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https://pressbooks.lib.vt.edu/alaskanative/ At the start of the pandemic, the editors of this annotated bibliography initiated a remote (i.e., largely virtual) ethnographic research project that investigated how COVID-19 was impacting off-site modular construction practices in Alaska Native communities. Many of these communities are located off the road system and thus face not only dramatically higher costs but multiple logistical challenges in securing licensed tradesmen and construction crews and in shipping building supplies and equipment to their communities. These barriers, as well as the region’s long winters and short building seasons, complicate the construction of homes and related infrastructure projects. Historically, these communities have also grappled with inadequate housing, including severe overcrowding and poor-quality building stock that is rarely designed for northern Alaska’s climate (Marino 2015). Moreover, state and federal bureaucracies and their associated funding opportunities often further complicate home building by failing to accommodate the digital divide in rural Alaska and the cultural values and practices of Native communities.[1] It is not surprising, then, that as we were conducting fieldwork for this project, we began hearing stories about these issues and about how the restrictions caused by the pandemic were further exacerbating them. Amidst these stories, we learned about how modular home construction was being imagined as a possible means for addressing both the complications caused by the pandemic and the need for housing in the region (McKinstry 2021). As a result, we began to investigate how modular construction practices were figuring into emergent responses to housing needs in Alaska communities. We soon realized that we needed to broaden our focus to capture a variety of prefabricated building methods that are often colloquially or idiomatically referred to as “modular.” This included a range of prefabricated building systems (e.g., manufactured, volumetric modular, system-built, and Quonset huts and other reused military buildings[2]). Our further questions about prefabricated housing in the region became the basis for this annotated bibliography. Thus, while this bibliography is one of multiple methods used to investigate these issues, it played a significant role in guiding our research and helped us bring together the diverse perspectives we were hearing from our interviews with building experts in the region and the wider debates that were circulating in the media and, to a lesser degree, in academia. The actual research for each of three sections was carried out by graduate students Lauren Criss-Carboy and Laura Supple.[3] They worked with us to identify source materials and their hard work led to the team identifying three themes that cover intersecting topics related to housing security in Alaska during the pandemic. The source materials collected in these sections can be used in a variety of ways depending on what readers are interested in exploring, including insights into debates on housing security in the region as the pandemic was unfolding (2021-2022). The bibliography can also be used as a tool for thinking about the relational aspects of these themes or the diversity of ways in which information on housing was circulating during the pandemic (and the implications that may have had on community well-being and preparedness). That said, this bibliography is not a comprehensive analysis. Instead, by bringing these three sections together with one another to provide a snapshot of what was happening at that time, it provides a critical jumping off point for scholars working on these issues. The first section focuses on how modular housing figured into pandemic responses to housing needs. In exploring this issue, author Laura Supple attends to both state and national perspectives as part of a broader effort to situate Alaska issues with modular housing in relation to wider national trends. This led to the identification of multiple kinds of literature, ranging from published articles to publicly circulated memos, blog posts, and presentations. These materials are important source materials that will likely fade in the vastness of the Internet and thus may help provide researchers with specific insights into how off-site modular construction was used – and perhaps hyped – to address pandemic concerns over housing, which in turn may raise wider questions about how networks, institutions, and historical experiences with modular construction are organized and positioned to respond to major societal disruptions like the pandemic. As Supple pointed out, most of the material identified in this review speaks to national issues and only a scattering of examples was identified that reflect on the Alaskan context. The second section gathers a diverse set of communications exploring housing security and homelessness in the region. The lack of adequate, healthy housing in remote Alaska communities, often referred to as Alaska’s housing crisis, is well-documented and preceded the pandemic (Guy 2020). As the pandemic unfolded, journalists and other writers reported on the immense stress that was placed on already taxed housing resources in these communities (Smith 2020; Lerner 2021). The resulting picture led the editors to describe in their work how housing security in the region exists along a spectrum that includes poor quality housing as well as various forms of houselessness including, particularly relevant for the context, “hidden homelessness” (Hope 2020; Rogers 2020). The term houseless is a revised notion of homelessness because it captures a richer array of both permanent and temporary forms of housing precarity that people may experience in a region (Christensen et al. 2107). By identifying sources that reflect on the multiple forms of housing insecurity that people were facing, this section highlights the forms of disparity that complicated pandemic responses. Moreover, this section underscores ingenuity (Graham 2019; Smith 2020; Jason and Fashant 2021) that people on the ground used to address the needs of their communities. The third section provides a snapshot from the first year of the pandemic into how CARES Act funds were allocated to Native Alaska communities and used to address housing security. This subject was extremely complicated in Alaska due to the existence of for-profit Alaska Native Corporations and disputes over eligibility for the funds impacted disbursements nationwide. The resources in this section cover that dispute, impacts of the pandemic on housing security, and efforts to use the funds for housing as well as barriers Alaska communities faced trying to secure and use the funds. In summary, this annotated bibliography provides an overview of what was happening, in real time, during the pandemic around a specific topic: housing security in largely remote Alaska Native communities. The media used by housing specialists to communicate the issues discussed here are diverse, ranging from news reports to podcasts and from blogs to journal articles. This diversity speaks to the multiple ways in which information was circulating on housing at a time when the nightly news and radio broadcasts focused heavily on national and state health updates and policy developments. Finding these materials took time, and we share them here because they illustrate why attention to housing security issues is critical for addressing crises like the pandemic. For instance, one theme that emerged out of a recent National Science Foundation workshop on COVID research in the North NSF Conference[4] was that Indigenous communities are not only recovering from the pandemic but also evaluating lessons learned to better prepare for the next one, and resilience will depend significantly on more—and more adaptable—infrastructure and greater housing security. 

