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Abstract As the Arctic and its rivers continue to warm, a better understanding of the possible future impacts on people would benefit from close partnership with Indigenous communities and scientists from diverse fields of study. We present efforts by the Arctic Rivers Project to conduct community‐engaged research to increase collective understanding of the historical and potential future impacts of climate change on rivers, fish, and Indigenous communities. Working in central to northern Alaska and the Yukon Territory in Canada, the project seeks to engage with Indigenous communities in ethical and equitable ways to produces science that is useful, useable, and used that may serve as an example for future research efforts. Toward this goal, we formed an Indigenous Advisory Council and together developed project‐specific knowledge co‐production protocols. This paper provides a novel model of design and implementation to co‐produce knowledge with communities across a large study domain.
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Care-fully?: The Question of “Knowledge Co-production” in Arctic Science
Understanding and redressing the climate crisis in the Arctic demands acknowledging and translating perspectives from frontline communities, environmental scientists, Indigenous knowledge bearers, and social scientists. As a first approximation to the question of how Arctic scientists conceptualize and enact “knowledge co-production,” we analyze how they write about it in their academic publications through a systematic literature review. Based on the results, we identify the lack of clear definition and practical engagement with “co-production” understood as a practice of integrating knowledges and methodological approaches from various disciplines and cultures. We raise concerns regarding researchers’ claims of co-production without understanding what it means, which is particularly harmful for Arctic communities whose knowledge practices scientists have long marginalized and exploited. In response, we argue that feminist STS scholarship provides crucial guidance on how to create and sustain meaningful relationships for knowledge co-production. These relationships can potentially subvert power inequities that have prevented many Arctic science teams from breaking out of traditional disciplinary silos to create new forms of knowledge exchange, particularly those based on notions of care for collaborators, communities, and equity.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2022639
- PAR ID:
- 10564997
- Publisher / Repository:
- Catalyst Project
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2380-3312
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i2.39359
