Sustainability Leadership Fellow Cohort: 2024-2025

Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology and InTERFEWS

Research Summary: For my Ph.D. dissertation, I am doing community-based participatory action research to explore how settler colonialism is generating water injustice and climate change adaptation struggles among the Tribal nations in the Northern Great Plains. I am using decolonizing and indigenizing methodologies often overlooked in Western science-dominated climate change adaptation research. This research is influenced by a project I am co-leading at the Great Plains Tribal Water Alliance, a South Dakota-based Tribal grassroots organization. Through intensive document analysis and in-depth interviews with Tribal Water Resource Managers, I am assessing Tribal climate change adaptation water needs in South Dakota.