Communication and collaboration are key components of engineering work (Trevelyan, 2014), and teamwork, including interdisciplinary teamwork, is increasingly seen as an important component of engineering education programs (Borrego, Karlin, McNair, & Beddoes, 2013; Male, Bush, & Chapman, 2010, 2011; Paretti, Cross, & Matusovich, 2014; Purzer, 2011). Employers and education researchers alike advocate teamwork as a means of developing skills that engineering graduates need (Purzer, 2011), and accreditation bodies consider the ability to both lead and function on teams as an important outcome for engineering graduates (Engineers Australia, 2017). However, “despite the clear emphasis on teamwork in engineering and the increasing use of student team projects, our understanding of how best to cultivate and assess these learning outcomes in engineering students is sorely underdeveloped (McGourty et al., 2002; Shuman, Besterfield-Sacre, & McGourty, 2005)” (Borrego et al., 2013, p. 473). In order to contribute to the current conversation on interdisciplinary teamwork in engineering education, and to advance understandings of how best to cultivate teamwork learning outcomes, this paper discusses the most common teamwork challenges and presents boundary negotiating artifacts as a conceptual framework for addressing them. Drawing on data from long-term ethnographic observations of a design competition project, and the challenges students experienced, we utilise findings from a systematic literature review and the conceptual framework of boundary negotiating artifacts to present a case study of how boundary negotiating artifacts can support important teamwork constructs. 

Interdisciplinary teams must figure out ways to navigate team members’ differing disciplinary backgrounds and successfully communicate with one another. This can prove challenging because disciplines comprise unique cultures, goals, perspectives, epistemologies, methodologies, and languages.1 Consequently, communication is among the most frequently cited challenges to interdisciplinary collaboration, and developing communication skills is widely recognized as an important facet of teamwork.2 Yet, “Newcomers often underestimate the challenges of interdisciplinary work and, as a rule, do not spend sufficient time to allow them to overcome difference and create common ground, which in turn leads to frustration, unresolved conflicts, and...discontinued work.”3 Thus, it is important that teams establish common ground in terms of shared language, concepts, and goals.4 Boundary negotiating artifacts (BNAs) are one way in which interdisciplinary teams can establish common ground and facilitate communication between team members. BNAs are artifacts and inscriptions that coordinate perspectives and align different communities of practice so that they can collaboratively solve design problems.5 They facilitate transmission of information across disciplinary boundaries, allow team members to learn from other disciplines, create shared understanding of a design problem, and communicate important information. The concept of BNAs emerged out of boundary object traditions in the field of Science and Technology Studies, and is an attempt to overcome limitations of the original concept. More specifically, BNAs add nuance and depth to studies of the complex, non-routine projects which designers increasingly face as they work to address societal challenges. Focusing on the daily micro-level practices of designers reveals communication processes and facets of design work that otherwise remain unseen and are not revealed through either normative descriptions of design work or through interviews alone. Boundary negotiating artifacts provide a framework to study just such daily micropractices and inscriptions. We suggest that boundary negotiating artifacts are a timely and essential concept for multiple stakeholders in academia and the workplace. This paper presents a theoretical exploration of BNAs and their roles in design teams, supported by an empirical example from a long-term ethnographic study. The three-fold aim of this paper is to present BNAs as: 1) a theoretical and methodological tool for other researchers, 2) a pedagogical tool for faculty members, and 3) a conceptual tool for team members themselves.