We are pleased to let you know that the 2nd CHARTER project newsletter is now out. You can read it here on this website, or read and subscribe to the newsletter, as well as read the previous newsletter from this page.
Recent events have meant that all future field work in Russia has been cancelled, which has meant for an extremely challenging situation for all academic cooperation and collaboration with Russian colleagues and administrators, with whom partnerships have developed over the last two decades. The CHARTER project was in the midst of planning an extensive fieldwork campaign on the Yamal peninsula and has team members who are Russian citizens and some of whom are in Russia.
The ongoing uncertainty has cast a cloud obviously, however, the project will continue. Much data has already been collected and is still to be analysed. As project leader Bruce Forbes put it:
CHARTER was funded in part on the strength of the extensive and highly experienced consortium’s capacity to build upon and synthesize existing datasets from recent and ongoing, regional, national and international projects. Relatively little new fieldwork and new infrastructure were planned within the biophysical sciences. However, considerable resources are also devoted to social anthropological fieldwork and participatory workshops. These were originally conceived as part and parcel of an integrated and iterative process, so that CHARTER findings would be truly co-developed with our local and indigenous partners. It will be some time before we know how to navigate the new reality regarding existing and forthcoming datasets based on Russian cooperation
There is other project news in the newsletter too, including new hires, and remote camera capture field work in Chukotka that is currently underway.