This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project includes 30 months of interdisciplinary research aimed at understanding how people in Arctic Communities form social connections in response to high levels of social change. The research will take place in the communities of Nain and Goose Bay, located in Labrador, Canada. There, as in many Arctic towns and villages, resource development, land settlements, and new governing mechanisms have prompted significant adjustments in how people earn a living and deal with outside interests. While individual, personal accounts of these changes are available, there has been little systematic investigation of the local patterns of social interconnection. This is important because social connections play a significant role in influencing individual perspectives on change. This project investigates patterns of social connectedness - called social networks - as they are made and remade by Northern residents. It seeks to understand how network connections influence peoples' lives, livelihoods, and understandings of their political and economic opportunities/challenges.
The research entails 800 interviews with residents of the two communities. Interviews focus on the links people make use of as they go about finding housing and jobs, or securing household health and traditional food harvests. Sometimes, as with the sharing of traditional foods, these connections ensure the movement of necessary and important goods and staples. In other cases, connections facilitate the movement of information relating to the economy or government programs. In such cases, the pattern of connections is bound to be quite different. Yet taken together, social networks influence a range of important factors, from public opinion about development projects to local health outcomes and educational attainment.
Project researchers are using new methodologies aimed at producing composite models of large networks from individual accounts. These models allow the research team to do more than simply represent these networks. Using methods from Network Theory, the models provide an opportunity to render the flows of resources and information in mathematical terms, which can then be compared with similar structures in other places. Precise knowledge of these networks will allow local residents and policy makers to better understand and manage the pace of change in the North, and to understand how local communities continue to react and change in their interaction with governing bodies and outside interests (such as health providers and resource developers). The project is undertaken with cooperation and support of the Nunatsiavut Government (the Inuit administrative body for Labrador) and the Labrador-Grenfell Health Authority, and is being carried out by team of researchers from the City University of New York that specialize in projects that integrate ethnography, network science, sociology, and public health. The research for the project is expected to be complete by August, 2010
