| NSF Org: |
OPP Office of Polar Programs (OPP) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 23, 2018 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 29, 2022 |
| Award Number: | 1833297 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Liam Frink
lfrink@nsf.gov (703)292-0000 OPP Office of Polar Programs (OPP) GEO Directorate for Geosciences |
| Start Date: | August 15, 2018 |
| End Date: | October 31, 2023 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $19,142.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $22,961.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2020 = $3,819.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO ALBUQUERQUE NM US 87131-0001 (505)277-4186 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
1700 Lomas Blvd NE Albuquerque NM US 87131-0001 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
Cultural Anthropology, ARCSS-Arctic System Science, ASSP-Arctic Social Science |
| Primary Program Source: |
0100XXXXDB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.078 |
ABSTRACT
Paragraph 1:
Several journalistic accounts report that environmental change in Greenland is expanding possibilities for Greenlandic agriculture. However, environmental change in the Arctic, including in Greenland, Canada and Alaska, is not straightforward in the sense of simply creating opportunities that enables the production of more food and other crops for the Greenlandic population or export. Agricultural history in Greenland goes back over 1000 years and understanding contemporary agricultural changes must be contextualized by a deeper ethnographic inquiry. Greenland offers a compelling window into present-day and historical processes of social and economic change, which anthropological fieldwork and analysis can elaborate and analyze. Understanding agricultural development at high latitudes could prove to be of substantial national interest. This research will provide important insights into the potential of agriculture in other Arctic regions, such as Alaska, and how agricultural development may be developed to provide healthy food and economic opportunity to very remote rural populations with few employment options.
Paragraph 2:
This project will investigate the environmental and sociocultural characteristics of agriculture in Southern Greenland, and, ultimately, the economic and political implications of agricultural production for the emergence of a potentially independent nation-state in Greenland. This is a proposal to conduct two exploratory research field trips focused upon contemporary agriculture in Southern Greenland in the era of rapid environmental change. The first trip will focus on the capital city of Nuuk, interviewing natural resource managers, government economist, and academics about agricultural potential in Greenland and its social and political context. The second trip will investigate the extent of new agricultural interests and practices through ethnographic interviews in specific farming communities. This EAGER project will not only investigate the extent of agriculture current in Greenland and the aspirations of Inughuit (Greenlandic Inuit) for agricultural production, but the PI is committed to testing a new and developing northern social science methodology of co-producing knowledge with arctic communities. The researcher will work closely with Inughuit to set out a research agenda, and a commitment to training scholars from under-represented communities and regions.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The project entitled "Pilot Research on Agricultural Growth in a Changing Arctic" was conducted in Greenland in 2019, 2020 and 2021. The initial visit in 2019 focused upon establishing research relationships with colleagues at the University of Greenland, and upon understanding the socioeconomic and political contexts around existing agriculture in Southern Greenland. Those relationships resulted in an invitation to teach a class, "The Anthropology of Food: Towards Imagining Greenland's Food Futures" for the Fall of 2020. The class was configured to support MA and BA students' development of their own research projects focused on food and food futures, with which I hoped to collaborate. The Covid-19 pandemic made it impossible to travel to Greenland in 2020, and I was asked to teach the class through an on-line platform. I agreed to do so; the resulting class was far less effective without either face-to-face contact with students for whom English is their third language, and also without the essential in-class research activities I had planned, e.g. visit to various markets where different foods are processed and sold, visits to various restaurant venues to experience the development of specifically Greenlandic cuisine, visits to local farms, etc. Consequently, the class did not support the development of research partnerships as planned. I returned to Greenland in 2021 to discuss these outcomes and potential future research with former-students and colleagues at the University, and concluded the project was no longer feasible.
Based on the preliminary research I conducted for this project, one manuscript has been produced which tracks the effects of two different mining porojects upon Southern Greenland, where farming is already present and might expand in the future. The manuscript, entitled “Lenses of Transparency: Optical Disjunctures Around Mining and the Future in Greenland’s Nation-Building Project,” is under consideration for publication in an edited volume.
Last Modified: 11/01/2023
Modified by: Les W Field
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