ou0355@princeton.edu
Olga Ulturgasheva has carried out ethnographic research on childhood and adolescence, narrative and memory, animist and nomadic cosmologies, reindeer herding and hunting, climate change and the latest environmental transformations in Siberia and Alaska. Since 2006, she has been engaged in a number of international projects exploring human and non-human personhood, youth resilience, climate change, and adaptation patterns in Siberia, the American Arctic, and Amazonia. She is an author of Narrating the Future in Siberia: Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny (Berghahn Books 2012) and a co-editor of Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (Berghahn 2012).
She serves as a Principal Investigator for two large international, collaborative research projects funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the European Research Council (ERC). The NSF-funded project is a comparative, collaborative study of adaptation strategies and resilience patterns among Alaskan Yup’ik and Siberian Eveny. The study aims to provide new insights on human capacity to navigate through the latest environmental threats induced by climate change and environmental degradation in the Arctic (2015–2022). The ERC-funded project examines how climate change is managed at the ethnic borderlands of China and Russia while mobilizing expertise of anthropologists, historians and philosophers of science and ethics, religious studies experts, indigenous leaders, and environmental scientists (2020–2026).
