Kelsey Dokis-Jansen is of Anishinaabe ancestry and affiliates with Dokis First Nation located on Okikendawt Island in north-central Ontario, southwest of Lake Nipissing. Born in Edmonton and raised in Hinton, Alberta, Kelsey is also acknowledged as an adopted member of the Foothills Ojibway First Nation. Specializing in the intersections between environmental/resource management and Indigenous knowledge and research practice, Kelsey is furthering her academic study as a PhD Student in Indigenous Studies at the University of Alberta, Faculty of Native Studies under the supervision of Dr. Kim TallBear. Kelsey received her MSc in Risk and Community Resilience as well as her BSc in Environmental and Conservation Sciences from the University of Alberta in 2015 and 2011. Her previous work has focussed on bridging methods from natural science, social science and Indigenous practice to formulate research approaches that are grounded in community perspectives, address local needs, and have a significant focus on youth engagement in science-based learning and intergenerational transfer of traditional teachings and language.
Rick W. A. Smith is a Neukom Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. His research is concerned with the interrelations of power and materiality, especially the ways that social, political, historical, and biological forces are entangled in the production of human and non-human bodies. Merging queer and feminist materialisms, bioarchaeology, paleogenomics, and epigenetics, one of Rick’s ongoing projects has focused on reconstructing the DNA-level effects of social violence, political transformation, and environmental change across the rise and decline of the ancient Wari society, the first expansive state in what is now the central Peruvian Andes. Rick is also interested in the reconfigurations of matter that are enacted through the production and maintenance of contemporary settler colonial states, of which enduring human inequalities as well as human/non-human hierarchies are symptomatic. Ranging from questions of indigenous, queer, and white trash belonging, genetically modified organisms, and ancient humans and Neanderthals, Rick draws linkages between epi/genomics, queer and feminist materialisms, postcolonial theory, and multispecies relations to question the conditions of possibility through which human and non-human bodies are recomposed through regimes of power.
Arlana Bennett (Redsky) is Anishinaabe and a member of the Shoal Lake 40 First Nation in northwestern Ontario. She is a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. Arlana has received the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship for her dissertation research “Co-producing Knowledge of Chronic Wasting Disease with Indigenous Partners.” Her M.Sc. thesis, written in the Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology at the University of Alberta, focused on expert perceptions regarding cervid (deer, moose, elk, caribou) management in Alberta. This research focused on aspects of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) management, and Indigenous consultation and engagement. Arlana’s current areas of research and specialization include wildlife disease management, wildlife conservation, Indigenous harvesting rights, kincentric and posthumanist ecology, and historical-contemporary multi-species entanglements in the Colonialocene.
Merissa Daborn is a master’s student in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. She will be beginning her PhD in History at the University of Alberta in Fall 2017. Merissa has received a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship for her research “Toxic Relations: Colonization, Contamination, and Food Security in the Northwest Territories.” Merissa’s research is largely informed by Indigenous Studies, STS, environmental history, and feminist theories of science, vulnerability and economy. She researches toxic environments resulting from processes of colonization, Indigenous peoples’ food security, generational changes in food use, and federal policies regarding health, food, and environments. Merissa will be working with communities in the NWT who have been impacted by contamination from abandoned mines and/or military sites. She will work with key community members who hold knowledge of contamination occurring through the 1970s to 1990s to co-produce a comprehensive testimony of contamination and subsequent threats to food security.
Jimmy Beveridge is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Texas-Austin. Since his undergraduate honors thesis, Jimmy’s research has examined decolonization and development processes in Amazonian protected areas such as indigenous territories and national parks in Bolivia and Ecuador. He is currently developing a set of ideas called ‘knowledge articulation’ that analyzes how government officials, NGOs, and local indigenous communities draw upon components of indigenous and western scientific knowledge systems in realizing development projects. In addition to anthropology, this theorizing draws from STS, Indigenous studies, feminist science, and Political Ecology. Furthermore, Jimmy employs an activist approach co-designed with indigenous Amazonian communities that forefronts the local indigenous communities’ knowledges, social relations and practices, in designing and implementing small scale development projects. This is part of a larger collaborate project intended to forge North-South alliances between U.S. and Canadian Native students with decolonization/development projects in Bolivian and Ecuadorian Amazon. [Email Jimmy at jimmy.beveridge.anthro@gmail.com if interested in participating in this collaboration].
Aadita Chaudhury is a PhD student at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at York University and a Graduate Associate at the York Centre for Asian Research. Previously, she completed a Masters in Environmental Studies at York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies, and a Bachelor of Applied Science at University of Toronto’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry. Her research interests are broadly surrounding the anthropology and philosophy of biology and the ecological sciences, cartography, postcolonial and feminist STS, and environmental and medical humanities. She has worked in mining consulting for projects in Saskatchewan, Panama and Turkey and interned at the Division of Technology, Industry and Economics at the United Nations Environment Program in Paris, France. She also served as a science writer and the founding editor for Technology and Engineering of the Canadian science communication platform Science Borealis.