Research

 

My dissertation is entitled "Too Dysfunctional to Govern: Trauma Capital and State Retreat in Rural Alaska."

Unprecedented climate instability across Alaska is forcing hundreds of small, remote, Alaska Native villages to relocate or go extinct. My dissertation is an effort to trace the roots of this crisis and contextualize the imminent collapse of rural, subsistence-based Native life as it has existed for thousands of years. I find that it is not just a question of climate change, and show how particular patterns of rural development and political incorporation have ultimately affected community well-being and democratic participation in Alaska Native communities, and paradoxically rendered them far less resilient to the climate threat.

The extreme vulnerability of rural Alaskan villages imperiled by climate change is not the result of an unlucky, exogenous environmental crisis: the environmental crisis is a window onto how democratic projects of modernization and inclusion can fail, and fail catastrophically. My dissertation explores in detail how the social contract of "vulnerable citizenship" has profoundly failed much of rural Alaska by undermining rural resilience and threatening democracy, all in the name of inclusion and development. 

Working papers, dissertation chapters, and work under review available upon request.

Assimilation without Representation: Alaska's Experiment in Native Social Engineering5.62 MB