Exploring Indigenous Health and Wellbeing in the Context of Anthropogenic Climate Change

This event will bring together researchers from a broad range of disciplines and career stages to explore:

• The impact of anthropogenic climate change on the health of Indigenous peoples globally.
• Indigenous resilience, survivance, and worldviews in relation to environmental change and the more-than-human world.
• Indigenous climate action, activism, adaptation, and mitigation efforts.
• Indigenous epistemologies and how they shape understandings and responses to anthropogenic climate change.

Presentations will explore the impact of climate change on mental and physical health, community wellbeing and ‘good living’, multispecies and planetary health through engagements with Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies from diverse regions of the globe.

In addition to these excellent research presentations, we are thrilled to welcome Professor Ilan Kelman, who will give the keynote talk at this event. Ilan is Professor of Disasters and Health at UCL Institute for Risk & Disaster Reduction, and a Professor II at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway. His overall research interest is linking disasters and health, integrating climate change into both. His work spans a number of key areas, including (i) disaster diplomacy and health diplomacy; (ii) island sustainability involving safe and healthy communities in isolated locations; and (iii) risk education for health and disasters.

Panel 1: Languages and temporalities

• Words in a Dictionary in a Novel: Ecologies of Language and Their Role in Indigenous Health and Wellbeing, Alexandra Effe
• Imaginary Territory, Claudia Ramírez Julio
• Plural epistemologies against linear time: Indigenous Futurity in (post) Apocalyptic Times, Elisa Randazzo

Panel 2: More than human relations

• Dying for Bad Karma? Tibetan Pastoral Kinship, Interspecies Care, and Buddhist Ecology of the Yak in an Era of Anthropogenic Climate Change, Bo Yang
• Indigenous Mineral Knowledge as Geoheritage in the Arctic Anthropocene, Nadezhda Mamontova
• Creating a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change among the Callawaya, Rosalyn Bold

Panel 3: (Re)centring the margins

• The Impact of Climate Change on the Mental Health of Populations at Disproportionate Risk of Health Impacts and Inequities, Germán Andrés Alarcón Garavito
• Health and Resilience for Indigenous Communities through Optimal Indoor Environments under Climate Change, Yasemin Didem Aktas
• Ecological Grief or Environmental Adaptation: Making Sense of Inuit Perspectives on a Changing Climate, Jeevan Toor

Panel 4: Decolonial feminist ecologies

• ‘Our cows died so I was taken out of school’: Drought, Gender-Based Violence, and Indigenous Wellbeing in Kenya’s Maasailand, Gabriella Santini
• ‘Echoes of the River’ On the Absence and Afterlife of Indigenous Knowledge, Sangita Thebe Limbu
• Sentipensar ways of being within the world, Paulina Serrano Tama

This event is co-organised by researchers in Anthropology and Global Health at UCL, and is funded by the IAS Octagon Small Grants Fund and SHS Health Mind and Society. Thanks to their generous support, refreshments and lunch will be provided for those attending in-person. Online attendance is also possible.

If you have any questions, please contact Jeevan Toor ⁠jeevan.toor.23@ucl.ac.uk⁠, Paulina Serrano Tama ⁠paulina.tama.20@ucl.ac.uk, and Ros Greiner rosamund.greiner.18@ucl.ac.uk.

Location: IAS Common Ground (G11, ground floor, South Wing)
Directions: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/about-us/find-us
Accessibility info: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/about-us/tickets-accessibility-and-copyrights#Accessibility

About the Speakers

Ros Greiner

Ros is a lecturer in global health at the Institute for Global Health at UCL. She holds a PhD in Global Health and Medical Anthropology, and her doctoral thesis was an exploration of gender, disability and care through an ethnography of families raising children with Congenital Zika Syndrome in Colombia. Her research focuses on the intersection of reproductive justice and disability rights, drawing on feminist theory and critical disability studies. She is currently developing research projects relating to obstetric violence, arbovirus (re)emergence and environmental reproductive justice.

More about Ros Greiner

Paulina Serrano Tama

Paulina is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department at UCL. Her research focuses on the intersection of the coloniality of the body, ontology, power and gender, and their connection to the current socioecological crises. She is working in partnership with ‘Red Agroecológica del Austro’ (an Ecuadorian agroecological network). She holds an MSc in Politics, Violence and Crime from University College London and a bachelor’s degree in law from the University of Azuay, Ecuador. She been involved in global campaigns relating to gender, migrants, and ecological justice, and worked as a Migrant Justice Coordinator for People & Planet.

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Jeevan Toor

Jeevan is a PhD student in Inuit youth health and wellbeing at University College London’s Institute for Global Health. She holds an MSc in International Development from St Andrews University and a BSc in Medical Anthropology from Durham University. Her expertise includes Inuit health impacts, climate change, and policy analysis, with extensive experience in research, teaching, and editing. Jeevan has published in the International Journal of Circumpolar Health and contributed to media coverage on Inuit health issues.

More about Jeevan Toor