Collaborative Research: Knowledge Co-production: communities and scientists working together to explore nature, culture, and Alaska Native well-being in a changing Alaska.

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This project brings together Alaska Native community partners and university researchers to develop shared research priorities, guide collaborative data collection, and interpret findings about issues of broad public and theoretical concern. Specifically, this project prompts collaborative engagements with the increasing challenges to fossil fuel development in northern Alaska, including: eroding coastlines, petroleum-dependent subsistence activities, plans for new offshore drilling, dwindling dividends,and unprecedented environmental shifts. Seeking to involve Native communities within wider conversations across research and policy around these concerns, this project is inspired by innovative community efforts to secure subsistence, insure wellbeing, and create viable cultural futures in a context of rapid change. By building a unique regional research alliance around these insights, the project also aims to revise common understandings about some of the most pressing topics of our times, including health and wellness, inequality, changing ecosystems, and the prospects of a petroleum-based social contract in Alaska. This project will directly benefit partner communities, science and scientific communities, policy-makers and efforts to strengthen American democracy. The project makes three primary contributions to publicly relevant social science research focused on Arctic futures. First, it develops a collaborative method that empowers Alaska Native community research partners to design, coordinate, and implement research questions and activities within their own communities.  Second, a decolonizing methodology endeavors to rethink the analytic lexicons of Arctic social science research, and thus to revise scholarly approaches to some of the biggest issues of the present, including the ways that knowledge about Arctic futures is negotiated and co-produced. Finally, this project maximizes the broader impacts of this knowledge by laying the foundation for a wider research network that brings Indigenous and scientific insights to bear on the most critical public problems in northern Alaska today. Findings from the study will also advance conversations in several bodies of scholarship concerned with decolonizing methodologies, shifting Arctic ecologies and economies, and Indigenous wellbeing.  In such ways, the project will engage current debates by creating a more inclusive exploration of the Arctic and its open-ended futures.