided the Tsimshian people of British Columbia with a range of food resources, both the fish itself—fresh, dried, or smoked—and the roe in several forms. But indigenous use has narrowed since the arrival of non-indigenous peoples. In this talk, Charles Menzies, a professor of social anthropology at the University of British Columbia, will describe the causes and implications of this narrowing of herring use among the Tsimshian, discussing the topic through archaeological, ethnographic, and indigenous-knowledge approaches. Dr. Menzies was formerly a commercial fisherman, and his research is predominantly fisheries-related, involving both indigenous and non-indigenous communities on the north coast of British Columbia. He also produces and directs documentary films, primarily about fishing communities.

Many recent developments in telecommunications provide opportunities for Alaska, particularly for Alaska Native and tribal organizations, business and institutional users, public sector agencies, and consumers. This seminar, held on March 28, provided a concise overview of these developments, with links to additional information. The seminar was conducted by Dr. Heather E. Hudson, professor of communications policy at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at UAA. She has conducted many studies on telecommunications in the North, and is completing a book entitled Connecting Alaskans: From Telegraph to Broadband, to be published by the University of Alaska Press. Download the presentation (PDF, 3.5MB) If you were not able to attend, but are interested in future ISER broadband activities and research, please send a message with “Broadband” in the subject line to UAA_ISER@uaa.alaska.edu.