ICASS 2014

Heather Gordon is a doctoral student in Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is from Alaska and is Iñupiaq. Heather’s current project is based on interviews with Arctic researchers and interviews and focus groups with Inuit members of a community in Greenland to understand relationship building between researchers and Arctic Indigenous community members.

I was born, raised, and reside in Yukon Territory, located in northern Canada.  I am currently a Masters of Educational Leadership student at Simon Fraser University.  I am primarily interested in knowledge dissemination between northern communities and southern institutions, what these collaborative concepts look like, and how these exchanges can either benefit northern peoples or proliferate centralized agendas.  My goal is to engender working groups or coalitions whose purpose is to advocate on behalf of northern autonomy. I coordinate a program that works with Aboriginal youth and their family members, most of whom face numerous societal and personal barriers.  I work to increase protective factors among Aboriginal families, to strengthen the resiliency of vulnerable youth, and to encourage transparency measures between agency and First Nation communities.Down time is usually spent hiking or canoeing my  great land, the most ruggedly beautiful patch of unspoilt real estate this world has to offer.  I spend a significant amount of time exploring the wild, seizing every opportunity I have to go, as we say in the north, "into the bush".

Vienna Poiesz is a Political Science undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Her current project is directed toward researching the effectiveness of the current Arctic environmental governance regime, including new developments such as the IMO Polar Code. Her research is executed in hopes of gaining a better understanding of possibilities for increasing multilateral cooperation and describing relevant environmental governance institutions necessary to ensuring the region's future environmental security.