Speaker: Darren J. Ranco, Citizen of the Penobscot Nation, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Chair of Native American Programs, Faculty Fellow, Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, UMaine
The promise of both sustainability science and indigenous research methods are for greater partnership and relevance of research to different community and societal needs. Here at the University of Maine through the Mitchell Center, a small group of us have been working on this related to Wabanaki Tribal Nations. In this talk, Dr. Ranco will describe these efforts, their underlying theories and values, highlighting successes, barriers and recent developments. He will also chart the future of such work here in Maine and beyond—with an emphasis on the deep partnerships and sharing required for work to be done in meaningful, decolonized ways.
Darren J. Ranco, PhD, a citizen of the Penobscot Nation, is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Chair of Native American Programs at the University of Maine, and is faculty in the George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions. He has a Masters of Studies in Environmental Law from Vermont Law School and a PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University. His research focuses on the ways in which indigenous communities in the United States resist environmental destruction by using indigenous science, diplomacies, and critiques of liberalism to protect natural and cultural resources. He teaches classes on indigenous intellectual property rights, research ethics, environmental justice and tribal governance. As a citizen of the Penobscot Nation, he is particularly interested in how better research relationships can be made between universities, Native and non-Native researchers, and indigenous communities. He has published in each of these areas—environmental risk and justice, climate change, invasive species, cultural resources, research ethics, indigenous subsistence issues, university-indigenous relations, and tribal governance in a variety of academic and non-academic publications, including Climatic Change, Ecology and Society, American Anthropologist, The Journal of Forestry, Antipode, Society and Natural Resources, and the Wicazo Sa Review.