  University of Alaska Fairbanks Courtney is an environmental anthropologist whose research program focuses on understanding social, cultural, and economic diversity in fishing communities and explores ways to sustain that diversity into the future. In one central area of study, she explores the social and cultural shifts in fishing livelihoods as fishing rights become privatized. In another, she partners with indigenous communities in the Arctic to study social-ecological change and subsistence ways of life. Her specific areas of expertise include: political ecology; resource enclosure and privatization processes; indigenous knowledge, science studies, and multiple ways of knowing; subsistence, mixed, and alternative economies; socio-ecological change; fishery systems; and Alaska Native cultures.  Rachel DonkerslootAlaska Marine Conservation Council Rachel was raised in Bristol Bay with her two brothers and sister. She left Naknek after high school to attend the University of Montana, returning home every summer to spend time with her family and work as a forklift operator, bartender, and budding ethnographer. She is currently working on this research project “The Graying of the Fleet,” where she is studying the barriers young fishermen face when entering the fishing business.Rachel holds a PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She was awarded a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation that allowed her to conduct a year of ethnographic research in a rural fishing community in northwest Ireland. Rachel has also explored the issues affecting life and work in contemporary fishing communities through the medium of ethnographic film. Her first film, Small Nets in a Sea of Change: Family Fishing in Donegal, Ireland, was completed in 2011.  Paula CullenbergUniversity of Alaska Fairbanks and Alaska Sea Grant  Jesse ColemanUniversity of Alaska Fairbanks Jesse is a PhD student at UAF's School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. She has worked in the Bristol Bay region as a fishery ecologist, and in Idaho and the midwest before moving to Alaska in 2009. She is currently developing additional objectives that build upon the Alaska's Next Generation of Fishermen project findings to pursue as part of her dissertation research. Jesse hopes to use her knowledge and experience in the ecological science realm and her new interest in social science of fisheries to bridge the disciplines that inform fisheries policymaking in the State of Alaska so that commercial fishing opportunities and fishing communities are sustained for generations to come.  Danielle RingerUniversity of Alaska Fairbanks Kodiak Seafood and Marine Science Center Danielle
Ringer is from Homer, Alaska and received her B.A. degree in Anthropology/Sociology
from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She graduated from the University of Alaska Fairbanks with her Master's in Political Ecology of Fisheries in 2016. She grew up in a Homer fishing family and today lives in Kodiak with her commercial fisherman husband. Danielle focuses on how rural community development strategies
and a better understanding of issues impacting commercial fishermen can aid in
the sustainability and health of coastal people and places. In 2014 she co-founded the Kodiak Salmon Life community event in Kodiak with Astrid Rose to celebrate salmon culture and people. Her interests include incorporating fisheries human dimensions into the policy realm, fishing community cultural values, local food systems, socioeconomic impacts of fisheries enclosure, and supporting commercial fishermen of all ages to become more involved in the regulatory process. |