Olga Ulturgasheva | Sharing your World through Dance and Stories: Alaska-Siberia Knowledge Exchange

Olga Ulturgasheva is a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK. Over the last 15 years she has been engaged in a number of anthropological and cross-disciplinary studies exploring human and non-human personhood, animism, childhood and youth, climate change, resilience and adaptation patterns in Siberia, American Arctic and Amazonia. She is an author of Narrating the Future in Siberia: Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny (Berghahn 2012) and co-editor of Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (Berghahn 2012). Her new book titled Risky Futures: Climate, Geopolitics and Local Realities in the Uncertain Circumpolar North (edited together with Barbara Bodenhorn) is forthcoming in spring 2022 (under contract with Berghahn Books). 

Currently, she serves as a Principal Investigator and co-Principal Investigator for two large international, collaborative research projects funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and European Research Council (ERC). The NSF-funded project is a comparative, collaborative study of adaptation strategies and resilient responses to the latest threats induced by climate change and environmental degradation in the Russian and American Arctic (2015-2021). The ERC-funded project examines how climate change is managed at the ethnic borderlands of China and Russia while mobilising expertise of anthropologists, historians and philosophers of science and ethics, indigenous experts and environmental scientists (2020-2026). 

Further Reading:

Ulturgasheva, O. and Rasmus, S., Morrow, Ph. 2015. ‘Collapsing the Distance: Indigenous Youth Engagement in a Circumpolar Study of Youth Resilience’ in Arctic Anthropology. 52(1):50-60.

Ulturgasheva, O. and Bodenhorn, B. 2017. ‘Arctic Futures? Climate, Geopolitics and Local Realities’ in Witness the Arctic: Chronicles of the NSF Arctic Science Section. 20(3):23-30.

Bodenhorn, B. and O. Ulturgasheva. 2017. Climate Strategies: Thinking through Arctic Examples. In Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 375 (20160363): 1-13. Open access.

Ulturgasheva, O., Rasmus, S., Wexler, L., Nystad, K. and Kral, M. 2014. ‘Arctic Indigenous Youth Resilience and Vulnerability: Comparative Analysis of Adolescent Experiences and Resilience Strategies across Five Circumpolar Communities’ in Transcultural Psychiatry. 51(5):735-756.