President
University of Northern British Columbia
Prince George, British Columbia, Canada
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Gail Fondahl is Professor of Geography at the University of Northern British Columbia, and served as UNBC's Vice-President of Research, 2008-2012. Heading to graduate school to study Moscow’s urban morphology, Gail soon became more interested in indigenous cultural geography of the Russian North. She examined the effect of the Baykal-Amur (BAM) railway construction on Evenki reindeer husbandry in Transbaykalia for her Ph.D. (U.C. Berkeley), then focused more broadly to indigenous land rights and legal geography in the Russian North.

Gail has also carried out co-managed research on sustainable resource management with Tl’azt’en Nation in northern British Columbia. She has been involved in organizing two International Summer Schools on Indigenous Rights, led by Natalia Novikova of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology. Gail is involved in the Arctic Social Indicators project, and serves as one of the co-leads on the Arctic Human Development Report 2. She has been a member of IASSA since 1992.

Outgoing president (ex-officio)
Ph.D., Senior Scientist
Stefansson Arctic Institute

Borgir, Nordurslod

IS-600 Akureyri

Iceland

Tel: +354 460 89 84
Mobile : +354 893 04 88
Fax: +354 460 89 89
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  
Special links:
Arctic Human Development Report 
Northern Research Forum
Arctic Social Indicators Project (ASI)
Arctic Human Development Report - Volume II  

Land Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ)

Joan Nymand Larsen is senior scientist with the Stefansson Arctic Institute, Akureyri, Iceland. She is also with the Social and Economic Development and Polar Law Program, University of Akureyri. She studied macroeconomics at University of Copenhagen, and received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Manitoba, Canada, specializing in economic development and natural resource-based economies of the North. Her background includes many years of researching and publishing on the Arctic economy and quality-of-life in the North. Her research on northern economies and renewable and non-renewable resource extraction includes the impact of industrial development and global change processes for Northern regions and local and coastal communities. Current research focuses on the study and assessment of living conditions and quality-of-life across the circumpolar region, and the construction, measurement and testing of Arctic specific social indicators. She leads three international indicators and quality-of-life projects - Arctic Social Indicators (ASI - I and II) and AHDR-II (Arctic Human Development Report: Regional Processes and Global Linkages. She was Project Manager and co-editor of the first Arctic Human Development Report (AHDR) launched in 2004. She is coordinating lead author of the Polar Regions chapter, for the 5th assessment report, WG-II, of the IPCC. She is member of the international steering committee of LOICZ – Land Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone, and board member on the Arctic Futures Program with the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research. Her editorial work includes, among others, Springer Encyclopedia of Quality of Life Research and The Polar Journal.

Arctic Council Indigenous Peoples’ Secretariat

Technical Advisor

Copenhagen, Denmark

Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Alona Yefimenko was born and raised in a family of Chukchi and Even reindeer herders in Ayanka, Kamchatka, Russia. From 1988 to 1996, she worked as the Director of the Koryak Ethnography Museum in Palana, Kamchatka. Her experience includes fieldwork and archaeological excavations in the Koryak region of Kamchatka, training and research in Canada (DIAND/Quebec Province) and at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University. With the establishment of the Arctic Council in 1996, she joined the Indigenous Peoples’ Secretariat, a support organisation for the Arctic Indigenous Peoples’ Organizations that are Permanent Participants to the Arctic Council. She has been involved in the CAFF Sacred Sites Project, the Northern Sea Route Assessment and other Arctic Council Projects.

She holds a Master’s Degree in Philology from the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia and the Far Eastern State University.

Department of Geography

University of Northern Iowa

205 ITTC UNI 50614-0406
USA

Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Andrey N. Petrov has a circumpolar career path: he was born, raised and educated in Russia, received his PhD in Canada (Toronto) and works as Assistant Professor of Geography and Director of the Arctic Social and Environmental Systems Research Lab (ARCSES) at the University of Northern Iowa, USA. Andrey is working primarily on economic issues in northern communities and policies of regional development in the Arctic. His ongoing projects include the Creative Arctic, an NSF-funded study of creative capital and cultural economies in the circumpolar region, Arctic Social Indicators (ASI I and II), Arctic Human Development Report II and others. Andrey also leads several international research efforts devoted to human-environment relationships and socio-ecological systems in the Arctic (e.g., Taimyr Reindeer and Environmental Change (TREC) and Arctic Fires Exploratory Study (AFES)). In addition, Andrey is one of the organizers of the polar geography affinity group in the Association of American Geographers. He also serves as the Director of the Program in Research and Outreach in Geography between Russia and the United States (PROGRUS).

Head of Project
Issittumi inuuniarnermut atugassarititaasunik misissuineq
Det arktiske Levevilkårsprojekt / SLiCA Survey of Living Conditions in the Arctic
Ilisimatusarfik - University of Greenland

P.O. Box 279

DK-3900 Nuuk

Greenland

Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Birger Poppel is Research Project Chief of the Survey of Living Conditions in the Arctic, SLiCA at Ilisimatusarfik, the University of Greenland. His research interests include living conditions of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, the mixed market and harvest, herding based economies of the Arctic and the economic, social and demographic developments of the Circumpolar North. He is currently co-PI of an ESF BORAS project: Understanding Migration in the Circumpolar North (UMCN); co-team leader in the Arctic Council project: Arctic Social Indicators (ASI); co-PI of Political Economy of Northern Regional Development (PoENoRD); and he participates in the Arctic Council project: The Economy of the North (ECONOR) .

