Teaching, Research, Service and PAR

... Over the past decade, AINA has contributed in all three areas (teaching, research and service), benefiting from association with its host university. We are now a nationally recognized centre of teaching and practice for participatory action research (PAR), known for our innovative combination of undergraduates, graduate students, and research associates in the conduct of international PAR projects. The last few years found our PAR teams in the Kola Peninsula in Russia, the back country of Nicaragua, the tundra of Holman Island, the Dene hearland of the Northwest Territories, and the boreal forest zone of northern Alberta and British Columbia. ... Collectively we have all benefited from the PAR methodology, and now we are sharing our methodological experience and participatory competence with several research and advocacy organizations in different parts of the globe. Chief amongst these at present are the International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies of the Gorbachev Foundation of Moscow, the David Suzuki Foundation of Vancouver, and the Instituto de Medicina Tradicional Y Desarrollo Comunitario of Nicarauga. We are always ready to share our experience with you, .... Is there a PAR project in your backyard

On the Relationship between Scholarship and Democracy

Over the 50 years of Arctic's publication, a series of dedicated editors and countless reviewers have applied their skills in the quest for clarity of thought, expression and concept in the best interests of an interdisciplinary readership. This tradition has fostered scholarly citizenship, in line with John Ralston Saul's contemporary appeal for academics (1995) to avoid the language of corporatist elites, which is typically private, exclusionary and supportive of hierarchies of knowledge. For Saul, a philosopher whose language is unintelligible to an archaeologist is as corporatist in manner and form as the mining company president who relies on euphemism and double-speak to explain the lack of gold showings in a core sample. One must ask: Just who is served when shareholders cannot understand explanations of basic geology, or when one academic discipline cannot comprehend the research of another? Who do universities persist in encouraging departmental and faculty hierarchies that promote corporatism rather than citizenship, which contribute to obfuscation rather than clarity? ... Should we be surprised that horizontal networks of civil society enthusiasts, rather than vertical patron-client relationships of exploitation and dependence, are key to establishing peace, order, and good government? Putnam's lesson for AINA is that a community of collaborative northern scholars, organized around interdisciplinary research problems focused on a geographic area, has a lot in common with Italian soccer players, choristers, and co-op members. We are all playing the same game, singing the same song, and reinvesting the same patronage dividends in a process called democracy

Raison d'Étre

... Sometimes, amidst the rush and complexity of what passes for academic life in the last years of the second millennium, we miss the opportunity to reflect quietly on the reasons why we do what we do. This commentary is being written in the boardroom/poster room of the Arctic Institute's Kluane Lake Research Station in the Yukon. All around me on the walls are poster displays on such topics as the University of Ottawa Field School Program from 1975 to 1998, How Do Glaciers Surge?, Vertebrate Community Dynamics in the Yukon Boreal Forest, and the Mount Logan Ice Core Climatic Change Project. These displays focus on past and current projects at the research station, and are pinned up to explain to this season's field school students, graduate student researchers, and the occasional inquisitive tourist just what the Arctic Institute does in its 37th year of logistical support to Yukon science. ... when I met with my colleagues on the Kluane Lake Research Station Users' Committee, we talked of our obligation to submit a Major Facilities Access Grant application to NSERC by October 1 to ensure that all of this tradition, science, and exuberant discovery can continue. Amidst a general air of good-humoured collaboration, social, biological, and physical scientists reviewed their progress over the past year and talked of their research dreams for the future. While the works conveyed strong commitment and rigor in the cause, the faces shone with the excitement of another good field season, renewed Yukon friendships, and the joy of sharing learning in one of the most beautiful places on earth. ... Behind the kitchen counter, ... I spied my 16-year-old son Lance washing dishes as a summer volunteer. ... Yesterday he told me that Andy Williams, the base manager, had taken him up in his Helio-Courier airplane to see the Icefield Ranges from 10,000 feet, and that it had been "one of the best things I've ever done in my life." ... As we cruise down the Alaska Highway back to the land of e-mail, appointment books, and commercial pleasures, we'll both know one thing: we'll be back

Is Anyone Behind The Shield of Achilles?

This commentary discusses the decline in northern science research as a consequence of reduced government fiscal support for northern research. This reduction in funding has affected federal programs, granting authorities and academic publications. The need to develop new university career opportunities for northern researchers is also highlighted

Generic properties of extensions

Motivated by the classical results by Halmos and Rokhlin on the genericity of weakly but not strongly mixing transformations and the Furstenberg tower construction, we show that weakly but not strongly mixing extensions on a fixed product space with both measures non-atomic are generic. In particular, a generic extension does not have an intermediate nilfactor.Comment: 29 pages; Lemma 7 strengthened and given a new proof; Former Lemma 6 removed; Former Lemma 8 is now Lemma 6, with a slight reformulation; Typos fixe