Tag the Scientists!

Abstract

Extract from Introduction...
Northern research. A big topic. An important one. Scholars, academics, practitioners, and community people are thinking about it a lot: how and why it’s done. We’re talking about how to repatriate it, about how to fund it, about how to ensure that inquiries are relevant and methods valid, that people are involved in research in good ways, and that the research benefits widely.
This is the place where “Tag the Scientists” comes from. Deep in the boreal forest, CritterLab, with its moose PI, fox and porcupine grad students, and bunny undergrads, undertakes an observational study of southern scientists who conduct research in and about the North, to uncover the complex lives of their subjects through remote sensing. It’s a riff on ACCESS, an idea facetiously floated by Aron Senkpiel and Norm Easton in the Northern Review’s first issue, recounting a time they’d been talking about “the problem of the South.” They had joked around with the idea of a northern Association of Canadian Colleges Engaged in Southern Studies. It would hold annual Southern Studies conferences in the North, and establish scholarships for students to come north to study southern Canada. The Association would set up field stations in the Near, Middle, and Far South to enable researchers to spend a month or two down south in the winter. “That reminded us,” they breathlessly conclude, “that we would have to give some thought to developing a code of ethics to which members engaged in southern research would have to subscribe.”(1) The tables would be comprehensively turned!