He received an MA in Economics from the University of Copenhagen (1978). He was the first head of Statistics Greenland and served as Chief Statistician from 1989-2004. He is chairman of the Greenland IPY Committee and a member of the IPY Data Sub Committee. He serves on the editorial board of Social Indicator Research . He is currently a member of the Board of Governors of Ilisimatusarfik, University of Greenland.

Lakehead University & Yukon College
Canada

Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Raised in Northern Canada, Chris Southcott is a professor of sociology at Lakehead University and an adjunct professor at Yukon College.  He has been involved in community-based research in the circumpolar north for over 25 years. Southcott has led several major national and international research initiatives dealing with the North. He has helped to build various programs for the University of the Arctic having led in the development of its social science courses and served as the Chair of the Mobility program. He is currently Lead of the UArctic’s Knowledge and Dialogue programs.  Chris Southcott was the Principal Investigator responsible for the creation of the Social Economy Research Network for Northern Canada (SERNNoCa), for which he currently serves as Chair and Research Director. Currently he is the principal investigator for an international project popularly known as the ReSDA (Resources and Sustainable Development in the Arctic). Its mandate is to develop ways to ensure that a larger share of the resource development benefits stay in the region for the people of North with fewer costs to communities.

Ph.D., Senior Researcher
Anthropology Research Team
Arctic Centre

University of Lapland

PL 122

96101 Rovaniemi

Finland

Tel: +358 400 138807

Fax:  +358-16 362 934

Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  

Website: www.arcticcentre.org/anthropology

 
Florian Stammler holds a position as Senior Researcher in anthropology at the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland, where he coordinates the anthropology research team. He is also an Institute Associate at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, UK, where he has worked between 2003 and 2005 as a post-doctoral research associate.

He received his PhD from the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany, specialising in postsocialist transition studies on the example of Siberian Yamal reindeer herders. His publications are mainly on human-animal-environment relations, reindeer nomadism and the impact of the extractive industry on northern livelihoods - a topic he has been working on for 10 years.

More recently he started working on relocation and sense of place among industrial migrants in the North and is the PI in the BOREAS project MOVE-INNOCOM that studies such migrants' relocation and settlement histories in Soviet and post-Soviet industrial northern cities. He has done extensive fieldwork in various regions of the North, with a special focus on West Siberia and European Russia.

Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Universitätssrasse 7

A-1010 Wien

Austria

Proferssor Emeritus (Anthropology)

Universitiy of Alaska Fairbanks

Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
 

Peter Schweitzer received his Ph.D. degree in social/cultural anthropology from the University of Vienna in 1990 and has since taught at universities in Alaska, Austria, and Russia.

He is currently Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and Professor Emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. From 2007 to 2012, he served as Director of Alaska EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research). His regional areas of expertise are northeastern Siberia and northwestern Alaska and his topical interests include social organization, ethnohistory, hunter-gatherer studies, and history of anthropology. He served as Project Leader of "Moved by the State: Perspectives on Relocation and Resettlement in the Circumpolar North (MOVE)," an IPY-endorsed European Science Foundation project within the BOREAS program. Since 2011, Schweitzer has been the chair of the Social and Human Sciences Working Group of IASC.

Russian Academy of Sciences
Moscow
Russian Federation

Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Tatiana Vlasova is a leading researcher in Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences where she received her Ph.D. in social/economic geography. She graduated from Moscow State University, Geographical Department as a physical geographer. Her experience in the Arctic  is based on the field work and participation in several international multidisciplinary projects such as Arctic Climate Impact Assessment  where she served as a representative from RAIPON, Local Health and Environmental Reporting from the Indigenous Peoples of the Russian North (UNEP Grid-Arendal), IASC Taiga-Tundra Interface Project, Arctic Social Indicators (ASI), etc. She is currently a member of the International Geographical Union Cold Regions Environment (CRE) Commission steering board. During the IPY 2007-2008 she served as a member of the IPY Committee of Russia and  the Sub Committee on Observations under the  WMO-ICSU IPY Joint Committee. She is the leader of the IPY National Russian project devoted to the construction of the “Integrated Arctic Socially-oriented Observation System” (IASOS) to be a network of observation sites in the Russian North. IASOS is included in the multidisciplinary IPY PPS Arctic cluster, is also endorsed by the Arctic Council SDWG as a parallel component to ASI  project - a follow-up of AHDR. Her current research interests include socially-oriented observations and assessments of human-nature system resilience to changes, adaptive capacities of Arctic residents, climate changes impacts on quality of life conditions of indigenous and other local people, involving traditional and local knowledge. She dreams about participation in a long-term circumpolar socially-oriented monitoring network construction which could serve as one of the instruments for the Arctic Change Assessment including the Arctic Resilience project implementation.