We All Live on Permafrost
Permafrost is a vital part of our global ecosystem, and it is under threat. In light of two recent publications, Susan Crate's Once Upon the Permafrost: Knowing Culture and Climate Change in Siberia and Pei-Yi Chu's The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science, and Charlotte Wrigley's forthcoming A Discontinuous Earth: Permafrost and Extinction in the Russian Arctic, this interdisciplinary panel will discuss the manifold effects of thawing permafrost: its geophysical impacts, effects on biological ecosystems, and its endangerment of iIndigenous and nomadic peoples and their lifestyles.
View recording of panel discussion
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Pey-Yi Chu, Associate Professor of History, Pomonoa College. A historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, she is interested in how ideas about nature have been shaped by culture, politics, economic practices and physical environments. |
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Susan Crate, Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at George Mason University. An environmental and cognitive anthropologist, she has worked with indigenous communities in Siberia since 1988. |
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Angelina Davydova, Director Office of Environmental Information, St.Petersburg, Russia is regarded as an expert in Russian climate/environmental policy, “green” civil society initi onmental/climate journalism and communication, sustainable and resilient urban development. |
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Charlotte Wrigley received her PhD from the Queen Mary University of London. She recently left her position at the HSE and will begin a new position with the University of Stavanger in the near future. |
"Once Upon the Permafrost is a longitudinal climate ethnography about “knowing” a specific culture and the ecosystem that culture physically and spiritually depends on in the twenty-first-century context of climate change."
The University of Arizona Press: Once Upon the Permafrost
"The Life of Permafrost provides an intellectual history of permafrost, placing the phenomenon squarely in the political, social, and material context of Russian and Soviet science."
University of Toronto Press: The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science
Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies