Paths to the Arctic converge in coproduction
INTRO: I’m Mike DeLue from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and this is Alaska Voices, a place where community members, friends, and scientists can share stories and place-based knowledge in order to build a better tomorrow for Alaskans and the world.
Originally I grew up in Gakona, Alaska…Tyonek, Egypt, Idaho, Rampart, St. Lawrence Island, St. Paul…and I’m here with my student…my science buddy, my teacher, my homie…I’m his daughter.
JULIAN DANN: Hi, My name is Julian Dann, I’m 29 and I am talking with Margaret today, we are friends and colleagues.
MARGARET ANAMAQ RUDOLF: I’m Margaret Rudolf. My Iñupiat name is Anamaq. I just turned 40. We’re in Fairbanks, Alaska. I’m with Julian Dann, and yes, we are friends, colleagues, have a lot of intersections of research and research interests. 
JULIAN DANN: So Margaret, why did you start working in the Arctic?
MARGARET ANAMAQ RUDOLF: So I grew up in Fairbanks and in Anchorage and I’m Iñupiat. My family originally comes from King Island. I always wanted to be a scientist, and I really wanted to help people with large problems, like complex large problems. Then I ended up in engineering since I thought that would be that type of work, when you actually became a scientist. Turns out engineers don’t do that. 
JULIAN DANN: What in your childhood reminded you of, what value did you see in scientists as you were getting into this? 
MARGARET ANAMAQ RUDOLF: My dad always kind of pushed me that way a little bit. Like we’d always watch “Nature” on Sunday. He’d always be that advocate of just like, “You can do whatever, you can be a scientist, you can be a race car driver.” But it was always that way, and then he’s an academic. He only has his master’s but it’s in philosophy. Then he worked, as I was growing up, for the university at the community college. So I think it was always that way. 
So I think that’s one part of the thing, and the other part is that you’re required to take Arctic engineering at UAF. And that’s when I started to understand permafrost and how much it was around me, and then it went off from there.
JULIAN DANN: That’s interesting. I didn’t know that UAF had that core requirement of taking an engineering permafrost class. I mean it’s ubiquitous, in Fairbanks, permafrost, and thinking about it and how the landscape is changing. As someone who grew up outside of Alaska, that’s not something that I would have thought.
MARGARET ANAMAQ RUDOLF:  And not only that, but if I tried talking about permafrost in like the Lower 48 to the public, they’d be like, “What’s that?” I think now it’s very fairly recognized, but not back in the day. But yeah, you have to take Arctic engineering. It’s a requirement to get licensure in Alaska. 
JULIAN DANN: Yeah, I went to a college in Connecticut in the Lower 48.  Part of the reason that I went to that school was that I wanted to go to a small, liberal arts school so that I had the flexibility to take anything. Having a general basis in a lot of different things, and especially related to where you are, is kind of cool.
MARGARET ANAMAQ RUDOLF: I mean certain aspects of academia is being able to do whatever you want, and having that creativity and practicality. I don’t really think it’s necessarily people want you to fit in a certain box and do certain things. 
And that’s where I really struggled with studying permafrost in the engineering context, was I was still very much what’s considered post-positivist, is the term, like the classic scientific mythology, you do theory verification, create a hypothesis, and you test it type of things. And it’s not really applied, not only that applied, it’s considered less-than, like applied research, working for an actual solution on things and stuff like that.
JULIAN DANN: Yeah, and so I mean it sounds like that foray into engineering really shaped the scientist that you are now, in terms of thinking about working with people in different ways, in interdisciplinary ways, transdisciplinary ways, and doing coproduction between different knowledges.
MARGARET ANAMAQ RUDOLF: Yeah. In a weird way, I look at my academic career and it seems like it’s all over the place because I also went into science communication, education outreach type things, and circled back to studying methodology and coproduction of knowledge, which is what I got my PhD in.
JULIAN DANN: Yeah, with my scientific career, I’ve definitely always been pursuing the theme of application and looking for what’s the next most applied thing I can do, and opportunistically moving in that direction. 
So I studied astronomy and physics in undergrad and gradually made my way back to Earth. I did some stuff on Mars, I did some stuff on Earth’s atmosphere, and then I switched and started doing Arctic research in the last seven years.
MARGARET ANAMAQ RUDOLF: Why did you make that switch?
JULIAN DANN: Yeah, I think growing up as a little kid in Portland, Oregon, a lot of people have these ideas of what Alaska is in the Lower 48. I remember that was a fourth-grade class project to follow the Iditarod and make a poster about a state, all of that was Alaska. And so I just for some reason was really enamored with the idea of Alaska and specifically I was coming from it like the concept of a place full of nature. 
Yeah, so I always just had this idea of what Alaska was like, and wanted to go. And then eventually I was working at Los Alamos National Lab doing a summer internship focused on what Earth’s aurora looked like. I was thinking aurora, I was thinking polar, and then I was like, as a kid I was always so interested in it. 
So I just reached out to someone who worked at Los Alamos and worked in Arctic science and was like “Hey, I don’t have a background in this, but I have these skills.” And that’s how I got started on working in Alaska. How I picture Alaska has drastically changed from what I was picturing when I was in fourth grade.
MARGARET ANAMAQ RUDOLF: In what ways?
JULIAN DANN: Well I brought in this book just to remind myself, this is “Contesting the Arctic: Politics and Imaginaries in the Circumpolar North,” and it’s just this book that I read my first semester for a class, Geography in the Circumpolar North. And it just puts these lenses and just helps categorize them in terms of how people view the Arctic. 
They used to view it as The Last Frontier, they view it as a resource state, they view it as an Indigenous homeland, they view it as a geopolitical battle, they view it in all these different ways that in some respects, whether it’s through people’s belief in them, it becomes true. And all of these things exist at the same time. That’s always helped me envision Alaska and place the work I want to do in those different spheres.
MARGARET ANAMAQ RUDOLF: How has that influenced the research that you did for your PhD, what you want to do in the future?
JULIAN DANN: So yeah, I’m currently a PhD student, and my PhD is a combination of a couple of different hard skill, technical, remote sensing and satellite imagery processing to understand how the environment is changing. 
And the other side of it is understanding how big science projects work in the Arctic, how they work in the communities that they visit, because a lot of what I’ve learned is the academic history of exploitation of communities in the Arctic, and parachute science. And trying to teach myself as much as I can such that when I’m in a position that I am leading a project or I’m part of a project, that I have input to make sure that things on the project are done correctly and advanced.
MARGARET ANAMAQ RUDOLF: This is the way my academic career always went, it’s always been the Arctic, so I’ve always wondered what it’s like in other situations. I can’t really tell how much is different, like in a sense of the community, the culture. 
Because there’s definitely these different levels, where you have people that are researchers that keep their head down. And then there’s people who work within the state, or within a particular community or region, they work closely with that. That depends, like if you’re very sociable and I think it also depends on where you end up going, but also like your support system. Like if you work for an agency, there’s an aspect of being a bit more mission-driven for certain people, so those are the people you talk to.
And then there’s also this other level within Arctic research, which is the international pan-Arctic aspect. And so I end up working more recently in the international sphere.
JULIAN DANN: I am very soon going to be moving back to the Lower 48 for I’m not sure how long.  I’m going to be moving to a large city where there are so many people who have moved there. And who didn’t grow up there, don’t have necessarily a large attachment to the place that they live other than to their community within the city. 
That’s just something I’m thinking a lot about right now is how do I get that sense of place in somewhere else. And how much I would like my work to keep working in the Arctic and keep that tie but not knowing how to do that from afar. 
MARGARET ANAMAQ RUDOLF: I’ve thought about that aspect of moving as well. Just the opportunity, more education, more mentorship. But I go visit places and I’m like, I don’t see what I value. Both in the sense of as a researcher, as a person. But also as an Indigenous person, visually, I don’t see that reflected back at me when I go to other places like that.   
JULIAN DANN: In Fairbanks, there’s a large sense of camaraderie about getting through winter, and about seeing the seasons change and there’s just yeah, such drastic differences in seasons, and I don’t think those things will be quite the same in another place, that connection to the land there. 
OUTRO: Alaska Voices is a place for communities to connect through conversation. This podcast was the brainchild of Jesie Young-Robertson and Bob Bolton with support from the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center, who also funded today’s episode. The Alaska CASC is committed to providing regionally relevant science for Alaska’s changing climate. 
Alaska Voices would not be possible without the efforts of an amazing group of people. Our producer and audio engineer is Kelsey Skonberg of Mossy Stone Media. The Alaska Voices team includes Micah Hahn at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and Lia Ferguson, Mike Delue, Annika Ord, and Diego Noreña at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. 
If you are interested in more conversations or information, please visit our website at AlaskaVoices.org.