Research

For my dissertation, I conducted ethnographic research with Mongolian nomadic herders to examine how local communities perceive and respond to climate change. The study investigated how herders interpret climate impacts, the strategies they employ to adapt, and the institutional support they view as essential. Living and working alongside herder households, I engaged in daily household activities and participated in community and cultural events, while carrying out participatory field observations. These observations helped refine my interview protocols, which I then used in semi-structured interviews with 25 households, involving 52 participants. 

Findings revealed that herders face increasingly frequent and unpredictable extreme weather events, including dzuds (harsh winters with heavy snow), droughts, and floods. They described the severe impacts of these events on pasturelands, livestock, livelihoods, and the preservation of pastoral traditions. In adapting to these challenges, herders draw on local knowledge and social and material resources in the community. At the same time, they highlighted the critical role of institutional support in enabling sustainable adaptation. Importantly, herders identified problems or gaps in legal, social, political, financial, and economic aspects of the infrastructure and engaged in infrastructuring, in actions or proposals, to improve it. These findings challenge conventional views of infrastructure as purely technical, static, and fixed, instead highlighting how local people actively and agentively reimagine and reshape multi-dimensional infrastructures in response to climate change.

I examined how refugee-background youths in the United States integrate cultural and everyday knowledge with disciplinary knowledge when making sense of weather- and climate-related topics. The findings showed that these youths drew on a rich blend of household knowledge, cultural practices, lived experiences, media sources, and disciplinary learning to interpret scientific concepts. The informal learning setting, which encouraged them to bring diverse forms of knowledge, created equitable entry points and participation opportunities for students with varying levels of schooling and English proficiency.

This project built on my earlier work: (1) developing a technology-supported, learner-centered approach to study expansive learning across school and out-of-school contexts, and (2) reviewing literature on equity, diversity, and inclusion in STEM learning and professional environments.