Doctoral Dissertation Research: Migration and Indigenous Ecological Knowledge

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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.