Sarah P. Wise

Dr. Sarah Wise is an environmental anthropologist who works with coastal communities in the Bering Sea and Arctic to explore how people engage with the marine and coastal environment under conditions of rapid social and environmental change. Sarah explores the role of Indigenous Knowledges in climate resilience, disaster response, and decision-making, attending to the role of power around issues of food sovereignty, noncommercial fishing, community well-being, and marine resource management. She is interested in how people make sense of the changing marine environment, and the ways people shape their social and cultural worlds to navigate risk and disaster events. 

Drawing from a political ecology and social-ecological systems approach, Sarah has conducted field research in coastal communities in North America, European Union, and Caribbean. Sarah’s work focuses on community-based and co-production research. Currently, she is involved in a number of transdisciplinary projects with partners to develop culturally meaningful ecosystem indicators, Indigenous perspectives of ecosystem processes and change, integrated ecosystem assessments, social (re-)organization in response to disasters, and methods to include multiple ways of knowing marine ecosystems in resource management.