Olga Ulturgasheva (Ph.D. Cambridge) is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology. For more than a decade she has been engaged in a number of anthropological and cross-disciplinary studies exploring human and non-human personhood, childhood and youth, climate change, resilience, 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 co-editor of Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (Berghahn 2012). Her latest book, Risky Futures: Climate, Geopolitics and Local Realities in the Uncertain Circumpolar North (Berghahn Book 2022) which she edited together with Barbara Bodenhorn, focuses on the latest implications of climate change for our understanding of environmental risk, co-production of knowledge, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Between 2008-2014 she was involved in two large interdisciplinary projects looking at Arctic Indigenous youth resilience, environmental change and vulnerability both funded by the US National Science Foundation. Now she serves as a principal investigator and co-principal investigator for two synergistic research projects funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and European Research Council (ERC Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme). The projects look at the impact of climate change on knowledge production, environmental policies, and Indigenous adaptation patterns in Arctic and beyond. In 2021-2022 she was Pathy Visiting Professor at Princeton University and has been recently invited to serve in an advisory capacity of the Senior Research Scientist for the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She is currently working on two large publication projects: one is a single-authored research monograph and another is a co-edited volume. Both books will examine the latest implications of climate change and environmental uncertainty for more-than-human security and co-production of knowledge.  

Dr Olga Ulturgasheva served as a Prinicpal Investigator for the NSF-funded international, collaborative research project "Community Adaptations and Knowledge Sharing in Alaska and Siberia" run in collaboration with the University of Alaska Fairbanks (duration: 2015-2021) and now leads Manchester-based team of the project "Cosmological Visionaries: Shamans, Scientists and Climate Change at the Ethnic Borderlands of China and Russia" funded by the ERC Synergy Grant and run in collaboration with King's College London (duration: 2020-2026). The project announces the latest developments and milestones through the website: www.cosmogeorussia.com

I welcome enquiries from students wishing to undertake ethnographic research in Siberia, Russia, Arctic regions and Eurasia in the following broad areas:

-environment, sustainability and climate change 
-the anthropology of childhood and youth
- the anthropology of the Arctic and Sub-Arctic
-shamanism, shamanic practices and animist cosmologies
-post-Soviet, post-socialist transformations
-human-animal relations, reindeer herding, hunting
-movement, mobility, migration, settlement

ERC Synergy Grant 2020-2026

https://cosmogeorussia.com/