Doctoral Dissertation Research: Migration and Indigenous Ecological Knowledge

据预测，人为气候变化将增加从边缘农业和土著社区向富裕城市的移民。许多农业家庭已经依靠移民劳动力的家庭成员收入来补充其农业生计，尽管这种对移民的依赖正在改变长期以来的农业实践和相关知识体系。本博士论文项目考察了气候变化和移民之间的联系，以土著农业家庭如何通过其农业和经济实践了解和应对气候变化为中心。除了提供资金培训一名人类学和环境研究的研究生，学习经验、科学数据收集和分析的方法外，该项目还将有助于对气候变化如何影响移民的实证和理论理解。该项目的结果将传播给致力于气候变化、农业和移民关系的组织。该项目是对土著自给农户及其国际移民社区的多地点民族志研究。该项目提出了以下三个假设：土著农民依靠当地的气候知识来管理农业的风险和不确定性；家庭通过维持耕种所需的土地和资源来管理移民的风险和不确定性；移民导致的农业实践变化使农户免受气候变化的影响。为了验证这些假设，本项目采用了对农业和家庭经济实践的参与性观察、半结构化访谈、经济日记和参与性遥感等方法，研究人员将与参与者一起拍摄航空照片，并对他们的农业实践进行空间可视化。该项目有助于研究移民对环境的影响、自给农民的家庭经济以及气候变化对移民的影响，并在更广泛的范围内推进环境人类学和人文地理学的研究。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Anthropogenic climatic change is predicted to increase migration from marginalized agrarian and indigenous communities to wealthier cities. Already, many agrarian households rely on family members’ incomes from migrant labor to supplement their agricultural livelihoods, even as this reliance on migration is changing long-held agricultural practices and associated knowledge systems. This doctoral dissertation project examines the link between climatic change and migration by centering how indigenous agrarian households understand and respond to climatic change through their agricultural and economic practices. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology and environmental studies in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, this project will contribute to an emerging empirical and theoretical understanding of how climate change impacts migration. The results of this project will be disseminated to organizations working at the nexus of climate change, agriculture, and migration. This project is a multi-sited ethnographic study of indigenous subsistence farming households and their international migrant communities. This project forwards the following three hypotheses: that indigenous farmers rely upon local climatic knowledge in managing the risks and uncertainties of agriculture, that households manage the risks and uncertainties of migration by maintaining the land and resources necessary for cultivation, and that migration-induced changes in agricultural practices insulate or expose agricultural households to the effects of climatic change. To test these hypotheses this project employs the methods of participant observation of agricultural and household economic practices, semi-structured interviews, economic diaries, and participant remote sensing, in which the researcher will work with participants to take aerial photographs and make spatial visualizations of their farming practices. This project contributes to scholarship on the environmental impacts of migration, the household economy of subsistence farmers, and the impact of climate change on migration, in addition to advancing scholarship in environmental anthropology and human geography more broadly.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.