I am a social anthropologist working at the intersection of Indigenous knowledge, climate change, human-nonhuman relations, and collaborative research in the Arctic and beyond. My research asks how Indigenous communities understand, anticipate, and respond to environmental change, uncertainty, and risk. I am especially interested in how people work with animals, landscapes, weather, spirits, scientists, and policy-makers to make sense of rapidly changing worlds and to shape possible futures. My forthcoming book, Reimagining Collaboration: Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge in a Time of Climate Crisis, will be published by Princeton University Press in February 2027. The book examines how Indigenous and scientific knowledge can be brought into more meaningful forms of collaboration in the context of climate crisis. It argues that collaboration is not only a matter of dialogue between Indigenous knowledge-holders, anthropologists, and climate scientists, but also depends on learning to listen to animals, land, weather, and other more-than-human beings whose presence and actions shape environmental knowledge.

I have carried out long-term ethnographic research in Siberia and the American Arctic. Across this work, I have focused on childhood and youth, resilience, adaptation, more-than-human personhood, environmental change, and the co-production of knowledge. I am the author of Narrating the Future in Siberia: Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny (Berghahn Books, 2012), co-editor of Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (Berghahn Books, 2012), and co-editor, with Barbara Bodenhorn, of Risky Futures: Climate, Geopolitics and Local Realities in the Uncertain Circumpolar North (Berghahn Books, 2022).

My current work asks how Indigenous knowledge, scientific research, and more-than-human relations can be brought into more meaningful forms of collaboration in a time of climate crisis.

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/