The intensification of ecological fragility and rapidity of environmental change in the Siberian Arctic questions adaptability and human capacity to predict and avert ecological disasters while pointing at potential limitations of available models for forecasting and mitigating environmental calamities. Given the bounded human capacity for predicting unpredictable, the challenge is to craft a tentative strategy that takes into detailed and balanced consideration limitations and productive potential of knowledge whether scientific or public. This talk will examine the potentials of co-mobilising geo-cryological and cosmo-ecological expert systems in devising strategies for dealing with the latest dynamic of climate change.
Olga Ulturgasheva is an Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Since 2006 she has been engaged in a number of international studies exploring human and non-human personhood, youth resilience, climate change and adaptation patterns in Siberia, American Arctic and Amazonia. She is an author of Narrating the Future in Siberia: Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny (Berghahn Books 2012) and co-editor of Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (Berghahn 2012). Currently, she is involved in two large international, collaborative research projects funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and European Research Council (ERC). The NSF-funded project is a comparative, collaborative study of adaptation strategies and resilient responses to the latest threats induced by climate change and environmental degradation in the Russian and American Arctic (2015-2021). The ERC-funded project examines how climate change is managed at the ethnic borderlands of China and Russia while mobilising expertise of anthropologists, historians and philosophers of science and ethics, religious studies experts, space and satellite researchers, indigenous leaders and environmental scientists (2020-2026).
Watch the event recording on YouTube here.
This event is co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Anthropology.
