Uninhibited Synergies: Connecting Humanities, Engineering, and Social Sciences in Arctic Research and Public Engagement

March 31- April 2, 2016, Juneau Alaska

The Juneau Workshop Organizing Committee: Sveta Yamin-Pasternak, University of Alaska Fairbanks; Erica Hill, University of Alaska Southeast; Igor Pasternak, University of Alaska Fairbanks; Bill Schnabel, University of Alaska Fairbank

Over the past 15 years, the Arctic has experienced substantial social and environmental transformations. Some of these changes are on pace with predictions of the late 1990s, but others have occurred much more rapidly than expected. Many of the documented and anticipated shifts in the Arctic are linked to environmental change: changing sea ice and snow cover, coastal erosion leading to displacement of modern villages and destruction of preserved archaeological sites, questions of subsistence food security, increased shipping and oil exploration, with their associated economic impacts (positive and negative) and risk of oil spills, to name just a few.

Many other changes in the Arctic are largely independent of changing climate: continued loss of Native languages, high rates of unemployment, domestic violence and substance abuse, and the increased influence of social media among and between isolated communities of the high north. Yet, while the North has always seemed remote and marginal to global or US national interests, Arctic people and environments are increasingly connected socially, economically, and environmentally to those living to the south.
The potential for an increasingly ice-free Arctic Ocean, for example, opens up possibilities for new shipping routes shifting economic costs and benefits for global markets, for expanded exploitation of the circumpolar basin’s fossil fuel and mineral resources, and for attendant new focus on the north as an economic and security zone of strategic and tactical importance.

All of these potential transformations have impacts not only on the United States’ northernmost communities, but also on the global and national economic, social, and cultural systems best studied by social scientists in interdisciplinary collaborations capable of providing information and strategies of need for policy development and community development.

The Arctic Horizons project will bring together members of the Arctic social science research and indigenous communities to reassess the goals, potentials, and needs of these diverse communities and ASSP within the context of a rapidly changing circumpolar North. A series of five topical and regional workshops held across the country will bring together approximately 150 western and indigenous scholars to discuss the future of Arctic social science research. Additional participation by the broader Arctic social sciences, indigenous science, and stakeholder communities will be solicited through an interactive web platform that will also share workshop and project outcomes, supported by special sessions at national and regional conferences.

The results of the workshops and on-line input will be compiled at a final synthesis workshop with a report produced to describes the community's vision for the future of Arctic social science research. This re-envisioning process will help shape future Arctic social science research and inform Arctic economic, environmental, and political policy development.